Cardinal Health announced that it has entered into a strategic collaboration with Palantir Technologies Inc. to design a solution that will give health systems and hospitals dynamic purchase decision insights in order to quickly improve their bottom line. The Cardinal Health solution, which will be integrated into Foundry, Palantir's operating system, will deploy artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to bring together diagnosis and clinical data with real-time customer purchasing and consumption data for pharmaceutical products with best-in-class data and privacy protections. Future iterations of the tool are expected to help inform purchasing decisions for therapeutic utilization, reimbursement insights and predictive drug inventory needs – to help further improve the connection between health system purchasing and supply chain support.

As hospitals balance increases in drug expenses due to the growth of specialty therapies and biosimilars, health systems are struggling to right-size pharmacy inventory together with constantly evolving payer formulary updates. Cardinal Health's data-driven solution will mitigate some of these challenges by analyzing real-time clinical and purchasing data to effectively create a clinically-integrated supply chain for pharmaceuticals.