Synthetic Data to Broaden Atropos Health's Real-World Evidence Consults
A partnership between Syntegra and Atropos Health, a startup company providing physicians with real-world evidence at the point of care, will enable users of Atropos Health’s Green Button Informatics Consult and Evidence Platform to leverage Syntegra’s synthetic data, in addition to the existing real-world datasets in Atropos Health’s Evidence Network.
Palo Alto, Calif.-based Atropos began as a research project at Stanford Medicine in 2011. The “Green Button” concept aimed to answer the question: What if pressing a virtual button could trigger a search of millions of similar, anonymized electronic records to instantly aggregate data to inform patient care?
The concept grew into a research project called the Clinical Informatics Consult service, with a proof of concept built at Stanford Health Care. Upon the successful completion of the pilot, Saurabh Gombar, Nigam Shah, and Brigham Hyde founded Atropos Health in late 2020 to democratize access to real-world evidence.
Atropos said the partnership with Syntegra will unlock answers for even more clinical questions by expanding the queryable data to include Syntegra’s vast, hyper-realistic synthetic datasets.
Syntegra creates these hyper-realistic synthetic datasets using a machine learning approach that learns the underlying trends in the data. It says this significantly expands the use and value of real-world data by removing privacy-related barriers and augmenting data to fill in coverage gaps for often underrepresented populations. In turn, this allows for the use of even more representative and realistic datasets to power Atropos’ research.
“The range of real-world data to inform patient care is exploding, and we think synthetic data has a critical role to play in the evidence ecosystem,” said Atropos Health CEO Brigham Hyde, in a statement. “Our engagement with Syntegra will also offer the clinical research community the ability to empirically evaluate the appropriateness of synthetic data vs. other de-identified patient data for critical research and point of care questions, ultimately generating greater evidence and insight for personalized patient care.”
The initial phase of the partnership will focus on demonstrating the clinical value of Syntegra’s data with Atropos’ rapid insights-generating technology to broaden the use of synthetic data. Syntegra will also provide millions of synthetic patient records to fuel the range of questions Atropos can answer, enabling more widespread deployments with their customers.
In 2021, Stanford Health Care partnered with Atropos to support clinical decision-making across its more than 2,000 affiliated physicians.
Earlier this year the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s CancerLinQ announced it was partnering with Atropos Health in an effort to provide oncology clinicians with the latest real-world evidence available to help inform personalized care and treatment of an individual patient.
Atropos Health and CancerLinQ are working together to provide a “digital consult” to pressing clinical questions that are important in tailoring treatment decisions. Participating clinicians on the CancerLinQ platform will be able to request an on-demand analysis of millions of aggregated de-identified records of similar patient cases and outcomes, which will be delivered within days in the form of a “Prognostogram” report, leveraging best-in-class, peer-reviewed observational research methodologies.
CancerLinQ is a real-world oncology data platform developed by ASCO that collects and aggregates longitudinal electronic health record data from oncology practices throughout the United States. CancerLinQ improves the quality of patient care and accelerates discovery by securely compiling, harmonizing, analyzing, and de-identifying vast amounts of information on patient characteristics (e.g., molecular profiles, comorbidities), treatments, and long-term side effects.
