Second Urology Qdata Module to Provide Real-World Evidence from more than 50,000 De-identified Patients in the American Urological Association’s (AUA) Quality Registry (AQUA)
Verana Health®—a digital health company elevating quality in real-world data (RWD)—today announced that a Urology Qdata® module is available to help support clinical research surrounding non-muscle invasive bladder cancer (NMIBC). This highly curated module will help facilitate a more comprehensive view of the NMIBC patient journey including disease progression over time. Exclusive insights into more than 50,000 de-identified patients with NMIBC are derived from key variables extracted from unstructured clinician notes including diagnosis date, treatments, recurrences, documented T stage, and tumor grade for risk determination. These exclusive therapeutic insights can be used to help better understand treatment patterns and outcomes to inform therapeutic strategies for patients with this disease.
Qdata NMIBC is powered by the American Urological Association’s (AUA) Quality Registry (AQUA), the world’s largest real-world clinical data registry for urology. The AQUA Registry includes eight years of longitudinal data from more than 2,100 healthcare providers representing more than 75 million de-identified patient encounters from nearly 10 million de-identified patients. Verana Health has an exclusive partnership with the AUA to de-identify, curate, and analyze electronic health record (EHR) data from the AQUA Registry.
Bladder cancer is the sixth-most common cancer in the U.S. and ninth-most common cancer in the world. In 2021, nearly 84,000 people were expected to be diagnosed with bladder cancer in the U.S. Bladder cancer is three times more likely to occur in men than women, with the disease prevalence increasing with age.
Seventy percent of all bladder cancer is diagnosed as non-muscle invasive, and early detection correlates to higher survival rates. Qdata NMIBC offers a glimpse into patient data from the viewpoint of the urologist, the primary provider for patients diagnosed with this condition.
Clinical researchers may rely on medical claims to collect data on patients with NMIBC, although that may not provide the full patient picture. The FDA guidance notes that “the purpose of medical claims data is to support payment for care; claims may not accurately reflect a particular disease, or a patient may have a particular disease or condition that is not reflected in claims data.” For example, claims data for patients with NMIBC does not contain information on tumor grade or stage, thus providing limited transparency into the risk associated with the disease and potential for progression. Qdata NMIBC combines the breadth of coverage in claims with EHR data to help provide a better view of patients in relation to their specific stage of the disease.
Further, there is a nationwide shortage of Bacillus Calmette Guerin (BCG), the most commonly used intravesical therapy to prevent the progression of NMIBC. Such limited availability increases the urgency to better understand patients in the intermediate and high-risk categories of NMIBC and to find new therapies.
Verana Health’s Qdata NMIBC has the potential to provide the missing information to help clinicians and researchers track disease progression and measure outcomes for bladder cancer patients before it progresses to muscle invasive or metastatic disease. This new module comprises quality data from structured and unstructured fields that document real-world diagnosis, treatments, and outcomes and is likely to reflect earlier-stage data than found in claims or electronic health records from oncologists.
Data from the AQUA Registry is being transformed into quality real-world data (RWD) through Verana Health’s VeraQ® population health data engine, which uses artificial intelligence (AI), such as machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP), to bring meaning to structured and unstructured data at scale.
The new module will benefit life sciences companies, and ultimately patients, by helping to:
- Identify practices treating patients with specific NMIBC profiles to better inform trial design and efficiency.
- Enable better visibility into the patient journey and disease progression for patients with NMIBC stratified by stage, grade and treatments for HEOR and medical affairs.
“By applying AI and machine learning to the AQUA Registry data from which Qdata NMIBC is derived, we can help unlock a deeper understanding of the stage and grade of a tumor,” said Jennifer Bepple, MD, MMCi, board-certified urologist and Verana Health clinical advisor. “This deeper understanding of the NMIBC patient journey will help to advance science and the search for more effective treatments based on patient characteristics and risk levels.”
Verana Health announced the launch of Urology Qdata and the release of the first urology module (Qdata Prostate Cancer) in May 2022. Qdata NMIBC is the company’s second urology module, with modules planned for overactive bladder, and benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH), and other urologic conditions.
“Qdata NMIBC can help provide the high-quality RWD needed for life sciences research and the development and utilization of drugs to more effectively treat this disease at its earlier stages,” said Sujay Jadhav, CEO of Verana Health. “AUA and Verana Health are helping to better enable NMIBC researchers to gain greater insights into the progression of this disease and how it can be most effectively treated to reduce recurrences. The result will be to help improve patient and population outcomes and reduce healthcare utilization.”
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