Wall Street Journal: Medical Records Data Offers Doctors Hope of Better Patient Care

December 3, 2021 — Atropos Health is featured in a new WSJ article as part of its “Future of Everything” series.

The Atropos Health Prognostogram and informatics consult are described alongside Epic’s Cosmos and ASCO’s CancerLinQ products — together, three of the leading offerings bringing real-world insights to the point of care.

Key highlights below and full story here:

For almost any patient a doctor sees today—whether for, say, asthma, high cholesterol or sepsis—hundreds or perhaps tens of thousands of similar patients “have already had the care and have had outcomes, good or bad,” says Saurabh Gombar, co-founder and chief medical officer of Silicon Valley startup Atropos Health. To be sure, patient records are observational, and thus subject to confounders and other shortcomings that can undercut their reliability in pointing to treatment options. But the gold standard has its own issues. Randomized clinical trials, which control for differences in patient health status and other variables, are the preferred evidence to inform patient care. Yet such trials generally exclude an especially common group of patients—those with multiple ailments. Moreover, the elderly, children, women, minority groups and people who live far from medical research centers have long been underrepresented in such studies. As a result, the highest-quality evidence that medicine produces doesn’t apply to most patients doctors see in daily practice. “There are so many clinical situations where the evidence that is needed does not exist,” says Nigam Shah, professor of medicine and biomedical data science at Stanford University Medical School.

“Observational data have errors,” says Stanford’s Dr. Shah, who is also co-founder and a technical adviser for Atropos Health. “But that’s not an excuse to say we have all this data and we’re not going to use it ever.”