Archimedes, Inc.

Archimedes, Inc.

File:ARCHlogoB.jpg
Company type	Private
Industry	Healthcare Modeling
Founded	2006
Headquarters	San Francisco, California, U.S.
Key people	David Eddy, Co-founder and Chief Medical Officer Emeritus John Beasley, CEO Marc-david Cohen, PhD, Chief Science Officer Peter Alperin, Vice President of Medicine
Website	Archimedes, Inc.

Archimedes, Inc. is a healthcare modeling company located in San Francisco, California. It is named for the Greek mathematician Archimedes, who is generally considered to be the greatest mathematician of antiquity.

History and operations

Archimedes, Inc. was founded by David Eddy, MD PhD, and Leonard Schlessinger, PhD, when they moved on from not-for-profit managed-care organization Kaiser Permanente in January 2006 to form their own company. Archimedes helps healthcare organizations improve the quality and efficiency of their programs and services. Its proprietary software, the Archimedes Model, allows for a better understanding of the implications of medical decisions. It can be applied to a range of real world scenarios, including physiological changes, physician behavior, cost and patient decision implications. The company's staff includes scientists, physicians and software engineers.

The Archimedes Model is now being used by health plans, pharmaceutical companies, governmental agencies and others to address issues relating to new tests and treatments, guidelines, performance, incentives, and financing. It is also being applied to guide individual patient care.

Archimedes’ clients include the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the American Board of Internal Medicine, the American Heart Association, the American Cancer Society, Humana, Kaiser Permanente, Eli Lilly and Company, Myriad Genetics and GlaxoSmithKline.

Archimedes Model

The Archimedes Model combines biological, medical, and economic data with advanced mathematics and computing methods to create simulations that can address real-world healthcare questions. It is a clinically realistic, validated mathematical model of human physiology, diseases, interventions, and healthcare systems. The model enables clients to simulate clinical trials and compare clinical and economic benefits between drugs and standard treatments in almost any population.

The model uses object-oriented programming and runs on a distributed computing network. At its core are hundreds of ordinary and differential equations that represent human physiology and the effects of diseases.

Archimedes validates the model by running simulations of actual clinical trials and then comparing the results of the simulation with those of the real-world trial. To date, more than 50 clinical trials have been used to validate the model. The Archimedes Model is distinguished from other clinical models by its realism, its inclusion of multiple diseases in a single integrated model, its degree of clinical and logistic detail, and its validation against epidemiological studies and dozens of clinical trials.

According to Richard Kahn, then-chief scientific and medical officer at the American Diabetes Association, the Archimedes Model, "...is at least ten times better than the model we use now, which is called thinking.

David Eddy

David Eddy, co-founder and now Chief Medical Officer Emeritus of Archimedes, is a pioneer in evidence-based decision-making in medicine and coined the term "evidence-based." He made significant advances in the theory and applications of evidence-based guidelines. Eddy developed the Archimedes Model while working at Kaiser Permanente in Southern California in the early 1990s and later incubated the project at Kaiser’s Care Management Institute in Oakland, California.

Eddy received the Frederick W. Lanchester Prize in 1980 for the best contribution to operations research and the management sciences. In 2005 he received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Institute for Quality in Laboratory Medicine, and in 2008 he was honored with The Foundation for Managed Care Pharmacy’s Steven G. Avey Award and described thusly: "Possessing a rare combination of talents, Dr. Eddy is a heart surgeon turned mathematician and health-care economist known for his willingness to follow difficult paths or take an unpopular stand."

Foundation support

In 2007, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation awarded Archimedes a $15.6 million grant to extend the power of the Archimedes Model to more health policy and healthcare decision-makers, including the United States Congress and federal agencies; medical specialty societies and nonprofit disease associations (such as the American Diabetes Association and the National Committee for Quality Assurance); government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid; and insurers and healthcare provider networks. The grant was the largest to date made by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Pioneer Portfolio, which supports innovative projects that may lead to important breakthroughs in the future of health and healthcare.

See also

• Evidence-based design
• Evidence-based management
• Evidence-based medicine
• Evidence based policy
• Evidence based practice
• Mathematical modeling

External links

• Archimedes, Inc.
• Eddy, David. "Evidence-Based Medicine: A Unified Approach," Health Affairs, Vol. 24, No. 1 (2005): 9-17
• Taylor, Prentiss. "Clinical Decision Making: From Theory to Practice (book review)," Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 276, No. 17, 6 November 1996