Seattle health-data startup Truveta raises $95M

Seattle-based Truveta, a healthcare data services startup supported by 17 major healthcare systems in the United States, announced Tuesday that it has raised $ 95 million in a private donation.

The company is developing a platform that aggregates anonymized data from tens of millions of patients in 40 states and makes it available to healthcare providers, researchers and pharmaceutical companies.

The owners’ health systems, including Providence-affiliated Swedish Health Services and Virginia Mason Franciscan Health, both based in Washington state, have agreed to share much of their patient data with the platform. Three new health systems have joined the partnership: MedStar Health, which mainly covers Washington, DC, Virginia and Maryland, and Texas Health Resources and Baylor Scott & White Health, which mainly covers Texas.

The network now includes health systems that provide more than 15% of all patient care in the United States, the company said. All 17 are “roughly” the same investors, with no external investors, said Truveta.

“We felt that 15% of nursing in the US would really allow us to ask and answer questions we had never been able to ask before,” said Terry Myerson, CEO of Truveta, former Windows chief executive at Microsoft .

Truveta says nearly 40% of Puget Sound patients will be included in the platform’s records.

The money will mainly be invested in the development of the platform’s cloud technology and in staffing. Truveta currently employs around 100 people, three quarters of them in Seattle, and plans to double the workforce by the end of 2022.

“No system can do what we will do together by using our data to improve every aspect of healthcare,” said Barclay E. Berdan, CEO of Texas Health Resources, in a statement from Truveta.

TA McCann, managing director of Pioneer Square Labs, a Seattle-based venture capital firm not involved in Truveta’s work, said it “could be a bit of a snowball rolling down the hill”. He said other health systems may feel “left out” if they don’t join the initiative because Truveta has led key thought leaders not only to invest in the platform but also to become customers.

On the other hand, “With a lot of capital, a lot of people usually come,” he said. The involvement of so many health systems could also mean that each has its own priorities, such as specific disease areas. It can “get slower before it gets faster,” he said.

Truveta intends to provide an introductory version of the platform for early adopters by the end of 2021.

Truveta grew out of an idea Providence had in 2018 to build a platform that could help find “valuable needles from insights buried in a haystack of data” that the healthcare system managed but couldn’t find, according to a blog post by Myerson, who joined the company in 2020.

The pandemic accelerated the company’s mission to “save lives with data”. For example, it hopes to help pharmaceutical companies better assess drug safety or help healthcare providers better determine forms of treatment based on the unique medical information it collects.

Truveta has said from the start that patient privacy is a top concern and their data is anonymized through a process called “anonymization”.

“It’s not just about taking away your name, your social security number [and] Birthday, ”said Myerson. He said Truveta will use outside auditors to keep the data secure and anonymized, and use other industry-standard privacy techniques.

Adam Tanner, author of “Our Bodies, Our Data: How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records,” said any company handling medical information should consider patient consent. We should “have a say in whether or not intimate medical information about us is sold commercially,” he said.

Truveta said the patient’s consent for the research will be given by his or her members of the health care provider in accordance with federal law restricting the publication of medical information.

The company also aims to address health equity through its data collection and aggregation and to ensure that “representation across geography, race, ethnicity, gender, language and other socio-economic dimensions” is assured.

New members MedStar, Texas Health and Baylor bring significant data on the large black and Hispanic populations in their service areas that add transparency and insight, Myerson said.

Many health systems today still fail to collect meaningful information about the social determinants of health, including food security, living conditions and income stability, said Tanjala Purnell, associate director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity. Even when they do, different health systems rarely collect them in the same way, she said. This is one of the challenges in aggregating health information. “The data can only talk to what we collect.”

Truveta hopes to add even more health systems in the future. However, the ultimate goal is to be able to add additional members without them having to invest to gain access to the shared records, Myerson said.

Myerson said the company aims to “be representative of all of the diversity and wealth of our country – if not the world – and that requires more members”.