Northwell Health Partners with Digital Health Startup Oncora Medical to Deliver Targeted Cancer Treatment

This week, Dreamit HealthTech alum Oncora Medical announced a significant partnership with Northwell Health, New York State’s largest healthcare provider. Through the collaboration, radiation oncologists at Northwell Health will use Oncora Medical’s product to leverage large clinical datasets to predict patient outcomes and design personalized treatments for each cancer patient they help.

Over the past six months, data scientists and engineers from Oncora’s team have worked with Northwell’s Department of Radiation Medicine to mine and analyze data from the 50,000 cancer patients who have received treatment from the health network over the past decade.

The comprehensive analysis included information from radiation treatment plans, imaging, chemotherapy administration data, patients’ medical histories, and outcomes data such as side effects and cure rates. Over the next several months, Oncora’s product will continuously learn from the analyzed dataset to give physicians the insights they need to deliver precision-based care.

"Oncora is thrilled to be working with Northwell Health to personalize cancer treatments using data and machine learning. With this partnership we hope to power advanced research and ultimately improve patient outcomes through decision support," said David Lindsay, Co-founder and CEO of Oncora Medical.

At the same time, Northwell Health is excited for the partnership’s potential to improve care for cancer patients. “This is a first for Northwell and a first for Oncora – and is a big deal for cancer patients,” said Louis Potters, MD chair of Radiation Medicine at Northwell Health and deputy physician-in-chief of the Northwell Health Cancer Institute. “Our ability to aggregate our patient outcomes over 15 years creates an ability to customize treatment plans for individual patients. While a lot more effort is needed to validate this concept, this first step represents a proof in principle that this type of novel analysis can be achieved.”

David Lindsay and Chris Berlind co-founded Oncora Medical in 2014. Since that time, the company has worked with large health systems like MD Anderson, Penn Medicine, and most recently Northwell Health to help them use data to create personalized radiation treatment plans.

Oncora Medical is exhibiting at the 2018 ASTRO medical conference in San Antonio, TX. The company will host several in-booth presentations related to topics such as The Value of Intelligent Software in Radiation Oncology and Deep Learning for Survival Analysis in Radiation Oncology during the event.