Wake Forest School of Medicine Partners with Fluree to Improve Research Analysis

A new partnership is allowing researchers at Wake Forest School of Medicine, part of Wake Forest Baptist Health, to more quickly analyze data with a goal of providing innovations that improve health care.

The School of Medicine’s Center for Healthcare Innovation is working with Fluree PBC, a blockchain-backed data platform management expert, to create a data integration and review tool to deploy in health care innovation. 

This tool will enable the center’s team of clinical informatics experts to integrate data from multiple sources quickly, maintain the data’s integrity and origin, and understand the relationships between the different data types more efficiently through advanced visual analytics and graph database technology.

“Our goal is to identify clinically important results that enable us to quickly and efficiently improve the health of patients both locally and across the country,” said Jeff Williamson, M.D., professor of gerontology and geriatric medicine at Wake Forest Baptist Health and director of the Center for Healthcare Innovation at Wake Forest School of Medicine. “Today, many discoveries can be moved forward at  a much faster speed than is typically seen in academic medical centers so having both groups conveniently located in Innovation Quarter helps us match Wake Forest Baptist’s expertise in research and clinical care with Fluree’s technology skills.”

The mission of the Center for Healthcare Innovation is to collaboratively leverage the unique talents and capabilities of its research and clinical care innovators, digital health tools, scientific discoveries together with Wake Forest Baptist Health’s growing clinical care delivery system to improve population health, enhance patient experience, reduce costs and improve care provider work life.

"The Fluree team is thrilled to collaborate with Wake Forest Baptist Health in building and scaling leading-edge health care solutions,” said Brian Platz, Co-CEO and Co-Chairman of Fluree PBC. “Health care technology has many opportunities for our technology, from more security around sharing digital records to increased data ownership by patients. Our shared resources will yield innovations that make an impact and assist Wake Forest Baptist’s objective of offering the best health care close to home."

Fluree is a blockchain-backed Web3 data platform built for the emerging needs in enterprise data management: digital interoperability, data integrity, rich insights, and data-centric security. By combining blockchain technology with graph data management, Fluree's customers harness the value of connected, trusted, and secure data for next-generation applications.

Wake Forest Baptist Health and Wake Forest School of Medicine are home to a strategic range of leading-edge medical research focused on the primary causes of chronic illnesses and improving wellness, health care and care delivery. In the traditional research process, the findings and ideas that originate from such work can take decades to make a real-world impact on patient care.

However, as health care in the United States focuses increasingly on value-based care, innovation that more rapidly moves discovery into the health care system is needed in order to improve the quality of care and patient outcomes while decreasing costs. Wake Forest Baptist Health created the Center for Healthcare Innovation as an engine to more quickly move traditional research discoveries as well as other ideas and solutions that do not require the rigor of a traditional research process into clinical application.

The new partnership also highlights Innovation Quarter’s role in attracting and bringing together leading-edge institutions like Wake Forest Baptist and Wake Forest School of Medicine with commercial companies, like Fluree, to move forward new ideas and solutions.