Dr C.K. Wang Discusses How Real-World Data Can Benefit Payers

C.K. Wang, MD, senior medical director, COTA, explains how COTA's real-world data platform can benefit payers.

Transcript

COTA has announced that it will partner with Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey. How can payers benefit from COTA’s real-world data platform?

I think it’s very important to understand that payers' current view of a patient’s medical treatment and cancer journey is through claims data, and for anyone familiar with claims data, it is often fragmented, incomplete, and can often times be not very accurate. COTA’s platform on the other hand, by exposing and bringing forth real-world data, can help lend a clear granular view into that patient’s treatment journey. We capture many treatment variables, including performance status, the cancer diagnosis, the cancer’s actual pathology make up, the treatment regimen, the drugs used, the toxicities, as well as the patient’s journey through their treatment history.

What COTA does is we then take that real-world data and we assign a specific code to the patient, called the CNA [Cota Nodal Address]. What the CNA essentially serves as is it allows a provider or allows any entity to view patients by their groupings, and patients with identical CNAs are technically clinically similar patients that should have been treated very similarly, and hopefully have very similar outcomes. With the use of CNA in conjunction with claims data, all of a sudden, payers are now given a clear view into what truly happens to a patient .What we’re finding is payers can then use this information, or the healthcare system can use this information to help payers understand the multiple variables that take place in a patient’s treatment, and in the current day of the ever increasing cost of cancer care, I think we’re seeing that payers are very excited to use the CNA and to use also real-world data in an attempt to work with providers to help control costs.