Today, we are thrilled to announce Datavant Switchboard, our next step in helping companies safely connect data. This post will walk through the problem we’re tackling, how the Datavant Switchboard works, and how it is used across the healthcare ecosystem.
Background: The Challenge We’re Tackling
One of the most important opportunities of our time is to solve data fragmentation in healthcare.
As a relatively simple patient, my data is scattered across at least 100 institutions — various health systems I’ve visited, pharmacies where I’ve received vaccines and prescriptions, and insurers (not to mention genetic testing, wearables, and other health-relevant data…
3.5 years ago, I founded Datavant to connect the world’s health data to improve patient outcomes. Today, we are announcing the combination of Ciox and Datavant — our biggest step forward to become the neutral, trusted, ubiquitous infrastructure powering the exchange of data across healthcare. This post outlines our vision for the combination and the possibilities we hope to unlock for patients, researchers, and the industry.
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The challenge: the fragmentation of health data
Anyone who has ever visited a doctor knows that the health data ecosystem is broken. As a fairly simple patient, there are at least 100 institutions…
In a 2018 piece on why American medicine still runs on fax machines, Vox explained why the last decade of US government efforts to automate health data exchange had shown limited results. Earlier this month, new rules went into effect focused on making it easier for patients to access their health information and to exchange data across electronic health record systems and payers. Here, we explain why the fax machine continues to be such a formidable opponent.
Getting access to your health information isn’t easy
To understand the great staying power of the fax machine, consider the experience of a…
In the US, there are over 2,000 government health data sets at the federal, state, and local levels, including several of the largest surveillance databases (such as FDA’s Sentinel and the CDC’s surveillance infrastructure), one of the world’s largest claims databases (CMS data), and one of the largest electronic medical records datasets (VA data). Historically, government data has been created, stored, and analyzed in data silos. This fragmentation limits the utility of government data in answering critical public health questions. …
As part of the tragedy of COVID-19, tens of thousands of new cases are diagnosed in the US each day. In America, the data from these patients are captured across electronic medical records, medical claims, diagnostic tests, pharmacies, and mortality records.
Buried in this data are the answers to many of the questions vexing researchers: how the disease progresses, the impact of various co-morbidities, the safety and efficacy of various therapeutics, the genetic correlations of the disease, and the demographic disparities of the disease’s impact. …
As part of the tragedy of COVID-19, tens of thousands of new cases are diagnosed in the US each day. In America, the data from these patients are captured across electronic medical records, medical claims, diagnostic tests, pharmacies, and mortality records.
Buried in this data are the answers to many of the questions vexing researchers: how the disease progresses, the impact of various co-morbidities, the safety and efficacy of various therapeutics, the genetic correlations of the disease, and the demographic disparities of the disease’s impact. …
Last weekend, Datavant hosted a Pandemic Response Hackathon. We were thrilled by the energy around the event: we hosted more than 2,000 participants, 230 submissions, and 30 sponsoring organizations. We are excited to share some of the results, and to continue supporting the teams implementing their ideas.
Motivation: There are thousands of technology companies and engineers asking “how can I contribute to solving this crisis.” Meanwhile, there are important needs on a local, national, and global level that can be improved by technology: technology to improve public health information sharing, technology to keep our health workers safe, tools to better…
Author’s Note: I am a huge fan of middleware companies. Datavant is a middleware company connecting health data; my last startup, LiveRamp (now NYSE:RAMP), is the largest marketing middleware company; and I am an investor in a number of middleware companies across industries. The Visa/Plaid combination is a great example of what makes the middleware space so compelling, which I’ll walk through below.
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Visa’s acquisition of payments company Plaid for $5.3 billion this week has cast a spotlight on an often-ignored part of tech: middleware. …
Google’s acquisition of FitBit has resulted in many great stories recounting the ins and outs of the fitness tracker and smartphone wars, Google’s troubled attempts to get a toehold in the wearables space, and the pending showdown with the Apple Watch. Commentators highlight the personal health data that Google will have access to through Fitbit as a regulatory and commercial risk — with FitBit users concerned that Google will now use their sensitive health information to strengthen its advertising business.
With this framing, it is possible to miss the central point of the acquisition: Google’s acquisition of FitBit is all…
We are excited today to announce Datavant for Clinical Trials, a solution that makes it easy for sponsors, CROs, and regulators to confidently bridge traditional clinical trial data with real-world data. This morning, we announced a multi-year strategic partnership with Parexel to roll out this connectivity solution across all of their clinical trials, and we believe all clinical trials should be linked to real-world evidence 5 years from now.
The explosion of healthcare data and analytics over the last decade has made possible a new paradigm for clinical research that incorporates information from beyond the clinical trial context — although…
Travis May
Co-Founder & President of Datavant. Fmr CEO of LiveRamp.
