Century Health and Arizona Gastrointestinal Associates collaborate to support real-world evidence research in IBD and MASH

Century Health and Arizona Gastrointestinal Associates (AGA) have announced a partnership aimed at transforming routinely collected gastroenterology data into research-grade datasets to support real-world evidence (RWE) generation and life sciences research.

The Baseline

• Century Health and Arizona Gastrointestinal Associates (AGA) have partnered to transform routinely collected gastroenterology data into research-grade datasets to support RWE generation.
• The collaboration focuses on inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH), using AI to structure and curate data from routine clinical care.
• The initiative will draw on data from more than 21,000 patients and aims to improve understanding of disease progression, treatment patterns, and patient outcomes in real-world practice.

The collaboration focuses on IBD and MASH, two of the most active areas of pharmaceutical development in gastroenterology. Despite growing research activity, access to detailed real-world clinical data remains limited, particularly outside controlled clinical trial settings, creating challenges for researchers seeking to better understand disease progression, treatment patterns, and patient outcomes.

To support these efforts, the organizations will work to convert routinely collected clinical information into research-grade datasets derived from routine gastroenterology practice. The resulting data resources are expected to support research into how these conditions develop over time, how treatments are used in routine practice, and the outcomes experienced by patients.

The collaboration will draw on data generated through routine gastroenterology care, including endoscopy reports, pathology findings, laboratory results, and physician notes. While these sources contain valuable clinical information, much of the content is stored in unstructured formats that are difficult to analyze at scale and have historically required substantial manual review.

Century Health will use its AI abstraction model, CHARM, to curate and enrich data from AGA's gastroenterology-specific electronic medical record system. The platform is designed to extract key variables from clinical notes, endoscopy reports, and laboratory records and convert them into structured datasets suitable for research use.

Dr Vikram Singh, Managing Partner at Arizona Gastrointestinal Associates, said the collaboration would help the organization gain greater insight from its clinical data without increasing demands on healthcare professionals:

"We see complex patients every day and have strong clinical intuitions about what works and what doesn't, but extracting meaningful patterns from the data has never been straightforward. Working with Century Health lets us do that without adding burden to our clinical teams.”

AGA is an independent, physician-led gastroenterology network serving the Phoenix area, with 25 board-certified gastroenterologists and two in-house pathologists. According to the organizations, the partnership will encompass data from more than 21,000 patients across IBD and MASH.

The focus on these conditions reflects both significant research activity and continuing evidence gaps. Although more than 23 therapies have been approved for IBD, there is currently no cure, and treatment is often highly individualized, with patients frequently cycling through up to five lines of therapy before finding an effective treatment. MASH has become an increasingly important area of research following the approval of the first disease-modifying therapy in 2024, yet real-world clinical data from routine gastroenterology practice remain relatively scarce.

The organizations noted that independent community gastroenterology practices represent an important source of clinical data because they capture long-term disease management and treatment decisions as they occur in routine care, providing insights that may complement evidence generated through clinical trials.

Commenting on the collaboration, Vish Srivastava, Co-Founder and CEO of Century Health, said:

"Our aim is to bring shared value for patients, clinics, and biopharma by helping show how treatments work in real-world clinical practice. With more than 21,000 patients across IBD and MASH, Arizona Gastrointestinal Associates has the scale to generate evidence to understand how these diseases actually progress and how patients respond to treatment outside of clinical trials.”