Accenture and Duke University have formed an alliance focused on jointly developing new advanced analytics solutions.

The Accenture and Duke University Analytics Research Program will have an initial focus on health management research and aims to bring together data, modeling and analysis to achieve sustainable business and patient outcomes, according to a release.

“We plan to operationalize the predictive and prescriptive analytics solutions we develop with Duke to tackle problems currently facing our enterprise clients," said Mike Salvino, group chief executive, Accenture Operations. "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.