Deloitte Buys Recombinant To Expand Healthcare Analytics Mojo

Deloitte hopes to spark innovation and "open new horizons" in its healthcare division with the acquisition of clinical intelligence vendor.

Deloitte's Life Sciences and Healthcare practice announced the acquisition of Recombinant Data, a warehousing and clinical intelligence tool provider. According to a statement released by Deloitte on Oct. 29, the company sees the acquisition as a move "signaling the growing momentum for using clinical data to transform healthcare."

Based in Newton, Mass., Recombinant was founded in 2005 and has seen success within the medical research, life sciences and government health markets in regard to enterprise data integration, population health analytics, clinical genome data assimilation and performance management for accountable care organizations (ACOs).

The reason for the acquisition is "straightforward," said Andrew Vaz, chief innovation officer at Deloitte, in an interview with InformationWeek Healthcare. "We at Deloitte always had capabilities in analytics consulting, whether data strategy, data governance, performance engagement type work [and this] complements this work with ... assets that can be deployed with our current engagements in material ways to help us transform healthcare organizations."

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Vaz said Deloitte has been looking into the healthcare analytics space for about three years and considered a number of companies before deciding on Recombinant. The acquisition, Vaz said, will combine Recombinant's products and software with Deloitte's consulting capabilities, "to bring to bear some strong combined capabilities in a hyper business model," he said. As a result, the company is looking to play a larger role in population health management and accountable care analytics, Vaz said. Clients of Deloitte can expect to see these changes almost immediately, he added.

Nitin Mittal, senior manager at Deloitte with a focus on healthcare business intelligence, said in an interview that Recombinant's focus on the secondary usage of data is key for the company. For example, within a clinical trial, Recombinant works with the R&D; functions of a life sciences company to figure out if there are secondary indications for a specific drug being tested. "The intent is to see if there are secondary usages for drugs or repurposed drugs beyond the primary area it's targeted for," Mittal said.

Similarly, Mittal continued, Recombinant works with several teaching hospitals at various universities to help "build a cohesive picture across genotypic data," he said. "They have the capabilities and the wherewithal to try to integrate clinical data with genomic data with data coming from [biorepositories]," he said. "This enables clinical studies, [helps] with personalized medicine and with translational sciences, and it can help organizations gain joint ventures with pharmaceutical companies for adaptive clinical trials," Mittal added.