Beyond Flatiron: The rising power of oncology clinical data companies

Founded in 2011, Cota is the brainchild of Andrew Pecora, M.D., a New Jersey oncologist who reportedly formed the company "when he and his team of top oncologists realized that precision medicine was evolving fast and there were no tools, and no patient classification system to address it, according to Eric Schultz, Cota's president of Technology, Informatics and Innovation. The result was Cota – which initially stood for "Cancer Outcomes Tracking and Analysis" – an approach that aggregates data from a range of oncologists, using both automation and manual extraction, similar to Flatiron, and distills the data in a fashion that assigns each patient to a very specific category, which they call the "Cota nodal address" (CNA). The CNA is designed to integrate all the attributes of prognostic significance to patients. The idea is that each patient in a given category is similar in the type of treatment they should ideally receive. By comparing outcomes and costs across patients with a given CNA, a physician organization (as well as a payor) can determine which doctors are providing the best, most cost-effective care. (This story was also featured on AEI.org.)

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