De-Identified Data to Improve Health Equity, Research 

January 24, 2022 - Truveta and LexisNexis Risk Solutions announced a strategic partnership that will use de-identified data to improve the quality of all health research and enable new insights on health equity.  

According to the press release, “For the first time, daily clinical data from over 16% of all clinical care in the US will be linked together across health providers, and then integrated with 40% of all Medicare and Medicaid medical insurance claims, 70% of all commercial medical insurance claims, social determinants of health data on every adult American, and comprehensive mortality data in one data platform for medical research.” 

Truveta CEO Terry Myerson explained that partnering with LexisNexis Risk Solutions will significantly advance the organization’s vision of saving lives with data.  

“The COVID-19 pandemic put a spotlight on the health inequities in our nation. Gaining a better understanding of these inequities requires connecting clinical, socioeconomic, and insurance data at national scale, which we now have for the very first time. We look forward to partnering with researchers to discover insights on how to improve care for all of us,” Myerson said.  

CEO of LexisNexis Risk Solutions Health Care and President of Clinical Solutions at Elsevier Josh Schoeller, also expressed how the Truveta and LexisNexis partnership has the potential to address health inequalities and improve patient outcomes.  

“By combining our rich, de-identified data sets and new Patient Centric Token with the power of the Truveta Platform and the leadership of its member health systems, we can generate critical new insights that can truly have an impact in advancing patient care, clinical research, and health equity,” Schoeller said. 

It has been challenging for medical research to feature participants representative of the diversity in the US. Traditional research rarely has access to social determinants of health data or mortality data since 65 percent of people die outside the hospital.  

The Truveta Platform will address these issues by linking national clinical data, medical claims data, socioeconomic data, and mortality data using the LexisNexis Patient Centric Token, which de-identifies any dataset to ensure patient privacy. 

All Truveta health system members will have access to the integrated data for their medical research, population health studies, and health equity studies. 

Over the past couple of years, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought to light disparities in the healthcare system. For example, Black residents were 40 percent more likely to die from COVID in Michigan despite representing 14 percent of the state’s population. 

“This global pandemic has exposed already existing health disparities all across the country,” said Henry Ford Health System President and CEO Wright Lassiter III.  

“In my state of Michigan, we witnessed first-hand how communities of color were more likely to become infected and die from COVID-19 than their Caucasian counterparts. Truveta’s commitment to adding new data sources to help deliver insights on these inequities will help us toward the goal of ultimately eliminating health disparities.”  

COVID-19 is not the only place where health disparities regarding race and ethnicity are present.  

Although the US is one of the wealthiest nations in the world, maternal mortality rates have increased over the past six years, with Black women 3- to 4-times more likely to die because of childbirth than their white counterparts. Additionally, Native Americans and Alaskan Natives are more likely to have diabetes and Black populations face the highest death rates due to heart disease and stroke.