Sharp HealthCare, a leading healthcare system serving San Diego, and Sioux Falls, South Dakota-based Sanford Health, the largest rural health system in the United States, have joined with New York-based Dandelion Health on a project meant to build diversity into data science.

WHY IT MATTERS
The health systems will collaborate with Dandelion on a platform designed to enable the broader industry to build artificial intelligence tools – aiding and automating medical decisions to improve diagnostics, drug development and more.

The consortium is in active discussions with additional health systems to ultimately reach a total of five partners that represent both rural and urban populations from different regions across the country.

The data platform will allow healthcare and life sciences companies to securely and ethically access representative, high-quality clinical patient data, including images, waveforms and structured health records.

THE LARGER TREND
The consortium seeks to build diversity into data science, long a problem for AI-based decision-making in healthcare. Narrow data sets have largely limited the ability of machine learning models to improve healthcare delivery.

"The critical bottleneck to AI development in healthcare has been data," Dr. Ziad Obermeyer, Dandelion cofounder and chief scientific officer, said in a statement. "People with great ideas cannot access research-quality AI-ready data in a secure, principled way. This means that AI products that could fundamentally transform clinical care aren't getting built."

According to Dandelion, the platform provides developers with "secure and ethical access to representative de-identified clinical data."

With Sharp HealthCare and Sanford Health, Dandelion brings health systems into the product development cycle and, along with a third-party auditor, seeks to safeguard patient data privacy.

By partnering with Dandelion, the health systems hope to advance healthcare algorithms and help improve healthcare delivery in clinical practice.

ON THE RECORD
"Sanford Health serves a diverse population across our 250,000-square-mile footprint, with two-thirds of our patients living in rural areas. It is vital that all patients, regardless of where they live, are included in the data as well as have access to modern healthcare," Kent Lehr, Sanford Health's chief business development officer, said in a statement.

"Our partnership with Dandelion represents our ongoing commitment to innovations shaping the future of healthcare by leveraging our expertise in data analytics and artificial intelligence for the benefit of our patients, community and healthcare industry," added Sharp President and CEO Chris Howard.

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