Cardinal Health logoCardinal Health (NYSE:CAH) announced that it entered into a strategic collaboration with Palantir Technologies (NYSE:PLTR).

The partnership pairs the companies to design a solution to give health systems and hospitals dynamic purchase decision insights. These insights help them quickly improve their bottom line.

Dublin, Ohio-based Cardinal Health plans to integrate this solution into Foundry, Palantir’s operating system. The companies intend to deploy AI and machine learning to bring together diagnosis and clinical data with real-time customer purchasing and consumption data for pharmaceutical products. They also expect to use future iterations to inform purchasing decisions for therapeutic utilization, reimbursement insights and predictive drug inventory needs.

According to a news release, the solution helps to improve the connection between health system purchasing and supply chain support.

“We are taking a proactive role in pharmaceutical decision support to provide support to our customers as they continue to manage rising drug expenses, supply chain volatility and continued drug shortages,” said Peter J. Siavelis, SVP and GM of Health System and Provider Distribution & Services at Cardinal Health. “By utilizing Palantir’s platform, we are working to reshape the pharmaceutical supply chain with innovative processes, products and solutions to improve access to critical medications and streamline pharmacy inventory management.”

Cardinal Health wants to address current health system struggles

According to the company, health systems currently struggle to right-size pharmacy inventory with evolving payer formulary updates. This comes as a result of increases in drug expenses thanks to the growth of specialty therapies and biosimilars.

The data-driven solution developed through this partnership can help mitigate some of these challenges, Cardinal Health said. It analyzes real-time clinical and purchasing data to create a clinically integrated supply chain for pharmaceuticals.

“Our partnership with Cardinal Health further shows our commitment to improve patient outcomes across the full healthcare value chain and Palantir’s ability to create resilience within the complex challenges of supply chain uncertainty,” said Palantir chief operating officer Shyam Sankar.  “We’re excited to work with Cardinal Health to achieve their mission-critical objective of expanding access to the medications patients need, by utilizing the software built to handle the toughest problems.”