NantHealth and Allscripts, two health IT companies intent on interoperability, will collaborate on the development and delivery of precision medicine at the point of care, they announced Monday.

NantHealth was founded by medical researcher, professor, surgeon and self-made billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong to work on the interoperability crisis that plagues healthcare today. Allscripts, a health IT company that nearly collapsed in boardroom turmoil a few years ago, has been led into stability by CEO Paul Black, a former Cerner executive.

The two companies together will introduce what they call an integrated, evidence-based, personalized approach to healthcare that includes actionable clinical data, enabling physicians to make informed decisions from complex genomic and proteomic analysis.

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"Our goal is to enable physicians to make better, more informed decisions, provide best-in-class patient care and monitor the effectiveness and progress of treatment, using real-time clinical and pan-omic data never before available," said NantHealth CEO Soon-Shiong, in a press statement. "We look forward to working in partnership with the Allscripts team as the first major clinical EMR vendor to take a major advancement towards the interoperability necessary to enable physicians and patients to stay engaged and active – before, during and after treatment – and enable the most appropriate, personalized intervention as early as possible."

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Soon-Shiong further explained that research has shown that a physician's ability to make effective, evidence-based clinical decisions can improve by using specifically matched cancer protocols and drugs, delivered to the patient based on the individual's unique DNA, RNA and proteomic profile, and integrated with the patient's holistic clinical picture.

"For the first time, NantHealth and Allscripts can integrate these two aspects into a unique knowledge-based solution to significantly improve the way clinicians treat cancer," he said.

As he describes it, beginning with genomic DNA and transcriptome RNA sequencing, foundational data on how a patient is likely to respond to a specific treatment protocol will integrate with big data and data-mining-based computational analysis. These new NantHealth technologies will enable providers to determine the most accurate treatment option in today's complex world of genomically driven cancer care.

With this comprehensive view of the patient from all data sources, physicians can then use NantHealth's eviti platform, a comprehensive oncology decision support application that helps select the optimal protocol for patients and verifies their eligibility for it. The eviti platform empowers oncologists with real-time, actionable, evidence-based treatment and clinical trial information to help them make informed treatment decisions for their patients.

NantHealth has some technologies that can be applied to the initiative.

NantHealth can gather and monitor patient data via NantHealth's DeviceConX and Hbox, a medical device data integration solution that works at the point of care for clinicians or at home for the patient, Soon-Shiong noted. Combined with critical clinical data from the physician's EMR and community data collected across the continuum of care, clinicians can proactively manage and monitor populations of patients over time and optimize their treatment. Clinicians can then identify all relevant outcomes, improvements and gaps in care, and make them available within the care providers' workflow regardless of their environment.

Together, physicians and patients will have the tools to stay engaged and active and provide necessary intervention as early as possible. Leveraging innovations in patient engagement, care coordination and disease management, NantHealth and Allscripts are creating the first fully comprehensive and integrated platform that will provide a transformation to the coordination and delivery of cancer care.

"We're working with NantHealth to create a game-changing platform for coordinated cancer care," Allscripts' CEO Black said in a news release."Integrated patient information – from the molecular level and from the entire continuum of care – is a powerful tool to improve healthcare."