The Food & Drug Administration is doling out $72 million to Wellesley, Mass.-based Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Inc. for a pilot of the agency’s Sentinel System for monitoring healthcare data.
The system will use automatically reported healthcare data collected by physicians and nurses in the field to better identify safety issues with medical products and drugs. The agreement is for one year and includes four renewable years, for a total of $72 million.
Harvard Pilgrim will use the money to build a scaled-down version of the Sentinel System, developing a system for collecting real-time data, according to the FDA, which launched the Sentinel initiative in May, 2008. The agency has already awarded 10 other contracts for the build-out of the system’s scientific operations, data, infrastructure and privacy functions.
The FDA is conducting the second Annual Sentinel Initiative public workshop in conjunction with the Brookings Institute’s Engelberg Center today in Washington, D.C.