By Christoph Schlegel | Bain & Company | January 22, 2020
When Flatiron Health set out in 2012 to gather real-world clinical data from cancer patient records, the challenge seemed overwhelming. Flatiron’s founders wanted to build a reliable database to help accelerate cancer research and development. But much of the information the company needed was unstructured and stored in the medical records of thousands of clinics and hospitals across the US—and hospitals were not allowed to share it. So Flatiron decided to acquire an electronic medical-records platform and tailor it to the needs of oncologists, with terms that would allow the company to analyze the data.
