What You Should Know:
In an effort to address glaring racial disparities in healthcare, today Komodo Health is expanding its Healthcare Map™ with new demographic characteristics, including patient race and ethnic data.
By incorporating these additional characteristics into its Healthcare Map, Komodo is making it possible to better assess real-world experiences and outcomes for diverse patient populations across the U.S.
Komodo Health today announced the expansion of its Healthcare Map™, adding new demographic characteristics to help its customers advance health equity and close gaps in care through richer population health insights. Komodo’s Healthcare Map is the industry’s largest and most complete database of de-identified, real-world patient insights, providing a longitudinal view of encounters with the healthcare system for over 330 million patients.
Enhancing Demographic Insights to Advance Health Equity
By incorporating additional patient characteristics into its Healthcare Map, Komodo is making it possible for its clients to better assess real-world experiences and outcomes for diverse patient populations. For instance, a more nuanced understanding of disparities in care can help healthcare stakeholders:
– Advance Diversity in Clinical Trials: By pinpointing underserved patient populations and their associated healthcare providers, life sciences teams can proactively design clinical trials that are representative of the patient populations who would benefit from new innovations. A preliminary analysis from Komodo revealed that patients of color have been persistently under-represented in clinical trials for the last decade. In oncology trials, for instance, 85 percent of participants over the last five years were White, while Black patient representation has remained stagnant at under 7 percent. Findings like these illuminate how much work needs to be done to ensure clinical trial participants better reflect the diversity of the actual patient population.
– Identify Gaps in Care: Through a better understanding of the behavioral, sociodemographic, and clinical factors driving disparities in care, healthcare leaders can explore how inequities are transpiring and develop opportunities for strategic interventions to reach underserved populations. A report from Komodo found that patients of color visited the emergency department and were admitted as inpatients for complications from certain chronic diseases more often than White patients, suggesting that patients of color experience more frequent and serious complications of their chronic conditions.
– Drive RWE to Better Understand Health Disparities: By quickly testing hypotheses and spotting variations in the healthcare experiences of different patient cohorts, researchers can drive insights to identify and respond to patterns in care. For example, a new analysis using Komodo’s Healthcare Map found that hospital admissions for heart attack and stroke were similar for all patients before the pandemic, but diverged by race during the pandemic, suggesting new health challenges that have disproportionately affected populations of color since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using data to shed light on new insights at almost every stage of the care pathway can play a role in ensuring more equitable access to care.
“If we are serious about reducing the burden of disease, we must acknowledge healthcare inequities that exist and take meaningful action to address unmet needs in communities of color,” said Arif Nathoo, MD, CEO and co-founder of Komodo Health. “Everyone in healthcare from providers to industry innovators play a role in addressing gaps in care, and we believe that we will have the ability to surface critical insights to help drive meaningful outcomes.”
