nference and Rush partner on clinical data platform for RWE research

Rush University System for Health and nference have entered a long-term collaboration to develop a Rush-hosted clinical analytics platform using de-identified, longitudinal, and multimodal patient data for research.

The Baseline 

• Rush University System for Health and nference have partnered to develop a clinical analytics platform using de-identified, longitudinal, and multimodal patient data. 

• The platform will encompass data from nearly 5 million patients to support real-world evidence, observational studies, and prospective research. 

Rush University System for Health has announced plans to work with nference to establish infrastructure for analyzing clinical data generated through routine patient care. Encompassing data from nearly 5 million unique patients, the platform is intended to support real-world evidence (RWE) generation, observational studies, and prospective research within Rush’s data environment.

The platform will bring together longitudinal data from clinical notes, laboratory tests, medications, diagnostic reports, radiology and pathology imaging, genomics, and electrophysiology, as well as data associated with biospecimens collected with patient consent. The organizations intend to enable researchers to analyze de-identified data across different clinical modalities and over time, with the data continually refreshed.

nference will build the platform using its federated software, data harmonization, and analytics infrastructure. Structured and unstructured clinical data will be prepared for observational studies and prospective research, with the platform operating within Rush’s environment and Rush retaining stewardship of its data. On the announcement, Matt Walsh, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Rush said:

"Our goal is to give our clinicians and scientists better tools to learn from the data generated through patient care and translate those insights into meaningful improvements for the communities we serve. This collaboration with nference will help our researchers ask more ambitious questions, generate evidence more efficiently and move discoveries toward clinical practice, while maintaining Rush's stewardship of the data entrusted to us."

As the collaboration progresses, Rush and nference plan to explore the platform’s use in multimodal and agentic AI research. Potential applications identified by the organizations include generating evidence for emerging therapies, supporting clinical trials, and using de-identified clinical data for biomedical research.

“Clinical data is extraordinarily rich, but the signals that matter are fragmented across notes, laboratory results, images, genomics and years of patient history,” said Venky Soundararajan, PhD, Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer, nference.