IQVIA, a provider of analytics, technology solutions, and clinical research services to the life sciences industry, and BREATHE – a Health Data Research Hub for Respiratory Health – have announced a new collaboration.

IQVIA joins BREATHE as a Supporting Partner, with strategic alignment between the organisations, to work together to improve health outcomes and quality of life for people living with respiratory conditions in the UK.

Building on BREATHE’s commitment to working with patients and the public, the collaboration will place the needs of people with respiratory disease at the front and centre of joint-working programmes that benefit from IQVIA’s health data technology, real world and genomic capabilities and care pathway analytics, synergistically working with BREATHE to achieve the following:

• Improve patient care pathways for those with long-term respiratory conditions across the UK, eliminating bottlenecks with quicker and more accurate diagnoses, timely referrals to specialist care and earlier access to innovative medicines
• Deliver efficiencies within the NHS, identifying potential issues earlier to keep people in the community, reducing avoidable harm, hospital appointments and admissions
• Help researchers accelerate the discovery of more effective treatments, personalised to the needs of individual patients, leading to better health outcomes and quality of life
• Establish the UK as a world-leading location for health data-enabled research, thereby attracting more global pharma and biotech investment.

Respiratory disease affects one in five people and is the third biggest cause of death in England, as well as being a major factor in winter pressures faced by the NHS. The annual economic burden of asthma and COPD alone on the NHS in the UK is estimated as £3 billion and £1.9 billion, respectively. In total, all lung conditions (including lung cancer) directly cost the NHS in the UK £11 billion annually.

Respiratory conditions, like asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), are often difficult to diagnose, leading to untreated symptoms, inappropriate treatments and avoidable morbidity and mortality due to disease progression. Research suggests that up to 2 million people in the UK have undiagnosed COPD. Improving the accuracy of diagnosis in primary care settings is a key goal for the new collaboration, allowing for better management of these conditions, and quicker referrals to specialist care. Equally, standards of care could be adjusted based on non-identified data collected and analysed.

With its network of partners, spanning academia, charities and industry, BREATHE is transforming the use of health data to improve respiratory outcomes in the UK. BREATHE works alongside partners and patients to identify priority questions that could be answered using non-identified health data, bringing together high-quality respiratory data from multiple sources and providing streamlined access and support for its use in research and innovation, whilst ensuring individual patient privacy is protected at all stages.