

However it also opens a new front in the debate about corporate access to personal data at a time when tech giants Apple AAPL.O, Amazon AMZN.O and Google's parent Alphabet GOOGL.O are seeking to carve out a healthcare niche. The ability to capture the experience of real-world patients, who represent a wider sample of society than the relatively narrow selection enrolled into traditional trials, is increasingly useful as medicine becomes more personalized.

Historically, it has been hard to get a handle on how drugs work in routine clinical practice but the rise of electronic medical records, databases of insurance claims, fitness wearables and even social media now offers a wealth of new data. Hot areas for such studies include cancer, heart disease and respiratory disorders. National Institutes of Health’s website. Half of the world’s 1,800 clinical studies involving real-world or real-life data since 2006 have been started in the last three years, with a record 300 last year, according to a Reuters analysis of the U.S. Real-world evidence involves collecting data outside traditional randomized clinical trials, the current gold standard for judging medicines, and interest in the field is ballooning. Studying such real-world evidence offers manufacturers a powerful tool to prove the value of their drugs - something Roche ROG.S aims to leverage, for example, with last month's $2 billion purchase of Flatiron Health. FILE PHOTO: A surgery nurse is seen beside the heart beat monitor in the operating theatre of the Unfallkrankenhaus Berlin (UKB) hospital in Berlin, Germany February 29, 2008.
