Seattle-area startup Truveta has released an early version of its health data platform and signed up three new partners to its system of health providers. Truveta’s total funding raised has also reached close to $200 million, the company announced Tuesday.
The fresh cash follows a $95 million Series A round raised in July from its healthcare system members, and an undisclosed investment from Microsoft revealed in September as part of a partnership to build Truveta’s platform on the tech giant’s Azure cloud platform.
Truveta emerged in 2020 with an ambitious vision: to aggregate data across multiple healthcare systems to provide medical insights.
The company “was born out of the experience in the pandemic that we do not have the data we needed to know how to take care of our patients, to know which therapeutics worked well,” CEO Terry Myerson said in an interview with GeekWire. Myerson is a former Microsoft executive who led the company’s Windows and Devices Group before departing in 2018 after a 21-year career at the tech giant.
Early in the pandemic, “clinicians were really grasping at straws for data about patients. What are different medical diagnoses that land people in the hospital?” said Michael Simonov, director of clinical informatics at Truveta who has treated COVID-19 patients as a practicing physician for the Veteran’s Administration in Connecticut. He is also a health informatics lecturer at Yale University.
The company now has more than 100 employees and with the new partners has signed up 20 healthcare system members. It has access to data for more than 35 million individuals, representing 16% of U.S. healthcare in the U.S.
The new healthcare systems are Ochsner Health in Louisiana, Saint Luke’s Health System in Kansas, and West Des Moines, Iowa-based UnityPoint Health.
The company has begun to de-identify and aggregate healthcare data, with a focus first on COVID-19. In an interview with GeekWire and in a video, Myerson showcased a dashboard drawing from individuals within its partner healthcare systems.
For example, the data provides information on patients who are vaccinated for COVID-19 that have breakthrough infections. For each question, the system will provide data only on patients whose data have been de-identified and are ready for analysis.
The company released an early analysis of about 1.7 million fully-vaccinated patients, showing that patients with certain chronic conditions are more likely to be hospitalized after a breakthrough COVID-19 diagnosis than the general population. People with diabetes, chronic lung disease or chronic kidney disease were nearly twice as likely to be hospitalized, consistent with findings from other studies.
“We have the ability to be very transparent about how every population was defined, and how each parameter within that population was defined,” said Myerson, adding that data such as age, ethnicity, and other conditions is readily available.
The early analysis has limitations. For instance, it does not specify whether individuals were hospitalized specifically for COVID-19. But the researchers aim to dive deeper into the data in the future and expand to new healthcare questions.
“There’s going to be more questions and more answers and iteration, and just continuous improvement,” said Myerson.
The new findings showcase the potential power of Truveta’s large dataset.
The data is available to health researchers within the company’s partner institutions. These include Providence, the largest health system based in Washington state. Providence was involved in forming the company and has fostered a growing collection of startups, such as digital health services company Xealth.
Outside researchers are welcome to contact Truveta about access to its platform as well, said the company. Health data is in demand by medical providers, as well as drug companies and academic researchers developing new tools and treatments. Linking treatments with outcomes and underlying health can enable researchers to better understand the effectiveness of health interventions.
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