Optum DAPI: Assessing the connections between infant health and pregnancy

John D. Seeger: At Optum Epidemiology, we realized there was need for information about the safety of medications during pregnancy.

And so we developed a platform that we call the Dynamic Assessment of Pregnancies and Infants, and this allows us to look at a broad range of pregnancy-related questions.

The platform that we've built enables us to link medications that the mother took with outcomes that the infant has.

What makes this unique at Optum is the depth of the data.

This platform is constructed of claims data as well as electronic health record data, and also the combination of those two.

And that allows us to answer questions about exposures, outcomes or covariates that we may not be able to assess in any particular data source alone.

The historical data in this platform is over 800,000 pregnancies and it grows by 80,000 pregnancies every year.

This tool is really powerful in that it's continually growing, and the more it grows the more we learn about the effects of medication during pregnancy.

It's not enough to just have access to big data.

At Optum Epidemiology, we have an unparalleled combination of expertise and data access that enable us to provide really powerful solutions for our clients.