Banner Health partners with nference offering potent insights to further personalize patient care

Banner Health is one of the largest, secular nonprofit health care systems in the country while nference is a science-first software company that makes biomedical data computable.

The companies announced the partnership on Tuesday (August 22) and say it will accelerate scientific discovery to improve treatment, diagnosis, and care.

Banner Health will use nference’s analytics capabilities so its researchers can gain insight into diseases and treatments. It says it will ‘adapt the practice of medicine to meet the needs of its communities’.

Improving patient care

“We’re excited to embark on this innovative partnership that will unlock the insights from our data to further personalize the ways we deliver care to our patients,” said Scott Nordlund, executive vice president chief strategy at Banner Health.

“This partnership will support our own efforts to improve the care patients receive in our diverse clinical settings and benefit other researchers with global impact on diagnosis and treatment.

nference says its Federated Analytics Platform enables researchers and clinicians to derive meaningful insights from proprietary longitudinal clinical datasets, transforming discovery and accelerating development while preserving patient privacy.

Deepest, de-identfied, multimodal dataset

The platform, it adds, provides insights from the deepest, de-identified, multimodal (electronic health record, imaging, electrocardiogram) dataset available across therapeutic areas. These include cardiology, oncology, immunology, neuroscience, metabolic diseases, and infectious diseases by leveraging the company’s federated artificial intelligence (AI network.

Murali Aravamudan, co-founder and CEO of nference, said: “Our collaboration with Banner Health is an exciting addition to our unique federated network.

“Banner Health brings comprehensive, multimodal data from a geographically and ethnically diverse patient population to our network that will provide more potent insight generation, offering researchers the option to examine more inclusive data.”

nference says its agreement with Banner Health builds on recent collaborations with other leading academic medical centers, accelerating nference’s mission to expand its federated network, which is scalable and structured to encourage and facilitate collaboration among healthcare systems and biopharmaceutical researchers.

Making biomedical knowledge computable

nference’s technology platform and software concentrates on making biomedical knowledge computable. The company has several partnerships with large academic medical centers where it can synthesize decades of institutional knowledge producing real-world evidence (RWE) in real time. It converts large amounts of de-identified data into deep insights to advance the discovery and development of diagnostics and therapeutics and its AI-enabled software platform called nSights uses federated learning to accelerate life sciences research.

In addition to its 30 acute-care hospitals, Banner also operates an academic medicine division, Banner – University Medicine, and Banner MD Anderson Cancer Center, which is a partnership with one of the world’s leading cancer programs, MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Banner’s divisions include health insurance, employed physician groups, outpatient surgery centers, urgent care location, home care and hospice services as well as retail pharmacies, imagine centers and more.