AstraZeneca has entered into a three-year collaboration agreement with IMS Health, the leading provider of information, services and technology for the healthcare sector, to advance the use of real-world evidence based on observational and retrospective studies throughout Europe to inform the delivery of effective and cost-efficient healthcare.

The partnership with IMS Health will give AstraZeneca access to pre-existing anonymised electronic health records, which include clinical outcome, economic and treatment pattern data. In addition, the companies will jointly develop a customised research and data analysis platform. The information will provide a deeper insight into how medicines that are already on the market are working in real-world settings across Europe, painting a picture of unmet needs in the current standard of care and treatment patterns across a number of therapeutic areas, with an emphasis on chronic illnesses. The data will also be used to inform AstraZeneca’s discovery and clinical development programmes.

“Our collaboration with IMS is a key milestone in our commitment to understand the impact of our medicines in the real world, beyond what we see in controlled clinical trials. This insight will help us and healthcare decision-makers to improve the treatment of disease and ensure effective use of medicines to minimise the burden on individuals and healthcare budgets,” said Martin Mackay, president of  R&D, AstraZeneca.

Jon Resnick, IMS Health’s vice president of Real-World Evidence Solutions, said: “This joint initiative reflects a shared perspective on the transformative power of real-world evidence on global health systems. Our unique information assets, coupled with our services and technology capabilities, make IMS a leading partner for healthcare organisations in the identification, integration and interpretation of real-world outcomes. We are extremely pleased to be working with AstraZeneca on this collaboration.”

The collaboration reflects the interest among healthcare decision-makers in examining the cost and effectiveness of new and existing medicines and health technologies to help allocate their increasingly limited resources more efficiently. Unlike controlled clinical trials, real-world evidence studies use observational data such as electronic medical records, claims information, patient registries and patient surveys. By evaluating the data associated with the delivery of care, ‘real-world’ analyses can demonstrate treatment impact on measurable outcomes such as hospital length of stay, readmissions, overall health status and total cost of care.

This announcement builds on AstraZeneca’s existing ‘real-world’ data and research partnership with HealthCore in the US, the health outcomes research subsidiary of WellPoint.

The financial terms of the collaboration agreement are not disclosed.