RTI International Invests in Navidence to Standardize AI-Driven Real-World Evidence

RTI International announced a strategic equity investment in Navidence as the organizations expand efforts to standardize how diseases, treatments, and outcomes are defined in real-world evidence (RWE) research.

The partnership combines RTI’s scientific research and healthcare evidence expertise with Navidence’s AI-native data and medical informatics platform, according to the announcement published by RTI on May 5.

RTI said the collaboration will focus on improving consistency and reproducibility across clinical research and healthcare studies, where inconsistent operational definitions often create challenges in comparing datasets, validating findings, and generating regulatory-grade evidence.

Navidence, founded in 2022, develops Computable Operational Definitions (CODefs), which are standardized human- and machine-readable definitions used to structure diseases, treatments, outcomes, inclusion criteria, and exclusion criteria across studies.

The company said defining these elements often requires weeks or months of work across epidemiology, informatics, statistics, and clinical teams before researchers can begin evaluating real-world data.

“Navidence was built to solve exactly that,” Aaron Kamauu, CEO at Navidence, said in the announcement. “RTI's investment validates our approach and accelerates our ability to bring transparent CODefs to research teams across the life sciences.”

The deal adds to a broader push across healthcare and pharmaceutical research to improve how AI systems process and interpret large-scale patient and clinical datasets. Companies across the sector are increasingly building infrastructure around standardized healthcare.

Previous partnerships involving AI-driven real-world evidence platforms, include Atropos Health’s collaboration with Arcadia for healthcare evidence access:

RTI Expands AI-Focused Healthcare Investments

RTI positioned the investment as part of a wider strategy focused on AI-enabled healthcare and evidence-generation technologies.

The organization previously announced investments and collaborations involving companies including Nested Knowledge, b.well Connected Health, and BEKhealth.

RTI said the Navidence partnership will also support commercialization and product development efforts tied to the platform.

“Navidence tackles a long-standing challenge in life sciences research by bringing clarity and standardization to how health data are defined and operationalized,” Asli Aras, Vice President and Head of Corporate Development at RTI International, said in the announcement.

The partnership comes as healthcare organizations face growing pressure to improve transparency and reproducibility in AI-assisted research and regulatory submissions.

Industry groups and researchers have increasingly focused on computable definitions and standardized operational frameworks as healthcare companies expand the use of AI across clinical research and evidence-generation systems.

There have been broader efforts to apply AI to healthcare data workflows, including Komodo Health’s launch of a generative AI assistant built using multiple large language models:

Standardization Becomes a Larger AI Challenge in Healthcare

The RTI-Navidence partnership focuses on a persistent issue in healthcare AI systems: inconsistent underlying definitions across datasets and studies.

Differences in how organizations define diseases, outcomes, and treatment criteria can affect patient matching, study reproducibility, evidence quality, and regulatory review processes.

Navidence said its CODef libraries are designed to help researchers move more efficiently from protocol development to real-world data evaluation while improving consistency and trust in study findings.

The organizations said the collaboration is intended to support more effective therapeutic interventions and improve evidence quality across the life sciences ecosystem.