28 Apr COTA Aims to Deliver Best Quality Care at Best Price
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Dr. Andrew Pecora
Andrew L. Pecora, M.D., F.A.C.P., C.P.E.
Background: Key leadership of health care informatics company, COTA, Inc., will travel to Vatican City after being invited to speak at The Vatican’s Third International Conference on the Progress of Regenerative Medicine and Its Cultural Impact.
COTA’s founder, Dr. Andrew Pecora, will discuss health care inequality and how new therapies only exacerbate the problem due to high costs. He will talk about the approaches COTA takes to address the problem, increasing access and affordability.
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background and mission of COTA?
Dr. Pecora: Right now, up to 30 percent of health care delivered in the United States is not ideal, meaning doctors are providing treatments that do not necessarily need to be provided or do not precisely align with what is best for the client – a factor called ‘adverse variance.’ The fundamental problem we’re facing today is that we haven’t been able to successfully recognize and predict adverse variance.
This is an issue that the entire world is dealing with, and COTA’s mission is to remove that variance and make the best care completely clear to patients, doctors, hospitals, payers and the government. COTA’s aim is to ensure patients are getting the best possible care, leading to the best possible outcome at the best possible price.
MedicalResearch.com: What does the acronym stand for?
Dr. Pecora: COTA stands for Clinical Outcome Tracking and Analysis.
MedicalResearch.com: What type of health care issues are you attempting to address at ‘Cellular Horizons, The Vatican’s Third International Conference on the Progress of Regenerative Medicine and Its Cultural Impact’?
Dr. Pecora: At the Vatican, I will be speaking to how COTA is enabling the bringing together of both precision medicine, such as genomics and new technology, and precision analytics. It is this combination that will put us on the trajectory to ‘enlightened reimbursement.’
With this knowledge, payers will know exactly what to pay and not to pay for. They won’t be forced to do guesswork or have broad policies that adversely affect patients. Everything payers do will be precise – just as precise as the medicine. With what COTA has developed, payers will only pay for what is needed, no more no less, and patients receive what they need, no more no less.
MedicalResearch.com: On a broader level, how can COTA help the medical, pharmaceutical and technology industries extend lives globally, without greatly increasing costs?
Dr. Pecora: COTA enables these industries to work together and to utilize precision analytics to give patients the right care, based on their ultra-specific situation, which will lead to the best possible clinical outcomes.
To explain what I mean by ‘precision analytics,’ COTA has developed the COTA Nodal Address (CNA), a numeric embodiment of every single factor that is biologically relevant to a patient with a disease. We have digitized the biologic narrative.
To break it down, every patient has an individual set of characteristics: their height, weight, sex, family history, behavioral patterns, socio-economic status, etc. This set also includes the genome that each patient has been born with. Then, we have a disease that also has its own set of characteristics: its histologic characterization, level of aggressiveness, degree of spread, time of presentation and its entire genomic profile.
Right now, all of these characteristics are being addressed in silos. However, what COTA has done with the CNA system, is take the numeric embodiment of each patient along with the numeric embodiment of each disease and combine them together into one number. By working with an individual number rather than a slew of words, doctors are able to provide computational assessments that pinpoint the best possible path of care, the most effective drugs and the care delivery methods that generate the best efficiency, cost and clinical outcomes.
MedicalResearch.com: What is the role of ‘precision medicine’ and ‘precision analytics’ in making oncology therapy more effective?
Dr. Pecora: Precision medicine tells us why the cancer is in existence and what keeps it in existence. Precision analytics tell us what is unique about each patient and their disease including the genomics. With the level of precision analytics COTA’s CNA delivers, and the level of precision medicine that comes along with it, we are able to remove the blindfold and see the truth. The best, most effective path of care is made clear.
MedicalResearch.com: What should patients take away from your discussion at the Vatican?
Dr. Pecora: I hope that in the future, every patient demands to know his or her COTA Nodal Address before starting treatment. Imagine getting in a car or on a plane without a GPS to tell you how to get where you need to be. That’s health care today. Our CNA is the GPS for patients, doctors, hospitals and payers. It identifies exactly where a patient is and the most direct, effective and efficient path to where they want to get. From my discussion, patients should take away the power that the CNA can have on their clinical outcomes and realize how critical it is to the healing process.
MedicalResearch.com: What have you learned as a result of your work with COTA thus far?
Dr. Pecora: We’re learning that the power of precision analytics, through COTA and our CNA system, is allowing the biopharmaceutical industry to consider not doing clinical trials the way they used to and instead use real-world data to get FDA approval for their medications – a much less costly and less time-consuming process.
We’re learning that providers are able to know as soon as their patient walks through the door, that they have a specific CNA assigned and can then compare them to every person around the world that matches up with that exact numeric code. By examining the details of each person currently being treated or that has been treated before them, providers can pinpoint the best possible treatment for their patient moving forward.
We’re learning that patients can look at their own CNA assignment and not only see their best path and outcome, but go one level deeper and identify the best doctor and hospital for their treatment.
We’re learning that payers and doctors both hate pre-certifications, and by replacing them with our numeric CNAs, doctors no longer need to submit E/M codes each time they see a patient – they no longer need to do piecemeal work. Rather, the CNA code is submitted to the insurance company, and the patient receives a check for one year of precise care.
We’re learning that with COTA and the CNA, we can align these incredibly powerful forces and harness the insight within precision analytics to create a new system of care where everybody wins.
MedicalResearch.com: Why are you starting with cancer, rather than another disease?
Dr. Pecora: We’re starting with cancer because cancer is among the most complex diseases to treat, and the amount of new medications, new therapies and new approaches is increasing more so than in any other field of medicine, with the cost rising correspondingly. To make certain that cancer care remains accessible by being affordable, we need to identify and eliminate adverse variance.
MedicalResearch.com: Thank you for your insights, Dr. Pecora.
Last Updated on April 28, 2016 by Marie Benz MD FAAD