December 13, 2007 | Read Time: 2 minutes
A San Francisco company has created complex medical-simulation software that allows health-care professionals to forecast the effectiveness and cost of different treatments and to compare the approaches.
Now the company is getting philanthropic help — $15.6-million from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, in Princeton, N.J. — to make the medical software far more widely available.
The five-year grant to Archimedes will be used to develop an Internet interface that will make the forecasting tool easier and less expensive for people to use. It is the largest grant ever awarded by the foundation’s Pioneer Portfolio, a program that supports cutting-edge ideas that have the potential to transform health care.
Archimedes is a for-profit company that is wholly owned by Kaiser Permanente Southern California, a nonprofit health-care plan in Pasadena.
The model uses mathematical equations to represent physiological processes in the body, the prevalence and behavior of diseases like diabetes and hypertension, patient and physician behavior, and health-care costs.
To test the model’s accuracy, Archimedes uses the model to simulate clinical trials that have actually taken place. According to the company, the results of the simulated trials have closely tracked the real results in four dozen tests.
“Our goal is to create a virtual world, because in the virtual world you can explore things that can’t possibly be explored in the real world,” says David Eddy, co-founder and chief medical officer of Archimedes.
The problem, says Dr. Eddy, is that the complexity of the model requires companies and organizations to run simulations through consulting projects with Archimedes, which are expensive and time-consuming.
Creating the Internet interface will change that, he says. As an example, he describes a project the company is working on for the American Cancer Society, the American Diabetes Association, and the American Heart Association.
The three groups have identified 14 disease-prevention guidelines, such as controlling obesity and quitting smoking, and have asked the company to use the model to determine the health and cost implications of the guidelines, both separately and in various combinations, if they were to be followed by baby boomers as they become eligible for Medicare.
Clinical trials to try to answer those questions would never happen, because they would cost several billion dollars to conduct and take decades to complete, says Dr. Eddy. With the current Archimedes simulation model, the project will cost the organizations several hundred thousand dollars and take six months, he says. After the Internet version of the software is ready, the cost for this kind of project would be cut by 90 percent and require just several days to complete.
For more information: Go to http://www.rwjf.org/programareas/pioneer/resources/product.jsp?id=23112&pid=1140
