Baptist Health South Florida has enlisted Cota, the developer of analytics tools for oncology, to help it advance precision medicine at its new Miami Cancer Institute. The $430 million cancer center, which opened a year ago, will use the company's technologies to offer more tailored care plans to patients.

The multi-year agreement aims to advance treatment and research for every type of oncology at Miami Cancer Institute. Cota's Provider Solution offers a software suite comprising analytics, decision support and value-based tracking.

[Also: Microsoft, Google invest in precision medicine startup DNAnexus]

Precision medicine and associated technologies have been picking up steam in healthcare for the last couple years and in the oncology realm, specifically. Late last year, for instance, the University of California Center for Personalized Cancer Therapy published results of a trial demonstrating how a supercomputer can spot cancer in biopsy results that humans previously missed. Consultancy Accenture, meanwhile, found that hospital spending on personalized medicine was among the drivers as digital health spending rose to $7 billion in 2017. 

Baptist Health’s Miami Cancer Institute will roll out tools such as the Cota Nodal Address technology, which enables creation of a precision patient classification system, and Cota Real-World Evidence, an aggregation of oncology patient data.

[Also: Novartis, Cota Healthcare ink precision medicine collaboration deal]

Cota chief medical officer Andrew Norden, MD, said the company's Nodal Address system, which classifies patients and their cancers using concise digital codes, can help reduce "unwarranted variation in treatments, costs and outcomes and lead to treatment standardization and notable operational improvement on a practice and physician level."

MCI is part of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Alliance. Cota recently announced a multi-year partnership with MSK for similar patient care and research efforts, with an eye toward lowering the total cost of oncology care with actionable data and analytical insights.

As the third member of the MSK Cancer Alliance, which applies Sloan Kettering's standards of care to community settings, Miami Cancer Institute aims to be the primary destination for cancer patients in the southeastern U.S. Latin America and the Caribbean.

"With the ability to see genomic-level data alongside cost and historical clinical data, Cota will help accelerate our journey to value-based care," said Leonard Kalman, MD, executive deputy director and chief medical officer of Miami Cancer Institute. "This not only increases the level of precision in our patients’ treatment journey, but it also ensures that every individual receives the highest quality of care possible which increases the odds of survivorship." 

Twitter: @MikeMiliardHITN
Email the writer: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com