PHOENIX & CHARLOTTE, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

PINC AI™ Applied Sciences (PAS), a division of Premier, Inc. (NASDAQ: PINC), and Datavant, the company that protects, connects and delivers the world’s health data, announce the companies are expanding their existing collaboration to help shape the future of healthcare research, advance clinical trial operations, and increase trial diversity and equity – aiming to accelerate the development of novel therapies and products for improved patient outcomes.

The organizations have been working together since September 2022 to to deliver meaningful insights that improve the quality of patient care. Through this new and expanded effort, PAS will leverage Datavant’s trial tokenization solution and data connectivity platform to link clinical trial data and PAS real-world data and generate real-world evidence that propels clinical research innovation. This will provide deeper insights into the benefits and risks of medical interventions in real-world settings within and beyond the controlled environments of clinical trials.

Robust real-world evidence is becoming increasingly important for pharma and medical device development. As an example, with the passage of the (IRA) in August 2022, real-world evidence is serving as an important tool for life sciences and medical device companies striving to demonstrate the value and comparative effectiveness of their products and help patients get access to the therapies and interventions they need faster.

“As life sciences and medical device companies continue to bridge the gap between medical solutions development and real-world application, leveraging real-world data for real-world evidence generation has emerged as a game changer,” said Myla Maloney, Chief Growth Officer, PINC AI™ Applied Sciences. “With Datavant, we are taking our best-in-class, real-world PINC AI™ Healthcare Data (PHD), securely linking it with other real-world datasets via tokens and leveraging it specifically in the clinical trials space to enable evidence-based decision making, which we believe can lead to better patient experiences and outcomes and cost and time savings.”

Today, a clinical trial for a chronic condition is utilizing Datavant to link clinical trial patient data and PHD data to understand the participants’ complete patient journey. By uniting clinical trial data with real-world data contained in the PHD, researchers are gaining insight into medication history, which can be difficult to collect, as well as the ability to follow the patients forward after the trial has ended, when oftentimes patients are lost. The real-world evidence generated from the linked data can be used to assess important long-term health outcomes outside of the clinical trial, improve drug safety and efficacy, and empower the healthcare industry to treat chronic care conditions more effectively.

In another clinical trial, a sponsor is building a real-world evidence control arm using PAS’ real-world data connected by Datavant at the patient level while preserving patient privacy. Utilizing real-world data/real-world evidence derived from patients on a standard of care may eliminate the need for researchers to construct a separate control arm, which can decrease the duration and cost of the clinical trial. The real-world evidence control arm is also helping to improve the patient experience and outcomes by enabling all study participants to partake in the treatment and its potential benefits rather than a placebo, thereby increasing their access to medical care.

In addition to these active trials, PAS’ linkable datasets are being utilized by life sciences and medical device companies and health systems to find diverse trial candidates and identify trial sites – both of which have a critical impact on bringing new solutions to market.

“Ever since launching our trial tokenization offering in 2019, Datavant has held that linking clinical trial data and real-world data has incredible promise to accelerate drug development, improve the safety and efficacy of treatments, and lead to better patient outcomes,” said Tal Rosenberg, President and GM, Life Sciences, Ecosystem and Public Sector at Datavant. “We’ve now tokenized over 100 clinical trials, and we’re excited to broaden our work with PAS and accelerate innovation with connected data.”

About PINC AI™ Applied Sciences (PAS)

is a trusted leader in accelerating healthcare improvement through services, data and scalable solutions, spanning the continuum of care and enabling sustainable innovation and rigorous research. These services and real-world data are valuable resources for the pharmaceutical, device and diagnostic industries, academia, federal and national healthcare agencies, as well as hospitals and health systems. Since 2000, PAS researchers have produced more than 1,000 publications which appear in 264 scholarly, peer-reviewed journals, covering a wide variety of topics, and conduct population-based analyses of drugs, devices, treatments, disease states, epidemiology, resource utilization, healthcare economics and clinical outcomes.

About the PINC AI™ Platform

^™ is the technology and services platform of (NASDAQ: PINC). With more than 20 years’ worth of cost, quality and operational data gleaned from 45 percent of U.S. hospital discharges, 2.7 billion hospital outpatient and clinic encounters and 177 million physician office visits, the PINC AI^™ platform provides actionable intelligence to help improve outcomes, support improved financial performance and enable success in new, alternative payment models. PINC AI^™ incorporates the 100 Top Hospitals ^® Program that inspires hospital and health system leaders to pursue higher performance and deliver added value to their patients and communities. PINC AI^™ offerings rely on advanced analytics to identify improvement opportunities; support award-winning Strategic Collaboratives for value-based care, maternal and infant health, workforce innovation, and health equity; and consulting services for clinical and operational design, and workflow solutions to hardwire sustainable change. The PINC AI^™ platform is also the data engine powering Premier’s newest brands – Remitra^® and Contigo Health^®. With a leading network of provider organizations, the PINC AI^™ platform accelerates ingenuity and serves as a large-scale innovation catalyst in healthcare. PINC AI^™ offerings and capabilities can be followed on (formerly Twitter) and .

About Datavant

Datavant’s mission is to make the world’s health data secure, accessible, and usable. Datavant is a data logistics company for healthcare whose products and solutions enable organizations to move and connect data securely.

Through proprietary technology, the world’s most robust healthcare network, and value-added services we protect, connect, and deliver the world’s health data. Datavant enables more than 60 million healthcare records to move between thousands of organizations, more than 70,000 hospitals and clinics, 70 percent of the 100 largest health systems, and an ecosystem of 500+ real-world data partners.

To learn more about Datavant, visit .

About Datavant Connect

Datavant Connect is a platform for secure, compliant real-world data connectivity. The platform enables organizations to tokenize data, find and assess potential data partners, and connect datasets at the individual level while preserving patient privacy. The backbone of the platform is tokenization technology that uses personally identifiable information (PII) to create encrypted tokens, which are unique, irreversible, and site-specific keys that can match individual patient records within and across datasets.

Premier, Inc. Forward-Looking Statements

Statements made in this release that are not statements of historical or current facts, including but not limited to those related to Premier’s ability to advance its long-term strategies and develop innovations for and transform healthcare and to accelerate healthcare improvement, and the intended or expected performance or utility of Premier’s and PINC AI’s products and services, are “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements may involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause performance or achievements to be materially different from historical results or from any future performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements. More information on risk factors relating to Premier and its products and services is included from time to time in the “Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements,” “Risk Factors,” and “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations” sections of Premier’s periodic filings with the SEC, which are also made available on Premier’s website at investors.premierinc.com. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date they are made, and Premier undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information or future events that occur after that date, or otherwise.

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