-: Yes. So this is the big question, right?
Because you start with a very large cohort at Optum,
we have 109 million people
with clinical data, and that's growing.
But when you start to ask very specific questions,
that number can become very small very quickly.
And so one of our challenges is figuring out the best cohort
to answer the questions.
And sometimes that becomes, you know,
we've had meaningful cohorts of 75 people
because they're highly characterized.
There's a lot of information about the people
and the longitudinal data is very strong
with other types of studies.
We need 10, 20, 30, 40, 50,000 people.
And so it's always figuring out what we need,
where do we have data?
Are, you know, we talked about claims
and clinical data and genomics.
Are they all overlapping
or do we have the broken arm problem where we have
cancer genomics, we have clinical data from IBD,
and then we have claims from broken arms.
So that's another challenge is making sure when we build the
cohort, we know that we have all of the pieces
of data needed to answer specific research questions.
And then I'm gonna put a plug in here too,
diversity is increasingly important.
So we have seen throughout time
that people talk about this great cohort,
but you know what, it's all people
who have the exact same demographics.
And so when we lack
that diversity in these foundational data sets,
we're missing information on how to develop diagnostics, how
to understand disease progression,
and certainly how to develop drugs that are safe
and effective for everyone.
So it's, it's thinking about all those different parts.
What question are you asking?
What types of data do you need? Do we have it?
And then have you addressed diversity in the issue as well?