Harvard Health, Outcome Health team up to better digital platform in clinics

Fresh off a $500 million first financing round late May, Outcome Health has already set out to improve its health intelligence offerings with the help of a new collaborator—Harvard Health Publications.

The Harvard Medical School division will help provide insights from expert faculty clinicians to help Outcome create and review health information designed for display on Outcome’s digital platform used in over 41,000 healthcare practices nationwide.

The information ranges from health advice to patient stories to information on certain conditions and enrolling clinical trials, and are displayed in the forms of video, digital poster to anatomical rendering and more.

Because of the challenge it poses to efficiency in clinical trials, patient recruitment has drawn more efforts and resources from the industry. The Outcome approach is to exhibit such information through digital devices in clinics and hospitals, where many potential trial participants are treated, making them the perfect places for distribution of trial information to the right patients, both therapeutically and geographically.

"We’ve been hearing from members that there is a desire to better educate patients about clinical trials as an option in their treatment journey," Anil Harjani, Outcome Health’s head of product development and strategic partnerships, told FierceCRO. "To continue to serve our growing member base and their patient populations, we sought to align with an organization that had both a history and a deep expertise of content development, and found that in Harvard Health Publications."

Harvard Health Publications is able to leverage the expertise of over 11,000 Harvard Medical School faculty clinicians and researchers at affiliate hospitals to come up with relevant health information. As Gregory Curfman, M.D., editor-in-chief of the literature institution, wrote in a statement, Outcome’s work "aligns directly with" its own mission, and the collaboration gives it the opportunity to "create a greater positive impact … with a broader audience through an engaging and informative experience at the time it matters most: the moments of care."

Outcome already has a robust creative production team based in Chicago and New York City, and it has also sought outside intelligence from medical associations and key opinion leaders to advise on its content and design process. But as it plans to grow its reach from about 20% (or 231,000) of healthcare providers to 70% by 2020, it is seeing more frequent requests to develop new content and update old ones.

It sees the help from Harvard Health as providing an "additional review process for clinical content, to ensure medical accuracy," Harjani said. "Our members need to educate and activate patients on all types of conditions and treatments, and we want to ensure we have the best resources available to deliver that care."

Harjani said the company is working with HHP to assemble a focus group to gather insights from physicians and patients about clinical trials. "This will help us better develop relevant and engaging information on clinical trials so that people can make more informed health decisions during the moments of care."