The FINANCIAL — Accenture and Duke University have formed an alliance focused on jointly developing new advanced analytics solutions to address real-world, client-specific business challenges. The Accenture and Duke University Analytics Research Program, which will have an initial focus on health management research, aims to bring together data, modeling and analysis to achieve sustainable business and patient outcomes.
The relationship combines Accenture’s industry and analytics expertise with Duke University’s leading interdisciplinary research capabilities. It leverages expertise from the Information Initiative at Duke (IID), with a close connection to the Duke Health System. The collaboration will address complex and challenging global business problems through the joint development of new analytics tools and techniques, according to Accenture.
“Effectively leveraging leading-edge analytics capabilities is critical for Accenture to deliver the next generation of outcome-focused, business process services to our clients,” said Mike Salvino, group chief executive, Accenture Operations. “We plan to operationalize the predictive and prescriptive analytics solutions we develop with Duke to tackle problems currently facing our enterprise clients. We look forward to expanding our relationship beyond health management research into other relevant areas in support of our business process outsourcing and infrastructure services offerings.”
Duke graduate and undergraduate students who participate in the program will closely collaborate on campus with Accenture professionals on two initial projects:
Patient care and disease management: An effective care management program is critical to reducing the time needed to achieve desired business outcomes and medical expenses. Within diabetes management, the research will look to identify the key contributing factors that can provide predictive insights into the efficacy of a prescribed patient care path or clinical intervention. The research team will apply predictive analysis to determine effective care management interventions for achieving desired patient outcomes, in the shortest amount of time, with the most efficient cost structure.
Data mart: The health industry lacks a standardized approach for categorizing and structuring patient data related to clinical care, which can result in inconsistent results and interpretations of data. This project will develop and implement a consolidated and standard approach to create focused therapeutic data marts that can answer specific research or clinical care questions.
“Our collaboration with Accenture will drive significant progress in the field of advanced analytics and enable us to achieve more together than we could alone,” said Dr. Lawrence Carin, vice provost for research, Duke University. “Teaming with Accenture will help us translate our ideas into results by providing us with invaluable insights on how our research can be best applied in a real-world business context. The alliance with Accenture also emphasizes the strong focus within IID on teaming with the Duke Medical Center to address data-driven challenges in medicine.”
