The Big Data analytics company GNS Healthcare said it will work with the health insurer Aetna to use its modeling and analytics to better treat and prevent heart disease, stroke, and diabetes related to people with or at risk of developing metabolic syndrome. The agreement follows Aetna’s launch last month of its Aetna Innovation Labs, which seeks to leverage data and best practices to improve patient outcomes or demonstrate measurable value to customers and providers.

Under the agreement, GNS will analyze Aetna claims data and patient data to determine patients at risk of developing metabolic syndrome and to help determine the best treatments for each patient. A person is considered to have metabolic syndrome if they have any three of the following: large waist size, high blood pressure, high triglycerides, low HDL or so-called “good” cholesterol, and high blood sugar. An Aetna member with two of these conditions is considered “at risk.”

Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

“Reducing or eliminating the impact of metabolic syndrome can improve the health of millions of people and reduce health care costs. Aetna offers many programs to help members understand their risks and take steps to improve their health. Using data, we will now know very quickly which of these strategies works best for specific members,” says Michael Palmer, the head of the Aetna Innovation Labs. “We will also know where we can make improvements or create new programs to help our members.”

Tom Neyarapally, senior vice president of corporate development for GNS Healthcare says his company through its work with Aetna and others is trying to learn from and capitalize on valuable information that is too often ignored.

“What we’re trying to establish with this and a lot of the other work we are doing, is to take all of this available data that’s kind of been left on the cutting room floor, whether it’s from drug development or whether it’s from the treatment of patients day to day, and learn through our platform, which allows us to learn cause and effect relationships, to learn what’s actually working for whom, and to do that in a more personalized way,” he says. “We’re not looking to make conclusions at the population level, but to do that at the level of individuals.”

Aetna hopes that GNS will be able to identify causal relationships among hundreds of variables and how they evolve over time that lead to actionable insights into precursors of metabolic disease. If the work in metabolic syndrome is successful, Aetna expects to expand its work with GNS into other major disease areas.

The GNS agreement with Aetna comes on the heels of an agreement between GNS and the contract research organization Covance, which will use GNS’s modeling and analytics to predict the safety and efficacy of a drug candidate against different patient characteristics.