Truveta, a Seattle-based health care startup led by former Microsoft executive Terry Myerson, unveiled its anonymous clinical care data platform Tuesday, signaling plans to expand the database to hospitals and patients.
Myerson and others touted the platform's broad applications, ranging from life science companies finding and evaluating tools and cures, to health systems looking to improve patient care with real-time data.
The Covid-19 pandemic inspired 14 health systems, led by Providence, to launch Truveta earlier this year in the hopes of evaluating the virus and possible treatments.
"This is the national data platform that we've all been looking for during this pandemic," Myerson said. "We want to put this data to ethical use. We want to save lives with data, that's why we built it. There's a lot of purpose behind this company and we want to work with more people that are trying to save lives."
Leading up to Tuesday's announcement, Truveta has raised nearly $200 million and landed six new regional health system partners, most recently adding Louisiana's Ochsner Health, Saint Luke's Health in Missouri and UnityPoint Health in Iowa. That brings its total to 20 heath systems, reflecting 16% of all clinical care across the country.
“By joining Truveta, Saint Luke’s can contribute data for the global good of humanity and discover new insights that will inform critical public health decisions and provide information that will help us better care for our patients,” Dr. Melinda L. Estes, president and CEO of Saint Luke’s Health System said.
The platform works by taking clinical data daily from all of Truveta's health partners, de-identifying it and sorting it into a common format through artificial intelligence and machine learning. Once it's in the platform, researchers can sort through various categories of treatments, illnesses and demographics to build dashboards and draw insights.
"This can apply anywhere," Dr. Michael Simonov, Truveta's director of informatics, said. "There really isn't a clinical domain that I'm not excited to study here."
One of the first applications for Truveta's platform has been studying Covid-19 vaccination data. Early observations include 9% to 15% of breakthrough cases leading to hospitalization, with Johnson & Johnson recipients having the highest hospitalization rate, as well as fewer than 1% of people vaccinated experiencing adverse effects.
“In just under two weeks, our team was able to ask and answer important medical questions using one of the largest comprehensive real-time datasets of fully vaccinated Americans,” Dr. Nick Stucky, director of clinical research at Truveta, said in a news release.
