Accenture (NYSE: ACN) and Duke University have formed an alliance focused on jointly developing new advanced analytics solutions to address real-world, client-specific business challenges. The Accenture and Duke University Analytics Research Program, which will have an initial focus on health management research, aims to bring together data, modeling and analysis to achieve sustainable business and patient outcomes.

The relationship combines Accenture’s industry and analytics expertise with Duke University’s leading interdisciplinary research capabilities. It leverages expertise from the Information Initiative at Duke (IID), with a close connection to the Duke Health System. The collaboration will address complex and challenging global business problems through the joint development of new analytics tools and techniques.

“Effectively leveraging leading-edge analytics capabilities is critical for Accenture to deliver the next generation of outcome-focused, business process services to our clients,” said Mike Salvino, group chief executive, Accenture Operations. “We plan to operationalize the predictive and prescriptive analytics solutions we develop with Duke to tackle problems currently facing our enterprise clients. We look forward to expanding our relationship beyond health management research into other relevant areas in support of our business process outsourcing and infrastructure services offerings.”

Duke graduate and undergraduate students who participate in the program will closely collaborate on campus with Accenture professionals on two initial projects:

  • Patient care and disease management: An effective care management program is critical to reducing the time needed to achieve desired business outcomes and medical expenses. Within diabetes management, the research will look to identify the key contributing factors that can provide predictive insights into the efficacy of a prescribed patient care path or clinical intervention. The research team will apply predictive analysis to determine effective care management interventions for achieving desired patient outcomes, in the shortest amount of time, with the most efficient cost structure.
  • Data mart: The health industry lacks a standardized approach for categorizing and structuring patient data related to clinical care, which can result in inconsistent results and interpretations of data. This project will develop and implement a consolidated and standard approach to create focused therapeutic data marts that can answer specific research or clinical care questions.

“Our collaboration with Accenture will drive significant progress in the field of advanced analytics and enable us to achieve more together than we could alone,” said Dr. Lawrence Carin, vice provost for research, Duke University. “Teaming with Accenture will help us translate our ideas into results by providing us with invaluable insights on how our research can be best applied in a real-world business context. The alliance with Accenture also emphasizes the strong focus within IID on teaming with the Duke Medical Center to address data-driven challenges in medicine.”

About Accenture

Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with more than 336,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world’s most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. The company generated net revenues of US$30.0 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2014. Its home page is www.accenture.com.

About Duke University

Younger than most other prestigious U.S. research universities, Duke University consistently ranks among the very best. Its graduate and professional schools – in business, divinity, engineering, the environment, law, medicine, nursing and public policy – are among the leaders in their fields. Duke’s home campus is situated on nearly 9,000 acres in Durham, N.C, a city of more than 200,000 people. Duke also is active internationally through the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School in Singapore, Duke Kunshan University in China and numerous research and education programs across the globe. More than 75 percent of Duke students pursue service-learning opportunities in Durham and around the world through DukeEngage and other programs that advance the university’s mission of “knowledge in service to society. The Information Initiative at Duke (IID) brings the entire university together to address the biggest societal challenges, as viewed through the lens of data, leading analysis methods and subject-matter expertise.”