![]() ![]() The idea was to build what you might call a classic tech platform, which provides oncologists access to a contemporary technology platform in exchange for the right to a copy of (de-identified) patient data. I can’t believe I don’t have access to more information and more data.”Ī serial tech entrepreneur, Lefkofsky decided there has to be a better way – and applied his tech know-how, and financial resources, to the challenge. “I can’t believe that it isn’t more clear what I should do. “I can’t believe how confusing this is,” he told a Chicago newspaper. The origin story is that Lefkofsky was shocked by the experience his wife had when diagnosed with breast cancer. If Cota has grown relatively gradually over the years, building incrementally on the ideas of its oncologist-founder, Tempus has arrived on the scene in a bolt of lightening (and funding), led by the founder of Groupon, Eric Lefkofsky. With their new funding, they plan to do what they’ve been doing, only more so: scale the platform, accelerate growth of the provider network, and build out the real-world dataset. While the company is focused on enhancing the delivery of value-based care in oncology by working with providers and payers, it’s extensive patient database also fosters a pharma-facing business, that includes synthetic cohorts and large registry studies, according to Tom Gallucci, Cota’s Chief Financial Officer.Ĭurrently, Cota estimates their provider network touches around two million patients. The company raised a $7M series A in 2014 (led by Horizon Blue Cross of New Jersey, and including Med-Metrix) an $18M series B in 2016 (led by Celgene and Novartis, and including Boston Millennia Partners, among others), and just announced a $40M series C that, interestingly, was led by IQVIA – a company formed by merger of health data giant IMS and CRO giant Quintiles – and included investments from EW Healthcare Partners, as well as Memorial Sloan Kettering, who last year announced a partnership with Cota. He adds they’ve also developed dashboards that enable medical centers to better track performance and help easily identify adverse variation in care patterns. Over the years, according to Schultz, Cota has developed a deeper model, involving more fields, and has followed patients for a longer amount of time. 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. The idea is that each patient in a given category is similar in the type of treatment they should ideally receive. The CNA is designed to integrate all the attributes of prognostic significance to patients. 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). ![]() ![]() Working with a group of high-volume clinical oncologists interested in administering appropriate standard of care treatment to each patient, Pecora developed an approach designed to help oncologists make the best decisions for their patients, and to enable oncology groups to monitor and effectively deliver best practices. “They also realized that with rapidly increasing costs, they needed to provide means to identify and reduce wasteful spend or the system would run out of money,” he added. Andrew Pecora, 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. Founded in 2011, Cota is the brainchild of Dr. ![]()
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