Truveta, a Seattle area startup, released an early version of its health data platform and signed health provider system agreements with three new partners. Truveta announced on Tuesday that the company had also raised nearly $200 million.
This new cash is part of the partnership to build truveta platform on the technology giant azure cloud platform, following the round a financing of US $95 million raised from its medical system members in July and an undisclosed investment disclosed by Microsoft in September.
Terry Myerson, CEO of truveta. (truvita photo)
Truveta was born in 2020. Its ambitious vision is to aggregate data across multiple health care systems and provide medical insights.
Terry Myerson, CEO of the company, said in an interview with geekwire that the company “was born from the experience of pandemic. We don’t have the necessary data to understand how to take care of our patients and what treatments work well.”. Myerson was a former Microsoft executive who led the company’s windows and equipment department. He left in 2018 after 21 years at the technology giant.
Michael Simonov, director of clinical information at Michael Simonov, said that in the early days of influenza pandemic, “clinicians are really grasping the straw for patient data. What are the different medical diagnoses for patients in hospital?” he was a practicing doctor of the Connecticut Veterans Administration and treated COVID-19 -19 patients. He is also a lecturer in health informatics at Yale University.
The company currently has more than 100 employees and has signed 20 medical system members with new partners. It can access more than 35 million personal data, accounting for 16% of U.S. health care.
Michael Simonov, director of clinical informatics, truvita. (truvita photo)
The new medical systems include Ochsner health in Louisiana, St. Luke medical system in Kansas and unitypoint health in West Des Moines, Iowa.
The company has begun to identify and summarize medical data, first focusing on COVID-19 -19. In an interview with geekwire and a video, Myerson shows a dashboard showing individuals in the partner medical system.
For example, these data provide information about patients who have been vaccinated with COVID-19 -19, who have a breakthrough infection. For each question, the system will only provide data for patients whose data has been de identified and ready for analysis.
The company released an early analysis of about 1 million 700 thousand fully vaccinated patients, showing that patients with certain chronic diseases were more likely to be hospitalized after the breakthrough of COVID-19 -19 than the general population. Consistent with other studies, people with diabetes, chronic lung disease or chronic kidney disease are almost two times more likely to be hospitalized.
“We have the ability to very transparently understand the definition of each group and how each parameter in that group is defined,” Myerson said, adding that data such as age, race and other conditions are readily available.
Early analysis has limitations. For example, it does not specify whether the individual is hospitalized exclusively because of COVID-19 19. But the goal of researchers is to study the data more deeply in the future and expand to new health care issues.
“There will be more questions, more answers and iterations, only continuous improvement,” Myerson said.
The new findings demonstrate the potential power of truveta’s large data set.
The data can be used by health researchers in the company’s cooperative institutions. These include Providence, the largest medical system in Washington state. Providence participated in the formation of the company and cultivated more and more start-ups, such as xealth, a digital health service company.
The company also welcomes external researchers to contact truveta about accessing the truveta platform. Health data are needed by medical providers, pharmaceutical companies and academic researchers developing new tools and treatments. Linking treatment to outcomes and potential health can enable researchers to better understand the effectiveness of health interventions.