Cambridge-based online patient community business PatientsLikeMe is teaming up with Boston-area health system Partners HealthCare to provide information and insights from PLM's platform to Partners' patients.
“We’re excited to work with such an esteemed health system to help patients and their care teams have a more complete understanding of patients’ whole health experience, and to support shared decision making about next steps," PatientsLikeMe Executive Vice President of Marketing and Patient Advocacy Michael Evers said in a statement.
PatientsLikeMe brings patients with the same condition together in online communities where they can track their symptoms, vitals, progress with treatments, and side effects and share that information with each other and with PLM, which sells the data in aggregate to partners.
PLM has been focusing on partnerships to share its data for a number of years, including collaborations with AstraZeneca, Genentech, and Walgreens, but this is the first deal that will provide access to PatientsLikeMe via a healthcare provider's patient portal. As part of the deal, Partners' Patient Gateway will connect patients into PatientsLikeMe's system.
Additionally, the organizations will team up to create a PatientsLikeMe 101 series to educate clinical teams at Partners about how to use PatientsLikeMe tools and how to teach patients to use them. Finally, a number of other projects are underway to use PatientsLikeMe at the point of care. Though the companies haven't released details, they said the projects will help them learn "how the use of patient-generated health data at the point of care can impact health outcomes, patient engagement, patient empowerment, care coordination and patient satisfaction."
“We know that as patients become more engaged in their care, they have better care experiences, make more informed decisions based on their goals, and in some cases can actually receive higher value care at the end of the day," Partners' population health management Associate Medical Director Adam Licurse said in a statement. "Peer mentorship, patient self-management, and patient education are all critical pieces to that puzzle. We believe PatientsLikeMe’s online patient community provides a meaningful solution to help meet these needs.”
PatientsLikeMe signed a data access deal with Genentech back in April 2014, but has been ramping up the partnerships more recently, with a Walgreens deal this past February (the first to display PLM data on another company’s website) and a deal with Astrazeneca announced just last month.
Partners, too, is working with a number of other companies as they transition from the fee-for-service model to explore value-based care. This year they launched a remote monitoring pilot with Japanese pharmaceutical company Daiichi Sankyo. Last month they also announced a partnership with Samsung to co-develop mobile health offerings with a focus on remote monitoring health factors like blood pressure, blood glucose, and weight, as well as mobile interventions in the areas of patient engagement, medication adherence, and wellness self-management.
