Accenture, Deloitte Health Care Data Plays

In recent weeks, Accenture and Deloitte — two of health care's largest professional services firms — announced partnership agreements designed to speed drug development and innovations in precision medicine.

Accenture is working with Merck and Amazon Web Services to build a cloud-based informatics platform for life-sciences collaborators. The platform will make it easier for health care innovators to aggregate, access and analyze data from multiple applications. It will also help organizations improve productivity, efficiency and innovations in the early stages of drug development, the companies reported. Merck will be the first pharmaceutical company to use the platform.

Meanwhile, Deloitte and Vineti announced that they will work together to build a cloud-based, precision-medicine platform. The companies will integrate and scale their respective supply-chain and patient-engagement platforms to make it easier to access next-generation cellular therapies.

Elsewhere, the health care venture formed by Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase has hired Monitor Group, a Boston-based global consulting firm, to help develop its strategy for lowering health care spending by improving the care of chronically ill patients. The consulting giant could help the firms bring down long-term health care costs for their employees by identifying the interventions most likely to get buy-in from the companies' chronically ill workers, and by evaluating the most promising technology solutions.