In a July 23 news release, Flatiron Health announced that its international oncology research network has tripled in size across the UK, Germany, and Japan over the past year. Flatiron Health, which has built an oncology-focused EHR network and a de-identified database with more than 4 million patient records, is an independent affiliate of the Roche Group, as previously reported by Healthcare Innovation. The company collaborates with partners in academic institutions, policy groups, regulators, and biopharmaceutical companies.

According to the press release, “Flatiron Health entered international markets to address the growing unmet need for high-quality, real-world oncology data that is reflective and representative of patient populations, practice patterns, and care settings globally. In just five years, Flatiron established a global network of more than 30 leading academic medical centers, hospitals, universities, and community sites across Europe and Japan that contribute de-identified patient data to Flatiron’s real-world database.”

"The unprecedented expansion of our global network will continue to support improvements to local cancer patients’ care and novel multinational research—fundamentally changing what’s possible for our partners and the patients they serve," said Nathan Hubbard, Chief Business Officer at Flatiron Health, in a statement.

Healthcare Innovation’s David Raths spoke with Neal Meropol, M.D., Flatiron’s vice president of research oncology, last November about broadening the scope of research using real-world data. In the interview, Meropol explained that “the applications of our data today not only include understanding adoption of new therapies, but also understanding the real-world outcomes associated with different patterns of care, being able to perform comparative effectiveness, to understand differences in approaches that might not be amenable to doing a prospective clinical trial.”