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.
