Unlocking the Opportunities Hidden in Healthcare Data

By now, everyone’s heard about the explosion of data in healthcare, but few realize just how massive this space has become. As the world’s gone digital, with every patient visit logged into an EHR, every pharmacy prescription tagged in a database, every morning run logged on a smartwatch or fitness app, healthcare-related data now accounts for roughly 30% of the world’s total data volume. In fact, the volume is so intense that we’ve even started using a new word to quantify it: exabyte. Last year, over 2,000 exabytes of healthcare data were generated. For perspective, you could record every word ever spoken since the beginning of time using just five exabytes of data.

While that staggering volume is often cited as a catalyst to a new revolution in healthcare – one in which it will be possible to quickly identify gaps in care, develop personalized medicine on a massive scale, and better understand disease progression – it also presents a number of challenges. Chief among those is the ability to cut through the noise and interrogate that data effectively. 

The legacy approach – aggregating claims in a spreadsheet or using an insurance claims database – treats data as static and leaves stakeholders with information that is out of date before they can even do anything with it. Worse, the old-school approach cannot possibly include the vast amount of information that’s now available to link the many pieces of a single patient’s healthcare experience. 

Without those linkages, healthcare and Life Sciences organizations are missing the most valuable piece of the healthcare puzzle: the patterns and insights that will allow us to address unmet patient needs and improve health outcomes. Making decisions based on outdated, incomplete, or unvetted information is bad for business in any industry; and in healthcare specifically, can impact patient outcomes for the worse. 

Instead, the industry needs a data asset that captures the vast volume of information that’s being created every day, pulling from all different payer types, hospital records, lab insights, and more, to provide real insight into the breadth and diversity of millions of de-identified patients. To really address the challenges we are facing, we need that asset to gather and process big data into a format that makes it accessible, informative, and actionable. 

That’s why we built the Healthcare Map™. The foundation of Komodo Health’s enterprise technology platform, our Healthcare Map is the industry’s largest and most complete database of de-identified, real-world patient data. It uses artificial intelligence and advanced data analytics to track the individual encounters with the healthcare system for more than 325 million patients. Drawing data from both providers and payers, it is the only database of its kind to provide a longitudinal view of the entire patient journey, whether care was delivered in-network, out-of-network, through a specialist, urgent care center, or retail clinic.

Unlike legacy claims databases, which have always been burdened by long lag times and inherent sampling biases, the Healthcare Map delivers near-real-time engagement with the healthcare system across a nationally representative sample of patients from all demographic and socioeconomic groups. The flexible, cloud-based architecture of the Healthcare Map also allows Komodo Health clients and partners to build highly customized analytics that integrate their own proprietary, first-party data into the Map for richer insights.

And trailblazers in the industry are already taking advantage of our approach. For instance, one partner is using the Healthcare Map to pinpoint the patients who are struggling to access breakthrough CAR-T therapies and, in turn, developing physician engagement strategies to close those gaps. Another has leveraged our software to identify patients with a hyper-rare disease called paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria, investigate the symptom patterns of those patients, and prepare physicians to better identify these needles in the haystack to get them onto therapy much earlier. 

We are at a pivotal moment in healthcare, where big data could be our best tool in tackling the complex challenges we face. But only with the foundational insights from high-fidelity, timely, operative, and flexible data can we prepare ourselves to answer the toughest questions facing healthcare today – and tomorrow. 

Watch our new video explaining how the Healthcare Map works and what sets it apart from the healthcare data sources of yesterday.