A few weeks ago TechCrunch met Terry Myerson and others from the Truveta team to discuss the company’s important product update. This publication has covered Truveta for some time, was curious about its intentions as a business with a strong public health component, and because Myerson was a longtime Microsoft reject from covering Windows for years and years.
Our interest was at the end of last year when Truveta raised $100 million, more than doubling its capital base. With nearly $200 million in backing, Truveta had a roster of people we knew and enough cash to carry anything he dreamed up.
Truveta’s concept is simple: work with different healthcare teams to collect anonymous patient data, aggregate the data and make it available to third parties so they can better see what’s going on in terms of patient outcomes. Public health and business applications are logically obvious, but what struck your author in talking with Myerson and his team was that this type of aggregated database of personal information did not already exist.
While there are some advantages to having a private-public health care system, centralized information does not seem to be one of them.
Back to the recent past: Truveta has expanded its list of health systems to 25 today, with a handful contributing to the data set by the end of 2021. When it comes to this kind of “healthcare analytics” job, more information is better, so the additional 11 providers are important.
But most importantly, the Truveta software product launched earlier this month. In the year In 2021, the company made a small splash when it launched a product focused on Covid. Truveta Studio is out now, and I got a tour.
What Truveta needs to handle is harmonizing data from different systems. This is something that is being tackled, which allows users to prepare interpretations in a computable format and collect and graph the results. The resulting wall of charts and graphs is fun to look at if you, like myself, are a big data visualization dork.
The service is not something that anyone interested in health care outcomes can use in the way that I did. But it can pay off for an expert – our guide explained that he spends weeks doing what he can do in minutes with Truveta in his previous research area. That amount of time savings is more than just ordering. If the service is user-friendly enough for professionals, the company may be on to something.
The question now is how many people – customers – want to use it. Truveta’s early goals — to structure the data, raise funds, build a team, and then produce a product for regular use — have been accomplished. Now we come to the endeavor business, Nas-Tac. And there are nine capital-sized forms that will be successful.
Because health care in the United States is so expensive, so opaque, and fraught with inequitable outcomes, people who are working to make it a little impossible to analyze are fine by me.
