Data Delivered: Collaborating with Pharma to Study Anticoagulant Use in COVID-19 Patients

NEWS: Same Unmatched Data, New Name. See Why.

Given the novelty of COVID-19 in the first year of the pandemic and the lack of extensive data on the disease, standard protocols, treatments and practices of care didn’t exist, with clinicians trying anything and everything to alleviate symptoms and improve outcomes, hoping something would work.

To drive to an effective therapy faster, Meitheal Pharmaceuticals, a manufacturer of generic injectable products, joined forces with Premier Applied Sciences® (PAS), the research and analytics division of Premier.

“At Meitheal, we continuously work towards bridging important gaps in healthcare,” said Tom Shea, CEO, Meitheal Pharmaceuticals. “Our partnership with Premier is a stepping stone in the global effort to find patterns that help inform treatment guidelines for COVID-19 care.”

PAS – part of Premier’s PINC AI™ technology and services platform – develops research, real-world evidence and clinical trials innovation for medical device, diagnostic and pharmaceutical companies. This includes:

• Applied research and analytics
• Science implementation
• Prospective research and clinical trials

Underpinning PAS’s healthcare improvement work is the PINC AI Healthcare Database (PHD), comprised of over 20 years of de-identified data from more than 1,000 hospitals spanning multiple therapeutic areas and quality improvement areas. Currently, the PHD contains data from more than 1 billion patient encounters.

To help fuel COVID-19 research, the PAS team developed a Special Release of the PHD (PHD-SR) that shortened the data lag time from five months to two weeks, making it the ideal source of data for studying the disease. Today, the PHD-SR contains real-world data representing more than 4 million patient encounters with a positive COVID-19 diagnosis.

Meitheal selected the PHD-SR as the data source for its retrospective cohort study on the effect of anticoagulant use in COVID-19 patients discharged from U.S. hospitals between April 1, 2020 and November 30, 2020.

Anticoagulants are medications that prevent blood clots, which have been shown to worsen outcomes and lead to increased risk of death in individuals with COVID-19.

The Meitheal Study

Researchers tapped the comprehensive, timely PHD-SR to provide real-world evidence for profiling patients diagnosed with COVID-19. Hospital administrative data for 776 hospitals was included in the anticoagulant and COVID-19 analyses.

The primary objective of the study was to describe and compare the clinical and resource utilization outcomes of hospitalized inpatients diagnosed with COVID-19 and to assess the effects of anticoagulant treatment on outcomes.

Secondary objectives of the study included a description and comparison of demographic, visit, hospital and clinical characteristics between exposure groups.

Data from the PHD-SR was used to support all objectives.

The Findings

Researchers found:

• Patients on a therapeutic dose of the anticoagulants enoxaparin or heparin have longer hospital lengths of stay, higher cost and worse clinical outcomes when compared to patients on a prophylactic dose.
• When the therapeutic group is split by age, lab values suggest no difference in outcomes by age category

These findings support guidelines that prophylactic dosage is conditionally recommended for preventing blood clots in patients with COVID-19 and suggest that differences in outcomes by treatment dosage is not due to patient age.

The Power of Real-World Data and Insights

PAS is leading the way with the most comprehensive database of COVID-19-related data to help understand the disease’s clinical progression and impact on patient care.

The PHD will continue to provide life sciences partners like Meitheal the opportunity to use real-world data to conduct evidence-based studies of drugs and clinical outcomes in an effort to improve the overall quality, safety and cost-effectiveness of care.

In addition to life sciences organizations, PAS partners with academia, government agencies, and healthcare insurers and providers, enabling them with PHD data for analyses of drugs, devices, disease states, epidemiology, resource utilization, healthcare economics and clinical outcomes.

Ready to put our data to work for your organization? Get the details on all the capabilities of the PHD as they relate to COVID-19 data.

Want more? Discover how the PHD has fueled leading COVID-19 research conducted by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and others.