Ken Tarkoff, formerly at RelayHealth, is joining Syapse as its new CEO.
Ken Tarkoff is joining Syapse as its new CEO. A health technology industry veteran who has held leadership roles at several cutting-edge companies, Tarkoff comes to Syapse from RelayHealth, where he was the COO.
A health information technology (health IT) company, Syapse develops software platforms that support clinical implementation of precision medicine in oncology via genomic data integration, decision support, care coordination, and quality improvement at point of care. They have partnered with several healthcare systems, including Intermountain Healthcare, Providence St. Joseph Health, Stanford Cancer Institute, Catholic Health Initiatives, Dignity Health, Henry Ford Health System, and Cancer Treatment Centers of America, which totals 285 hospitals across 25 states.
“Precision medicine has the power to transform health care, delivering better treatments and better outcomes. I’m excited to join Syapse, a company uniquely positioned to drive this transformation,” said Tarkoff, in a statement. “With its innovative model and unmatched network, Syapse can help more physicians offer effective and cost-efficient treatments so that patients get better, faster.”
Founder and president of Syapse, Jonathan Hirsch, views genomics as a transformative force in cancer care, a “wedge.” During a panel discussion at the Patient-Centered Oncology Care® (PCOC®) meeting in November 2016, Hirsch emphasized that interoperability can help avoid the frustration for care providers to extract data from different systems. He added that oncology has been one of the worst practice areas for health IT because patients have so many encounters with so many parts of the health system, over an extended period.
Syapse offers a robust platform that brings together fragmented clinical, molecular, and outcomes data within a physician’s workflow that are needed to deliver cancer treatments at scale.
“What we’ve done at Syapse is we’ve built integration capabilities with the major electronic medical records out there, so that we can effectively pull the right data on cancer patients from those medical record systems and then make it usable. But, let’s make no mistake, there’s a lot of work to do,” Hirsch told The American Journal of Managed Care®. He explained that the company wants to ease physician burdens, not add to them, by paying attention to provider workflows and making it easier for them to gather and deliver information.
“Effectively treating cancer is one of the greatest—and costliest—challenges in health care,” said Syapse Chairman Gary Kurtzman. "Precision medicine can change that, and scores of health systems and providers are rushing to integrate it into their care. With Ken’s leadership, Syapse will help make precision medicine the reality for more health systems, providers, and most importantly, more patients."
Standard Criteria for Loss of Ambulation Needed in DMD
April 19th 2024A recent study suggests the differences between ambulation definitions for patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) can impact the identification of ambulant vs nonambulant individuals, and standard criteria across settings are needed.
Read More
Government agencies have created an online portal for the public to report potential anticompetitive practices in health care; there are changes coming to the “boxed warning” section for chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapies (CAR T) to highlight T-cell blood cancer risk; questions about the safety of obesity medications during pregnancy have arisen in women on them who previously struggled with fertility issues.
Read More
Oncology Onward: A Conversation With Penn Medicine's Dr Justin Bekelman
December 19th 2023Justin Bekelman, MD, director of the Penn Center for Cancer Care Innovation, sat with our hosts Emeline Aviki, MD, MBA, and Stephen Schleicher, MD, MBA, for our final episode of 2023 to discuss the importance of collaboration between academic medicine and community oncology and testing innovative cancer care delivery in these settings.
Listen
Gene, Light Therapy Combo Shows Promise Against Prostate Cancer Cells in Proof-of-Concept Study
April 18th 2024In their preclinical model, the researchers found efficacy both in vitro and in vivo by using CRISPR-Cas9 to mimic porphyria and combining the technology with light therapy.
Read More
Pegcetacoplan for PNH More Cost-Effective Than Anti-C5 Monoclonal Antibodies
April 18th 2024A cost-utility analysis conducted from the perspective of the Italian health system found that pegcetacoplan was more effective and less costly than 2 complement 5 (C5) inhibitors for the treatment of paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria (PNH).
Read More