Q&A: Part 2 of 2: Denise Juliano, Group Vice President of Life Sciences, Premier

RamaOnHealthcare September 24, 2023

Helping Health Systems & Life Sciences Organizations Accelerate Innovation

Today, RamaOnHealthcare welcomes and talks with Denise Juliano, Group Vice President of Life Sciences at Premier, Inc. from the PINC AI™ Applied Sciences (PAS), Premier’s data, research, and analytics division of Premier Inc. She is responsible for developing strategic business relationships with life sciences companies and health systems and expanding the utilization of PINC AI Applied Sciences solutions.

Denise Juliano, Group Vice President of Life Sciences, Premier

This interview is provided in two parts. Part One covered Retrospective and Clinical Trial Data, Actionable Data, Real World Evidence, and Improvement Science. Part Two discusses Real World Data, Social Drivers of Health, Patient-Centric Care Model, and Health Equity Index.

ROH: Welcome back to Part Two of this Interview! You have impressive real-world data! How do you foresee hospitals, health systems, and life sciences organizations leveraging this data to generate Real World Experience?

DJ: During the COVID-19 pandemic, clinicians scrambled to find a vaccine, and life sciences organizations searched for up-to-date Real-World Experience.

The PAS team developed a Special Release of the pre-pandemic baseline data and clinically validated data from 2020 and forward. Data was made available for licensing to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institute of Health, life sciences organizations, and academia to conduct research studies on COVID-19 timely, resulting in more than 50 studies, many of which have been published in peer-reviewed journals.

Life sciences and medical device organizations are utilizing Real World Data to generate Real World Experience. One life sciences company recently leveraged data from our database to support its Breakthrough Designation request and 510 (k) regulatory filing. Their use of the data set helped them prove their device, with expanded indications, was substantially equivalent to using the predicate device, thus clearing the product of additional randomized clinical trials and testing.

Researchers are also seeking data on social drivers of health (SDOH), including their impact on outcomes, costs, and healthcare resource utilization. With the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services requiring providers to screen and report on SDOH starting in 2024, information must be collected about food insecurity, housing status, transportation needs, financial challenges, and interpersonal safety concerns. This data can provide a longitudinal view of the patient journey, illuminating critical touchpoints in care and opportunities to incorporate patient preferences, needs, values, and goals.

The PAS team is cultivating strategic collaborations, engaging in peer-to-peer knowledge sharing, and developing prospective research and evidence generation to support decision-making.

ROH: The team is leveraging data in oncology research efforts. Can you tell us more about those projects?

DJ: Researchers and clinicians are leveraging actionable insights derived from the PINC AI™ Healthcare Database (PHD) to further their knowledge in cancer research.

Examples of our work in oncology include:

• Collaboration with a large life sciences company and St. Luke’s University Health Network to introduce a patient-centric care model for breast cancer diagnosis – to help patients go from appointment to diagnosis and connection to a treatment plan in just 48 hours or less.
• Partnership with a large pharmaceutical company to investigate guideline-concordant care management in five cancer types – Breast, Ovarian, Non-Small Cell Lung, Small Cell Lung, and Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia – and address approaches to promote appropriate care. This work is grounded in NLP to map the patient’s journey and is a first-of-its-kind quality improvement study to drive provider behavior change. Patient benefits from evidence-based treatment that can help improve patient quality of life and longevity.
• Increasingly, organizations are looking for community-based oncology datasets to conduct analyses. Our Team recently used our PINC AI™ Healthcare Database to comprehensively evaluate the actual cost of three procedures. In this Real World Experience study, researchers found the Chimeric Antigen Receptor t-cell therapy had higher pharmacy costs during the index procedure compared to both autologous and allogenic stem cell transplant procedures but led to shorter hospital stays and lower nonpharmacy costs and was featured in AJMC and OncLive.

ROH: Finally, health equity has been on everyone’s mind lately. How is the PINC AI™ Applied Sciences team helping hospitals, health systems, life sciences, and medical device organizations in their efforts to reduce unjust disparities and advance health equity across the nation?

DJ: Health equity means every person can achieve their best health. Premier’s members are focused on advancing health equity and healing for social change.

PAS has developed deep, integrated data sets that can be linked to claims, mortality, and other specialized data sets such as SDOH to provide insights into patient journeys for more than 11 million inpatients and 100 million outpatient encounters annually – and with the ability to track patients longitudinally within the same hospital/health system.

PAS has been leveraging this data to advance equity across healthcare and through partnering with life sciences organizations, such as Henry Ford Innovations, University Hospitals, and Northwest Children’s Foundation, among other Premier members. We continue to identify and share best practices through strengthening and expanding data capabilities and educational outreach efforts.

In July, we announced a partnership with CaringWays through which we aim to award hospitals and health systems fully funded memberships to the PINC AI™ Health Equity Collaborative. The partnership’s focus is to standardize social drivers of health data collections, enhance patient-specific social needs data, and create a Health Equity Index for use in hospitals and health systems across the nation to improve care for populations that have been historically marginalized.

ROH: Thank you so very much for sharing your insights and expertise with our Readers. We wish you all the very best in transforming healthcare.

Abbreviations

AI – Artificial Intelligence
CKD – Chronic Kidney Disease
IPN – Incidental Pulmonary Nodules
NLP – natural language processing
PAS – PINC AI™ Applied Sciences (PAS) team
PHD – PINC AI™ Healthcare Database
SDOH – Social Drivers of Health

More about Denise

Denise spent 30 years with Merck before joining Premier. She graduated magna cum laude with a degree in Health Science from Seton Hall University and obtained a master’s degree from East Stroudsburg University in Exercise Physiology/Cardiac Rehabilitation. Denise participated in the Executive Education at the Harvard Business School of Harvard University and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

In 2022, Denise was appointed to CancerCare’s board of trustees. She serves on the Strategic Account Management Association (SAMA) board. She was recognized as one of the Top 50 Women Leaders of North Carolina by Women We Admire and one of the Top 25 Women Leaders in BioTechnology in 2022.

Her hobbies include boating, pickleball, golf, cooking, and spending time with her family as she cheers on The New York Giants, New Jersey Devils, and New York Rangers. She is also – incongruously – a Chicago White Sox fan.