A new joint collaborative initiative from MedRed, an informatics software provider, and BT, a telecom IT provider, is being launched to create one of the largest cloud-based open health data repositories in the world.
The collaborative, MedRed BT Health Cloud (MBHC), a global, multiyear initiative, will be launched at a White House event after being recognized by the Obama Administration for supporting big data research. It has been designed to integrate U.S. public data sets – including event reporting data from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and recently released Medicare data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services – with the UK’s National Healthcare Service (NHS) and other healthcare systems.
“MedRed is honored that our collaboration with BT has been recognized,” William Kennedy Smith, M.D., CEO of MedRed, said in a statement. “Our goal is to take data that resides in disparate systems and make the necessary connections so that it can be transformed into knowledge and action. We believe such transformation benefits a wide variety of stakeholders across the healthcare spectrum.”
Already, the collaborative has gathered de-identified population health data from England, Scotland and Wales, as well as hundreds of other U.K. and data sources. Specific data includes physician encounters, acute care interventions, pharmacy history, and health outcomes data. A version of it is being used by pharmaceutical companies and universities to help develop new drugs, identify new indications for existing therapies, correlate outcomes, examine comparative effectiveness, and establish best care practices.
