from eNexus, The Newsletter of the Great Valley Technology Alliance
November 2006

The major theme of Geisinger Health System’s mission is to enhance the quality of patient lives. Geisinger prides itself on its record of consistently delivering on this mission through its daily, direct interaction with its patients.

Over the past two years, through its Geisinger Ventures unit, Geisinger has committed itself to bring some of its key technologies and know-how to other players in the healthcare delivery chain – healthcare technology companies, other physicians, pharmaceutical companies, medical device organizations – in order to assist those like-minded organizations who, too, seek to increase the quality of peoples’ health. One such example comes in the form of MedMining, an information services business in the Geisinger Ventures portfolio which, through its medical device and biopharmaceutical targeted customers, can help shed light on the safety and effectiveness of new and existing therapies, reduce the timeline-to-market fornovel drugs and devices, and reveal patterns which suggest new potential indications for existing drugs. In doing so, Geisinger has found yet another innovative way to improve the lives of patients through creative albeit indirect means.

Jim Peters, MedMining’s Chief Executive Officer who returned to his native Scranton, PA from New York two years ago to accept a Senior Director position at the then three-person Geisinger Ventures unit (now eight), is proud of the young organization’s ability to impact healthcare: “Health researchers, product managers and market research groups in the biopharma and medical device industries face an increasingly complex set of questions which need answers in order to increase the safety and effectiveness of their products. Competitive dynamics, cost containment thrusts, and constrained resources make getting answers to these data-driven questions increasingly difficult. Until recently, upon the advent of MedMining, researchers have had to resort to relying on medical claims data that by definition barely scratches the surface.”

Jim Peters, CEO, MedMining

In response to these pressures, there is a growing trend of pharmaceutical market researchers developing relationships with a small handful of technologically advanced healthcare systems, which through an electronic health record (EHR) infrastructure can offer unparalleled insights into disease treatments through longitudinal, high resolution clinical and lab data.

These data, referred to as “de-identified” since they exclude all patient identifiable information, can yield valuable insights into diseases and treatments for them. Consistent with this trend, Geisinger Health System — a fully-integrated delivery system that includes a 650+ multispecialty physician group practice, 3 hospitals, a health plan, two dedicated research centers, an active clinical trials organization, and 41 ambulatory clinics that are connected seamlessly via an extensive, cross-continuum EHR platform — experienced a significant spike in requests from healthcare analytics and biopharmaceutical companies alike.

In response, Peters and Ron Paulus, MD, Geisinger’s Chief Technology and Innovation Officer who, like Peters, is a fellow Wharton MBA alumnus with an entrepreneurial track record, spearheaded the launch of MedMining to satisfy the market’s need for data-driven decision tools. MedMining does this by leveraging 7+ years of longitudinal, full-clinical and 10 years of lab data using Geisinger’s sophisticated electronic health record infrastructure as its backbone.

Peters explains “By leveraging Geisinger’s clinical data platform advantage, MedMining can provide insights based on information that, relative to traditional information sources, is deeper, more longitudinal, more controlled, more current and tied to ongoing, clinician-patient relationships – a completely new paradigm in the healthcare information services market. Our goal is to provide the biopharma and device industries with sophisticated, customized reports that can drive informed decisions, which in turn will drive value and ultimately help our patients.”