Health Evolution Features COTA’s Advancements With RWE & COVID-19

July 15, 2020
COTA Team
As the daily number of new COVID-19 cases begins to climb again, it’s important to reflect on what we’ve already learned about treatments and outcomes. While we don’t have an exact understanding of the mechanism of this virus, the last few months have provided essential learnings as we continue to treat patients.
Along with COTA’s data analytics expertise, Hackensack Meridian Health in New Jersey has been pioneering some of this early work. Stuart Goldberg, MD, a hematologist/oncologist and chief of the Division of Outcomes and Value Research at the John Theurer Cancer Center and Mike Doyle, CEO of COTA, recently spoke with Health Evolution about the findings so far, and how we continue to learn from existing patients.
Dr. Goldberg was already well versed in data analytics and outcomes research with COTA through his work with the John Theurer Cancer Center. Because he was familiar with the capabilities of this information and the process for gleaning new outcomes information, he said the pivot to COVID-19 research was a simple choice to make: “We had a system in place to do that with cancer, so why not shift our efforts and look to see how COVID patients are doing in hospitals, not just in our hospital but across the state.”

Fortunately, real-world evidence has been used in other areas of healthcare for some time, which allowed for a smooth transition. While COTA never envisioned their tools being used to help understand a global pandemic, it quickly became clear that analyzing real-world data offered the best chance of gaining early information about treatments and outcomes. 

According to Mike Doyle, “When we saw what was happening with humanity because of how ill-informed we were on COVID-19, and we still don’t understand the full biology of the virus, we decided we should redeploy our expertise and help. We had an advantage because patients, life science companies and providers in oncology have been using real-world data for quite some time.”

You can read the full interview with Dr. Goldberg and Mike in Healthcare Evolution here. Do you have a program that might benefit from the use of RWD? Request a demo to learn more about how our unique data abstraction process could help you.

Subscribe for Updates

Receive our latest news and research from thought leaders in the RWD industry
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.