As powerful analytics have proven to be in the business and technology worlds, nowhere is data more impactful than in the healthcare industry, where providing the right people with the right information at the right time can quite literally make the difference between life and death. That reality has created a tremendous market opportunity for startups such as COTA Inc., which just nabbed $3.7 million in funding help oncologists gain a better understanding of cancer cases.

In industry circles, the healthcare analytics space is often thought of primarily in the context of the groundbreaking experiments and futuristic research IBM Corp. is helping to power with Watson. The cognitive computing software behind the Jeopardy!-winning artificial intelligence (AI), which was recently released as a cloud service, is helping institutions such as the New York Genome Cancer tackle monumental challenges ranging from deciphering the mysteries of the human genome to curing brain cancer.

But while there’s no denying that those ambitious projects hold far-reaching implications for the future of medicine, what IBM is doing with Watson has not yet produced any meaningful change for the everyday patient in the here and now. At most oncology departments today, the primary factor that determines the level of service an individual receives is not the number of petabytes in the hospital’s database or what algorithms it uses to scan that data but the cost of delivering care.

Delivering cancer treatments at scale

And that’s the issue COTA is trying to address. The startup is the brainchild of Dr. Andrew Pecora, a world-renowned expert in cellular medicine and immunology who set out to remove the mundane but increasingly important operational challenges that make it so expensive to deliver cancer treatments at large scale.

COTA, whose name is an acronym for Cancer Outcomes Tracking and Analysis, offers a cloud-based analytics platform designed to provide oncologists with a clearer view of their patients and the reporting functionality needed to effectively communicate that knowledge. The service combines clinical and operational data into what the startup describes as a consolidated view of cases as they progress.

COTA provides a visual interface that makes it possible for a doctor to isolate a subset of patients based on factors such as type and stage of disease, examine how that group fares from a medical standpoint and then correlate the results with business metrics like cost. The platform aims to pave a path for hospitals transition from the traditional model of charging for services to a so-called value-based care regimen, which was unfeasible in the past due to a lack of visibility into operations.

The ability to accurately categorize individual cases can be a powerful tool for improving care delivery in and of itself, COTA highlighted. For example, an oncologist might check past outcomes for the specific patient group to which an individual belongs to determine whether chemotherapy is worthwhile.

COTA said that the new $3.7 million in funding from fellow healthcare analytics provider Med-Metrix LCC. and New Jersey insurer Horizon Healthcare Services, Inc. will be spent on hiring biostatisticans and analysts to accelerate the development of its namesake offering. The capital will also be used to expand sales and marketing as the service moves closer towards general availability. The financing is part of a planned $7 million round that will come from Horizon.

Horizon marketing head Dr. Glenn D. Pomerantz, Med-Metrix CEO Joseph Davi and Dr. William T. DeRosa of the Regional Cancer Care Associates (RCCA) are joining the COTA board in conjunction with the investment.

Image via COTA, Inc.