NextUp: The Philly Company Uncovering Smarter Healthcare Data Insights
HealthVerity has the largest healthcare data ecosystem in the U.S. And now it's partnering with the FDA in the fight against COVID-19.
Andrew Kress and Andrew Goldberg are the co-founders of HealthVerity. / Courtesy
“NextUp” is a weekly NextHealth PHL feature that highlights the local leaders, organizations and research shaping the Greater Philadelphia region’s life sciences ecosystem. Email qmuse@phillymag.com with pitches for NextUp.
Who: Andrew Kress and Andrew Goldberg recognized a challenge in the healthcare industry; for too long healthcare data had been siloed and fragmented, limiting an accurate view of the patient journey. They knew the industry would need a series of digital tools to ensure healthcare data could be shared in a way that would encourage innovation while maintaining patient privacy. To meet this challenge, Kress and Goldberg founded HealthVerity in 2014. The company set out on a mission to build the next generation of technologies that would enable connectivity, transparency and privacy management for healthcare and consumer data.
What: Patient care very rarely occurs in one place. Instead, a patient’s care journey typically includes multiple changes between insurers and providers, leaving behind a trail of incomplete records. HealthVerity has developed cloud-based software that can aggregate and provide companies with de-identified healthcare data from multiple sources. Companies can then use that data to create a more accurate picture of a patient’s healthcare journey, and perhaps, predict a patient’s future needs based on social determinants of health.
When: In April 2019, HealthVerity raised $25 million in a Series C round of funding. Then, in January 2020, the company scooped up more space for its Philadelphia headquarters at 1818 Market St. and announced plans to add 50 employees by the end of 2020, bringing its total workforce to roughly 150 employees. In March 2020, HealthVerity expanded its healthcare data ecosystem to include “the most comprehensive set of closed pharmacy and medical payer data available in the market.” With that addition, the company now claims it has the largest healthcare data ecosystem in the United States. To date, the company has raised over $42 million.
What it means: HealthVerity’s technologies and expansive data network could contribute to many improvements in healthcare from optimizing clinical trials and developing informative patient journey maps to improving the cost of care and models for cost-effectiveness.
Why it matters now: This month, HealthVerity signed a multi-year research collaboration agreement with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to evaluate a range of different real-world datasets for their potential to inform the FDA’s response to COVID-19. “The urgency of COVID-19 has elevated the need for immediate strategic industry partnerships,” FDA principal deputy commissioner Amy Abernethy said in a statement. “The more detail we can obtain around how COVID-19 affects different patient populations, the faster a potential treatment for coronavirus can become a reality. Developing the expertise needed to apply diverse, real-world datasets to these issues is an essential step in this direction.” HealthVerity will help the FDA identify and evaluate data sources that will enable researchers to summarize treatment patterns among COVID-19 patients, understand how the virus has evolved and spread, improve the design and prioritization of clinical trials, and develop generalizable knowledge regarding patients who have been tested for COVID-19 and those at risk of developing the disease.
