Cambia Health Solutions Announces Investment in GNS Healthcare

PORTLAND, Ore., April 18, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Does electronic health data hold the key to improved health and consumer affordability? Cambia Health Solutions and GNS Healthcare think so.  Cambia has invested in GNS Healthcare as they advance their technologies – which can understand and rapidly interpret massive volumes of complex health data – and plans to use it in ways that benefit their members.

GNS' Reverse Engineering Forward Simulation (REFS™) is a first-in-class platform capable of rapidly examining trillions of data points and extracting the important underlying cause-and-effect relationships between treatments and outcomes. As these relationships are identified, predictive models are automatically created which can show how a given treatment or combination of treatments will likely affect a patient's outcome.  This kind of information can help doctors and patients decide on what course of action is best, given a person's individual circumstances.

The Cambia family of companies, which includes leading health plans across the Northwest and Intermountain regions, possesses rich electronic data about members' medical conditions and treatments. With REFS™, GNS has created a platform with unprecedented capability to digest this data quickly to evaluate the effectiveness of the treatments members receive. Through this relationship with GNS, the value of these discoveries can quickly benefit Cambia members and the physicians who care for them. Per HIPAA requirements, all Cambia data will be provided anonymously to protect members' personal information.

This agreement represents Cambia's latest step toward a diversified business portfolio designed to advance a more sustainable health care system. By investing in companies like GNS Healthcare, Cambia strives to improve health outcomes while reducing wasteful spending that makes health care unaffordable for millions of Americans. It's this dedication to transforming the nation's health care system that set Cambia apart as the exclusive participant in GNS' most recent round of financing.

"Rapidly increasing costs are crippling America's health care system. We have to bend the cost curve and this supercomputing technology represents a major breakthrough," said Cambia's President of Direct Health Solutions John W. Morgan. "By using real world data to better understand which treatments work more effectively for which types of people, we can provide information that helps doctors and patients understand which treatments are mostly likely to promote better outcomes."

REFS™ has already proven valuable in the development of numerous pharmaceutical solutions, such as discoveries for developing new drugs and diagnostics for rheumatoid arthritis sufferers who are unresponsive to anti-inflammatory drugs and the matching of drugs to cancer patients in clinical trials. Additionally, it's now helping payer and provider groups deliver better outcomes, like their work with Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital where REFS™ is being used to understand adverse drug reactions and hospital readmissions among congestive heart failure (CHF) patients. Hospital readmission represents the largest CHF-related cost to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

"The healthcare system is at a turning point and knowing what works for whom is of paramount importance," GNS Healthcare's CEO Colin Hill.  "People often liken analytics to finding a needle in a haystack.  But our haystacks are simply getting too big.  With REFS™ ability to reason directly and at scale from observational data, it's like having a giant magnet.  What might have once taken decades of human research we can now accomplish in days. We're just beginning to see the full potential of the REFS™ technology realized."

"We are pleased to partner with GNS Healthcare. Like Cambia and its family of companies, GNS is aggressively innovating to break down decades of barriers that stand in the way of improved health and the affordability of care for generations to come," said Morgan.

About Cambia Health Solutions

Cambia Health Solutions is a nonprofit total health solutions company based in the Pacific Northwest/Intermountain region, serving consumers and communities for nearly 100 years.  Cambia companies provide a wide range of products and services, including health care information technology and software development, retail health care, health insurance plans that carry the Blue Cross and Blue Shield brand, life insurance, pharmacy benefit management, consumer engagement and wellness. For more information, please visit www.cambiahealth.com.   

About GNS Healthcare

GNS Healthcare is a 'Big Data' analytics company that has developed a scalable approach for the discovery of what works in healthcare, and for whom. GNS Healthcare's analytics solutions are being applied across the healthcare industry: from pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, health plans and hospitals, to integrated delivery systems, Pharmacy Benefits Managers (PBMs) and Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs). Whether your organization is delivering care or developing personalized therapies and diagnostics, GNS Healthcare can help you discover the knowledge you need to match patients with treatments that work. www.gnshealthcare.com

SOURCE Cambia Health Solutions; GNS Healthcare