Lab results can enhance clinical trials by providing critical data for site selection, patient recruitment, and monitoring.
Lab data can drive HEOR insights, offering concrete evidence of treatment efficacy, cost-effectiveness, and real-world outcomes.
Inform commercial strategies with lab results to help identify specific patient populations and providers to optimize outreach and engagement.
HealthVerity provides access to lab results for all patients, whether tests were paid through insurance or out-of-pocket.
Daily updates from HealthVerity ensure the most current data is available for research and decision-making.
Lab data from providers like Labcorp and Quest integrates with EMRs and claims through HealthVerity for a complete patient view for seamless integration.
We have already discussed the potential advantages of electronic medical records (EMRs) and hospital chargemasters or charge data masters (CDMs) in our four-part series exploring the benefits, considerations, and use cases for different types of real-world data (RWD).
In our third installment, we’ll take a deep dive into lab results, exploring their potential to provide unique insights into genetics and biomarkers, discuss potential limitations, and uncover how they can be used to improve clinical trials, health economics and outcomes research, and commercial strategies.
Finally, we’ll explore how you can access the largest data ecosystem of lab results, including Labcorp and Quest, with HealthyVerity.
Lab tests are pivotal for understanding a patient's health. They help diagnose or rule out a condition, determine appropriate treatment options, and evaluate the efficacy of therapeutics. The results of these tests can provide valuable insights into healthcare research and strategic decision-making.
Accessing medical claims on their own is not enough to obtain comprehensive data. Although they may indicate if a lab test was ordered, they do not provide numerical results. Unlike medical claims data, lab results provide detailed numerical data needed for in-depth insights.
While lab results are often integrated into EMRs, they may be incomplete or inaccurate, especially if manually entered. They may also come as separate reports attached to the EMR, captured in the system electronically, or manually entered, leaving room for errors and misinformation.
For the most accurate and comprehensive insights, it is key to acquire lab data directly from the source. This is where HealthVerity comes in, offering access to millions of lab results from major providers like Labcorp and Quest.
Lab results offer a range of advantages that can enhance healthcare research and guide decision-making. The four key benefits include:
Objective Insights: Lab results provide objective, verified data to confirm diagnoses and quantify disease severity, forming a reliable foundation for patient care plans.
Genetics and Biomarker Information: Beyond routine blood tests, lab data provides insights into an individual’s genetics or specific biomarkers. This information helps researchers guide treatment decisions and identify therapeutic targets.
Real-Time Availability: With HealthVerity, lab data is updated daily, ensuring that researchers and healthcare professionals always have access to the most current information.
Comprehensive Patient Coverage: Lab results cover all patients, whether the tests were paid for by insurance or out-of-pocket, providing a complete dataset for analysis.
These benefits make lab results an indispensable component of real-world data, supporting more precise, timely, and informed decisions in healthcare and research.
While lab data offers immense value, there are limitations to be aware of:
Regional Variability: Not all labs share their data. It can vary by region, creating the potential for geographical biases.
Inpatient vs. Outpatient Data: Different labs process outpatient tests (such as Labcorp or Quest) compared to inpatient tests that may be run by an internal lab during a patient's hospital stay. This means depending on where the lab data is licensed, you may not receive lab data from results obtained during a hospital visit.
Due to this potential limitation, lab results may only represent one part of the patient journey.
Cost: While highly insightful, accessing high-quality lab data can be expensive. Without a streamlined data resource like HealthVerity, cost can be a significant barrier to obtaining reliable lab results.
Lab results provide objective insights that can confirm a diagnosis, measure disease severity or progression, or provide novel datapoints on a patient's genetics and biomarker information.
This provides an opportunity for a variety of use cases throughout the pharmaceutical lifecycle:
Lab results can provide insights that aid in every phase of clinical trials. This includes site selection, patient recruitment, and monitoring.
Site Selection: Lab data can be analyzed to discover physician offices or potential investigator sites where patients of interest with a key lab result, diagnosis, or biomarker are being treated.
Patient Recruitment: Lab results are particularly helpful in recruiting patients for trials, especially for rare diseases that have very specific criteria, or where a diagnosis code does not yet exist.
Monitoring & Insights: During the trial, lab results indicate if the disease is improving, as well as provide insights into other comorbid conditions or potential side effects. These insights are especially useful in synthetic control arm studies.
