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There’s a vast trove of potentially valuable data salted throughout the U.S. healthcare system, but as yet nobody’s figured out how to connect the data silos to leverage the power of "Big Data" in a significant way.
Now a group including insurance leviathan UnitedHealth and 3 healthcare providers are betting that sharing is the key to unlocking the power of Big Data for the medical device industry.
The venture, SharedClarity, brings together UnitedHealthcare, Baylor Health Care System, Dignity Health and Advocate Health Care. On the provider side, SharedClarity represents about 100,000 healthcare workers who care for roughly 7 million patients per year. On the insurer side, UnitedHealthcare has wide-reaching records on its 40 million members, including procedures they’ve undergone, lab results, physical therapy and more.
"The real opportunity with SharedClarity is the unique data that can be pulled together that hasn’t been pulled together before," ShareClarity president Mark West tells MassDevice.com.
"The 1 bit of information [insurers] don’t have is they don’t understand what device is actually put into the patient, so that’s kind of a blind spot.," West says.
And although healthcare providers have detailed records on procedures and the devices used during them, their blind spot is that "they don’t understand what happens to that patient before or after they leave the building."
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In this podcast interview, West tells us about SharedClarity’s independent clinical study initiative, its plans to leverage "collaborative contracting" to negotiate medical device pricing for its members and how sharing Big Data can help save healthcare dollars while improving patient outcomes.
