GNS Healthcare today announced that U.S. Patent 8,571,803, entitled "Systems and Methods for Modeling and Analyzing Networks," has been issued, relating to significant innovations in automated causal data analytics.  The patent covers key methods underlying REFS(TM), a computational platform that automatically builds predictive and explanatory models from big data.

"Healthcare companies can no longer afford to pursue a manual approach to data analytics," said GNS Healthcare's CEO and co-founder Colin Hill. "However, most Big Data approaches also fall short of identifying the interventions for individual patients - be they drugs, disease management programs, or benefit designs - that will improve outcomes and reduce costs for those patients.  REFS(TM) addresses this critical need in this new era of exponential growth of data from Electronic Medical Records (EMR), claims, genomics, imaging, mobile health, and beyond."

Under an exclusive license from Via Science, the patent holder and its majority shareholder, GNS Healthcare is using REFS(TM) in the healthcare space to develop products for and provide services to leading health plans, pharmaceutical companies, and providers. These products and services address healthcare challenges such as comparing the effectiveness of treatments for individual patients, driving medication adherence, predicting risk-adjusted costs for health plan members, and demonstrating the economic and clinical value of health interventions.

GNS builds products and models that go beyond correlation to find underlying causal relationships from observational data. Discovering causal relationships is crucial to make predictions not just about outcomes for individual patients given their current trajectory, but for the more fundamental question in health care of what factors can be modified to achieve desired outcomes.

"The REFS(TM) platform is a unique and valuable tool for advancing our understanding of disease and guiding us to new treatments," said James Gusella, PhD, Director of the Center for Human Genetic Research at Massachusetts General Hospital, Bullard Professor of Neurogenetics at Harvard Medical School, and co-discoverer of the gene that causes Huntington's disease. "The models that GNS has built using the platform are providing a powerful resource for understanding biological consequences of the Huntington's disease mutation. Our ongoing collaboration will help to advance the goal of finding effective treatments for the disease."