To illustrate this key use case, let’s explore the work done between HealthVerity and a major pharmaceutical company studying treatments and vaccinations for RSV. By utilizing near real-time lab results to conduct disease surveillance, they were able to identify ideal clinical trial sites and healthcare providers across the U.S. that could participate in upcoming trials based on disease spread. HealthVerity successfully streamlined monitoring, site selection, and patient recruitment for this company, ultimately contributing to improved outcomes for RSV treatment and vaccination development.
HEOR relies on accurate and comprehensive data to evaluate the effectiveness and economic impact of treatments.
Lab results provide verified evidence of a drug's clinical performance by measuring biomarkers, disease progression, and treatment response. This data helps researchers understand the real-world implications of a therapy, from its efficacy to its safety profile, enabling better assessments of value-based care models.
Lab data also supports cost-effectiveness analyses by linking clinical outcomes with financial metrics, such as hospital readmissions or reduced healthcare utilization. A treatment’s ability to normalize a specific biomarker could correlate with lower long-term healthcare costs, a critical insight for stakeholders evaluating new interventions.
Lab results are a game-changer for commercial strategies in the pharmaceutical and healthcare sectors. They enable companies to identify healthcare providers and patient populations that align with specific treatment criteria, such as the presence of a biomarker or a particular disease severity. This targeted approach allows for more efficient and effective outreach.
Pharmaceutical companies can use lab data to trigger alerts when specific lab tests are ordered or results indicate a patient might benefit from a treatment. These real-time notifications can help sales teams prioritize high-value opportunities and support timely engagement with healthcare providers.
A recent analysis demonstrated that organizations leveraging HealthVerity lab data can gain significant increases in engagement and efficiency across commercial outreach efforts. As highlighted in the chart, precision alerts driven by HealthVerity lab data can deliver measurable lift in provider engagement over legacy triggers, ensuring more precise and timely commercial activation.
Lab data can also improve market segmentation and strategic planning. By analyzing trends in lab test utilization or results, companies can refine their messaging, optimize resource allocation, and even anticipate future market needs.
This level of precision ultimately leads to more impactful commercial strategies and better alignment with patient and provider needs.
HealthVerity is the only data provider to offer both Quest and Labcorp, representing 70%-80% of the outpatient lab testing market.
We offer an array of other diagnostic sources, including standard, microbiology and sensitivity testing, esoteric, genomic and pathological labs, as well as inpatient lab results, representing over 170 million total patients.
All of this data is fully interoperable, HIPAA compliant, and can be seamlessly synchronized with other data sources, such as medical claims, EMRs, and consumer, SDoH, and hospital chargemaster data for the most comprehensive view of the patient journey.
Real-world data, particularly lab results, has become a cornerstone of healthcare innovation, providing objective insights that improve patient outcomes and streamline research efforts.
Whether you're identifying clinical trial sites, evaluating treatment efficacy, or refining commercial strategies, lab results offer a unique and unparalleled value. By leveraging verified, comprehensive and research-ready datasets through platforms like HealthVerity Marketplace, you can unlock the full potential of this critical resource.
As the healthcare landscape continues to evolve, embracing the power of lab data will be critical to driving innovation and delivering better care.
Interested in learning how accessing lab data through HealthVerity Marketplace can enhance your healthcare initiative?
With the ability to customize your datasets through our marketplace, access pre-made mastersets, and synchronize proprietary data seamlessly, HealthVerity empowers you to unlock the full potential of real-world data.
Contact our team today to request a demo and explore how the nation's largest data ecosystem can transform your healthcare initiatives.
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Lab results confirm diagnoses, track disease progression, and provide genetic and biomarker insights that inform clinical trials, HEOR, and commercial strategies.
HealthVerity offers data from both Labcorp and Quest among other providers, covering a significant portion of outpatient lab testing. This data is fully interoperable with other RWD sources.
There are a few limitations of using lab data. This includes the potential for geographical biases, differences between inpatient and outpatient testing, and the high cost of data acquisition. HealthVerity can help minimize these limitations by providing a streamlined source of accessing data that is fully interoperable with other RWD sources.
Lab results help in site selection, patient recruitment, and monitoring, offering real-time insights into disease progression and therapeutic efficacy. This can help bring effective treatments to patients who need them most faster.