Duke Health, a world-renowned academic medical center, and SAS, a global analytics leader, have formalized a letter of intent to collaborate and support initiatives focused on improving health equity and optimizing health outcomes.

WHY IT MATTERS

In combining the SAS's analytics, including those in SAS Health, and the company's ability to scale artificial intelligence with Duke Health's experience testing and validating predictive models in collaboration with health data scientists, researchers and clinicians, the partners hope to tackle health equity.

"At Duke Health, our vision for advancing patient care is to deliver tomorrow's healthcare today," said Dr. Jeffrey Ferranti, senior vice president and chief digital officer for Duke Health, in the announcement. 

"With their many decades of experience developing analytics solutions that lead to bold discoveries and drive progress, SAS is an ideal partner to further our mission of advancing health together."

THE LARGER TREND

Duke launched the Health AI Partnership with Mayo Clinic and UC Berkeley to help to enable safer, more effective deployments of AI software and cultivate capabilities across healthcare delivery.

Also part of The Coalition for Health AI, which released its Blueprint for Trustworthy AI Implementation Guidance and Assurance last week, Duke and others convened to establish AI guard rails that uphold health equity and fairness in AI.

ON THE RECORD

"The need to transform healthcare is more urgent than ever, and SAS wants to be at the forefront of this evolution by increasing patient access to technologically advanced care and ultimately improving population health," Gail Stephens, vice president of healthcare and life sciences at SAS, said in the statement.

Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.

Ferric Fang, Ning Rosenthal and Sarah Warner will offer more detail at the HIMSS23 session "The Power of Real-World Data in Driving Healthcare Decision-Making." It is scheduled for Tuesday, April 18, at 1:30 p.m. - 2:30 p.m. CT at the South Building, Level 5, room S503.