Last year, a mysterious big data healthcare company came on the scene with a $7.1 million fundraise. Back then, HealthVerity cofounder and CEO Andrew Kress was sparing with the details of a business designed to support pharma companies, payers and providers. One year later the health IT business has closed a $10 million Series B round and Kress was comfortable enough to move beyond the company press release and offer some details about the company’s relatively new Marketplace in a phone interview.
Flare Capital Partners and Greycroft Partners led the Series B round with participation from Foresite Capital and additional strategic healthcare investors, the release said.
So a little about the Marketplace. As the press release describes it, the marketplace has linkable HIPAA-compliant, de-identified healthcare data on more than 300 million individuals in the U.S. from more than 30 national healthcare data suppliers. That means the marketplace includes data from medical claims, prescription claims, lab results, electronic medical records and other data sources. The company’s platform includes powerful self-service tools that enable users to build custom datasets by understanding and selecting relevant data sources, identifying counts of target patients and exploring…
Kress observed that the irony of the current practice of healthcare data research is that vendors end up with “incredible siloes of data” because the datasets have been de-identified differently.
He explained that every dataset the company brings into its marketplace or ecosystem, as he often refers to it, is completely interoperable because the data is converted with “advanced privacy software”. That conversion process keeps the data de-identified but allows it to be used in the context of other data in HealthVerity’s marketplace, providing “longitudinality” across multiple sources and deeper insights.
One of the features of the marketplace that Kress is excited about is the potential for researchers and think tanks to do deeper dives on data that could, for example. provide a better understanding of disease progression and a drug’s impact through the course of a disease.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
“When you put data together that has never been put together before you will learn things you never knew before,” Kress said.
In addition to pharma, healthcare provider and payer customers, Kress noted that financial services and economics-oriented think tanks that are very interested in the cost of care or trends in the cost of care would find value in the marketplace.
“We are only trying to make data accessible and licensable. We don’t weigh in on answers; we just want to make sure questions are answered in a permissible way.“
Photo: goir, Getty Images
