PicnicHealth, Komodo Pool Real-world Data for Research

PicnicHealth and Komodo Health have agreed to combine their databases of patient medical records to support research based on real-world evidence. Together, the companies hope to unlock new insights into complex diseases like multiple sclerosis (MS).

“Komodo Health and PicnicHealth share a mission to utilize health data to better understand disease,” Noga Leviner, CEO and co-founder of PicnicHealth, said in a press release. “Through this collaboration, we will pool our combined capabilities to work toward a deeper understanding of patient histories, treatment patterns, and therapeutic outcomes in the real world.”

Real-world data can help researchers better understand how patients behave or respond to a treatment in everyday clinical practice. Using real-world evidence can provide insights into complex diseases or patient groups and settings underrepresented in other clinical studies. However, gathering data from patients who move frequently from one doctor to another may be difficult.

PicnicHealth is a healthcare technology company that has developed an online platform where patients can view and share their complete health history in a single place. The platform gives patients access and control of their medical records and, with their consent, the opportunity to make their data available to the scientific community. The data remain anonymous.

In mid-2020, the company launched the PicnicHealth Research Platform, a research program based on real-world evidence that aims to more deeply understand a variety of diseases, including MS. Research is directed toward closing gaps in care, addressing unmet patient needs, and developing treatments.

Now, PicnicHealth plans to enrich its research platform dataset with data from Komodo’s Healthcare Map.

The Healthcare Map uses artificial intelligence — a branch of computer science focused on building machines that are made to think and make decisions like humans — and other data science techniques to track the unique patient journeys of more than 325 million patients. The approach combines individual patient data to provide a big-picture overview of a certain disease and better understand large-scale health outcomes.

“We are excited to be tapping into the breadth and depth of Komodo’s Healthcare Map to drive groundbreaking clinical research that can ultimately benefit patients suffering from complex diseases,” Leviner said.

Komodo also has a flexible application called Sentinel that lets researchers integrate data from the Healthcare Map with their own proprietary datasets to develop strategic insights into patient behaviors and treatment patterns.

“PicnicHealth shares our conviction that reliable medical data has the power to unearth deeper insight into disease trends, supplement clinical trials, and unlock the potential of new treatments,” said Arif Nathoo, MD, CEO and co-founder of Komodo Health.

“We see that researchers need access to a longitudinal view of healthcare to understand how complex diseases work in the real world,” Nathoo added. “Together, Komodo and PicnicHealth are creating a full picture to support patient-centered innovation and care.”