Billionaire healthcare maverick Patrick Soon-Shiong has made public a formerly stealth clinical genomics platform he says will reduce the necessary time for tumor genome analysis from 8 weeks to just 47 seconds per patient.

The software-based genomics platform, called eviti, ties together an eight year effort by Soon-Shiong and has been in testing at more than 2,000 oncology practices during the past 12 months. Doctors using the software have seen the number of cases in which they make incorrect treatment recommendations drop from 32 percent to nearly zero.

“What we have now taken is, for the first time, the entire knowledge domain of our country, the entire delivery domain, and taken the entire payment domain and made them all work together,” says Soon-Shiong.

He says he and his team realized that if they joined cancer patients’ genomic information, the genomes of their cancers, as well as other clinical information, and analyzed it using supercomputers, doctors could achieve “wisdom” about individual patients’ cancers.

Soon-Shiong reported on the successful real-time analysis of the largest collection of tumor genomes in the United States—6,017 cancer genomes from 3,022 patients with 19 different cancer types—in the record time of 69 hours. To date, genomic analysis has taken an average of 8 to 10 weeks to complete.

The platform was created by NantHealth, a NantWorks company, in cooperation with the Chan Soon-Shiong Institute for Advanced Health. NantWorks is Soon-Shiong’s investment and technology venture.

Another Soon-Shiong project, the high-speed fiber network National LambdaRail, Doctors Helping Doctors, Blue Shield of California, Verizon, Bank of America, AT&T, Intel, and Hewlett-Packard, are also contributing to the project.

“How can you hope to treat cancer and have a better outcome when in fact at the time we as physicians treat cancer, we don’t have the right information at our fingertips?” said Soon-Shiong during a panel highlighting the project at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington D.C. on October 3. “It’s not that we’re bad physicians, but the system prevents us from having that right information,” he says.

“Health outcomes through medicine are derivative of an integrated art,” said Michael M. Crow, president of Arizona State University, during the panel. “Physicians at the bedside [practice] a complex art, driven by science, enabled by technology. In our country, we have wonderful performance at all three levels: art, science, and technology. But in the aggregate, we have immense challenges and diminishing returns.”

Crow called the new project the “single most significant technologically-based, complexity-embracing [way] to attack cancer using every possible tool,” and says it’s an integration of science, providers, and payers into a problem-solving platform. Soon-Shiong characterized the effort as a product of the sort of convergence that has transformed the consumer electronics and entertainment markets, and reveled in the emergence of a concrete platform from advances in sometimes-disparate fields.

“When I talk about convergence of mathematics, physics, science, and nano-optics to bring what we call advanced clinical decision support [to doctors],” he said, “it’s not some hypothetical nerd thing.”