Atropos Health and Seqster joined forces to address historical diversity and inclusion challenges in clinical trials. The partnership seeks to enable the swift creation of turnkey patient registries that generate real world evidence from existing registries in under 48 hours.

By KATIE ADAMS
Two healthcare data companies joined forces on Thursday to address historical diversity and inclusion challenges in clinical trials. Atropos Health, a Palo Alto-based company that delivers clinical data to physicians at the point of care, formed a strategic partnership with Seqster, a San Diego-based company that aggregates patient data from various sources.

Together, they plan to remove barriers that perpetuate the lack of diversity in clinical trials. The partnership seeks to enable the swift creation of turnkey patient registries that generate real world evidence from existing registries in under 48 hours. These registries encompass real time updates to medical records, patient reported outcomes and tools for querying diverse patient populations.

Healthcare and life sciences companies that use the Atropos Health Evidence Network can now establish these turnkey registries to hasten evidence generation, the companies said.

Atropos’ evidence network seeks to quickly equip physicians and researchers with the most appropriate and relevant data possible. Now that Seqster is adding longitudinal real world patient data to the network, it will be much easier and less costly for health systems and life science organizations to deploy patient registries, said Atropos CEO Brigham Hyde.

“Healthcare and life science organizations who have come to rely on our platform for evidence-based insights can now scale data-driven clinical trial design, feasibility, and even emulate potential outcomes,” he remarked.

Collecting patient data is key to ensuring a clinical trial’s efficacy and success, yet it costs between $10 and 15 million, as well as takes years to develop and maintain, Hyde pointed out.

“The current registry process requires combing through thousands of potentially unreliable data points, but Atropos and Seqster are providing reliable and fast real-world data that’s easily auditable for patients and providers,” he declared. “Not only does this accelerate the time to insight for health systems and life science companies, therefore slashing costs, but it also addresses information gaps that exist in healthcare today by opening access to anonymized patient records that include subjects who are diverse in ethnicity, gender, disease state and more.”

The overall goal of the partnership is to accelerate scalar, novel evidence generation for underserved populations in clinical trials. To measure success, Atropos and Seqster will be tracking organizations’ speed-to-setup and speed-to-insight, Hyde said.

Nearly 75% of all clinical trial participants are white. This results in severe information gaps in drug discovery and development, which is a big loss for health equity.

Photo: Warchi, Getty Images