Tuva Health, an open-source healthcare data platform, launched out of stealth on Thursday with $5 million in seed funding, which will support the startup’s growth.
New York City-based Tuva Health works with payers, providers and pharmaceutical companies to help them convert their claims and EHR datasets into data tables ready for analysis by providing normalization, data quality testing and enrichment. Its open-source platform integrates with its customers’ data systems and gives them control over their data infrastructure. Created by a community of 1,500 healthcare data professionals, Tuva Health’s platform helps the healthcare industry adopt consistent and accurate analytics, with ongoing improvements made by the community that are openly shared and applied to all datasets. Its customers include payer Oscar Health and women’s health company Herself Health.
Mainly, Tuva Health is focused on cleaning messy data.
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“There’s no universal standard for coding and organizing healthcare data, which makes it difficult to use,” said Aaron Neiderhiser, CEO and co-founder of Tuva Health, in an email. “For example, if a health system wanted to know how many patients were given Tylenol on a specific day, it would be very challenging to get an accurate answer using raw data since it is disorganized and often stored in different formats. Tuva Health solves this problem by ingesting the raw data, normalizing it, and transforming it into a standardized format conducive to actionable insights.”
The seed round was led by Virtue and included participation from Box Group and Y Combinator, as well as health tech angel investors.
“Healthcare organizations have lacked a flexible, scalable, and transparent analytics solution to enhance patient outcomes and improve operational efficiency,” said Sean Doolan, founder and managing partner of Virtue, in a statement. “Tuva Health’s model addresses this need, providing a comprehensive solution that meets the growing demand for innovation in healthcare. By leveraging an open-source and community-centric approach, the company is poised to lead the transformation of the healthcare analytics industry, enabling stakeholders and partners to achieve greater efficiency and improved outcomes in a transparent, trusted manner.”
With the financing, Tuva Health will streamline product development for its platform, advance research and development and seek additional partnerships with health systems and pharmaceutical companies, Neiderhiser said.
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Tuva Health’s launch comes as the healthcare industry has made strides in data access, but many organizations are still struggling to gain actionable insights from their data.
“This raw data is useless for data analysis unless it has been transformed (i.e. normalized and enriched),” Neiderhiser declared. “We need to continue the progress on data interoperability while accelerating focus on data transformation if we’re going to realize the full potential of healthcare data to drive improvements in care delivery and patient outcomes.”
Looking ahead, the company is focused on growing adoption of its open-source platform and community while building out its commercial business, Neiderhiser added.
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