, a San Francisco-based healthcare modeling company, and the 

announced that the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has contracted with Archimedes to provide HHS agencies with direct access to the 

. The Archimedes Model, developed initially with support from Kaiser Permanente, is an advanced mathematical modeling tool available to answer complex questions on health and health care. Under this contract, HHS will make a new web-based interface called the Archimedes Healthcare Simulator (ARCHeS) available to its agencies, including the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the National Heart, Lung & Blood Institute and the Food & Drug Administration. For clinical trials, the modeling tool will users to run clinically realistic virtual trials on any population and to help with comparative effectiveness research, and clinical trial design and portfolio management.