CAMBRIDGE, MA  -  A new research partnership between Mayo Clinic and Optum  -  the health IT arm of UnitedHealth  -  will bring together more than 105 million clinical and claims records for the purpose of improving quality metrics in healthcare.

In January, the two groups announced the launch of the for-profit Optum Labs facility, based in Cambridge, Mass. Staffed by both clinicians and scientists, the lab includes a database containing some five million clinical records spanning 15 years from Mayo Clinic and 100 million claims records from Optum.

Officials said the idea for Optum Labs originated from the urgent need to fix the current state of the nation's ailing healthcare system.

"Healthcare in America is facing the greatest challenge in its history," said John Noseworthy, MD, president and chief executive officer of Mayo Clinic, on a Jan. 15 conference call. He cited fragmentation of care, rising costs and a stagnant economy as reasons for the new collaborative. 

"We will be able to better understand healthcare delivery over time, compare the effectiveness of care we provide today, and analyze the total cost of care for specific procedures or diseases," said Veronique Roger, MD, director of the Mayo Clinic Center for the Science of Health Care Delivery, in a statement. 

Roger used the example of heart failure to further explain the significance of this data-sharing collaboration.

"Right now, we are at a little bit of a loss to predict what causes hospital admissions in heart failure," she said. Although researchers have a sense of what some of the triggers are, many of these triggers are not what Roger called "actionable." For example, increasing age is a known factor associated with higher hospital admissions, "But it's hardly something that can be acted upon," she said.

"By having a data source that links claims data to clinical data, what we get is really the ability to go from a snapshot in the history of care of a disease, like heart failure, to a complete panorama because we then are able to piece together the care in the clinical facility, such as Mayo Clinic, to what happens after the patient gets dismissed from that care facility and goes back to his or her own care environment," she said. 

This data will enable researchers "to have much more powerful modeling of the events," such as predictors for hospital admissions and other quality metrics, said Roger.

When asked about the privacy and security issues relating to Mayo Clinic's clinical record-sharing and whether or not a patient's consent is required, Roger replied, "The number one consideration in discussing this point is that the patient clinical data is completely de-identified before they get linked to the Optum data."

The final HIPAA rule released by the Department of Health and Human Services Jan. 17 requires patient consent for certain research purposes, but it remains unclear as to where the line is drawn in this case. 

Speaking on the subject of funding, and whether or not Optum Labs would have "customers," Andy Slavit, group executive president at Optum, said there would be "a variety of financial arrangements," but offered only broad comment as to what those arrangements would include.

"Some of [the research needs] will require funding from some interested party; some of them will be funded by the researchers; some of them will be funding by an outside party," he said. 

For Noseworthy, however, the most news-worthy part of the collaboration is that the initiative's magnitude together with its unique mission have never been done before, and he hopes Optum Labs will serve as a model for other data-sharing collaborations in healthcare going forward.

"This work combining clinical and claims data is the largest effort of this type in the country," he said. "We'll be able to better understand healthcare delivery over time, compare the effectiveness of care and analyze the total cost of care for specific procedures or diseases." 

Officials anticipate the lab, situated across from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus, will employ some 60 staff members by the end of 2013. n