Roche and GE Healthcare are joining forces to develop clinical decision support software that they say will be the first of its kind.

The digital health platform will combine data from Roche’s biomarker, tissue pathology, genomics and sequencing portfolio with that from GE’s medical imaging and monitoring equipment.

The advanced analytics tying this together aims to help clinicians to make faster, more accurate and – crucially – more individualised decisions, and will focus first on cancer and critical care treatment.

Roland Diggelmann, CEO Roche Diagnostics, said: “This unique partnership will deliver innovative solutions and insights in clinical decision-making. Our goal is to support clinicians and other relevant stakeholders for the benefit of patients by providing the right decision support at the right time and through comprehensive digital offerings.”

This comprehensiveness will come from integrating in-vivo and in-vitro data, patient records, medical best practice, real time monitoring and ‘the latest research outcomes’, Roche said.

The companies plan to offer cancer care teams a data dashboard so they can review treatment decisions at each stage of a patient’s disease, while in critical care the software will plug in hospital monitoring data with biomarker, genomic and sequencing data. Roche and GE said doing so could help doctors identify, or even predict severe complications in critical care before they strike.

Kieran Murphy, GE Healthcare’s president and CEO, said: “This is the first time that two major players in healthcare have combined digital, in-vivo and in-vitro diagnostics to this degree. We believe this alliance will help accelerate the delivery of data-driven precision health for customers, patients and the healthcare industry.”

Digital healthcare for cancer patients

Meanwhile, Roche has agreed another digital health cancer collaboration that will see it work with Accenture, again with a goal of improving decision support.

The Swiss pharma company’s work with Accenture will see the consultants provide data integration services for its cloud-based NAVIFY Tumor Board solution, which have so far been launched in the US, UK, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the Netherlands.

Tumour board meetings see multi-disciplinary healthcare teams get together to review and discuss cancer patient cases and the available treatment options. NAVIFY aims to streamline and standardise workflow processes during the meetings.

By looking to ensure all the available data is used at the meetings Roche hopes to move closer to helping provide ‘personalised healthcare solutions’ to patients.

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