MCI Onehealth Technologies Inc. ("MCI") (TSX: DRDR), a clinician-led healthcare technology company focused on increasing access to and quality of healthcare, and Palantir Technologies Inc., a leading builder of operating systems for the modern enterprise, are pleased to confirm a three-year commercial agreement to power MCI's clinical insights that can improve patient outcomes and help address urgent health system issues. Palantir's Foundry platform will power analytics for improved MCI patient care and research projects for MCI's international stakeholders in the health, pharma, therapeutic, and life sciences sectors. The partnership with Palantir supports and helps accelerate MCI's partnerships with other health innovators like MDClone. "At MCI Onehealth we remain firmly committed to our mission to make healthcare more accessible, affordable, and ultimately safer. MCI has built a first-of-its-kind model in community healthcare that is right now demonstrating efficiencies and improving patient access in ways that has not been demonstrated before in Canadian healthcare. Our collaboration with Palantir is already producing insights that can benefit our patients and the health system," said Dr. Alexander Dobranowski, MD, Chief Executive Officer of MCI. "We're using data to screen patients - rapidly and proactively - for chronic and rare diseases, for clinical trials, and matching patients to see appropriate specialists within and outside the MCI network for appointments within four weeks. Our high-performance healthcare network is delivering our goal: more preventative medicine with continuity of care that creates a more satisfying patient journey. Doing this with Palantir, a global leader in data analytics, data protection, and information security, not only drives our mission forward, but also ensures that regard for our patients is always front-and-centre".
MCI's collaboration with Palantir will continue to accelerate MCI's data strategy in disease screening, novel referral optimization and other custom data and precision medicine initiatives. Health researchers can access MCI generated insights to better understand disease progression, enhance care delivery and develop new products and treatments that can improve patient outcomes - which can help reduce overall health system costs. This is possible by leveraging MCI's rigorous data governance controls and Palantir Foundry's embedded data protection capabilities, including granular access controls, end-to-end provenance, and audit, which ensures MCI can secure sensitive health data, while enabling access to only authorized users for approved purposes.
"For our health sector partners, Palantir powers data-driven decisions to improve patient outcomes. Palantir gives our clients the tools to build a trusted research environment. Innovatively harnessing the power of data like MCI is doing is the way to bring personalized, preventative health care to life," said Dennis Halfpenny, who leads Palantir's Canadian Commercial Healthcare sales.
It is well documented that the COVID-19 pandemic created a massive backlog of millions of health care services in the province, including treatments, surgeries, doctors' visits, diagnostic tests, missed screening opportunities, and increased wait times. In the absence of more providers and resources, greater clinical efficiency and data that is used well can flag gaps in care, target patients for services they're behind on, and provide patients with more options.
This partnership with Palantir allows MCI and other health stakeholders to surface insights that address these issues and can help improve care. The real-world patient health journeys that MCI's tech-enabled network is able to capture offer a comprehensive picture to researchers, who can benefit from a fuller perspective. Through Palantir, MCI and relevant health stakeholders can securely identify and offer new treatment and clinical trial opportunities. Whether through MCI's clinic network, international healthcare providers, or pharmaceutical, life sciences and biotech partners, these insights are helping to quickly translate healthcare data and research that can help improve health and quality of life for patients.
"MCI's high-performance healthcare network of patient-facing services allows it to build a much richer and deeper patient profile for each of our patients. With Palantir's software, MCI provides health system stakeholders with rapid access to a data integration and analysis ecosystem to support a variety of research, clinical and data science needs. The insights derived ultimately help make care preventative instead of reactive, personalized instead of generic. We are helping bring innovation to the front lines of healthcare faster while pioneering personalized, precision medicine technologies," said Dr. William Plaxton, Critical Care Medicine Specialist and MCI Onehealth Special Advisor, Data Strategy.
Currently, MCI provides data insights as a service in six categories: rare disease; complex major medical/chronic; patient cohort building; clinical trial recruitment; synthetic health data and bespoke insights. Such services are targeted at pharmaceutical companies, life science companies, precision medicine companies and top-tier university centres.
"We are firmly committed to drive excellence in healthcare in Canada and we are committed to delivering on our strategy and value for our shareholders," said Dobranowski. "From an investor perspective, not only are we achieving our core strategies of building the high-performance healthcare network of choice and growing our technology and data offering, but the revenue opportunities that this enables are solidifying, with clients engaging our data insights as a service portfolio."