A total of US $ 100 million was raised in two years.
In the information age, medical innovation is more dependent on data. But how can data be properly passed to R & D institutions? How to guarantee people’s privacy? This is a common concern of the industry.
“Verana Health” is an early entry into the industry and was founded in the United States two years ago. The company has raised $ 100 million in funding from Google Ventures, Bain Capital, Castin Capital and Define Ventures, with life sciences investor Brook Byers as chairman of the company’s board of directors.
Verana Health ’s approach is to work with the Medical Association to optimize and integrate medical clinical databases based on a regulatory-grade data platform. The platform gives doctors the power to analyze this real-world data, thereby accelerating medical research.
Actually, this idea started almost 20 years ago, when the Specialist Medical Association began to set up clinical data sets to share information among doctors and standardize reporting in accordance with federal government requirements.
Specifically, it provides two types of products: Verana Practice Insights, which provides a comprehensive view of practice trends across the United States, and also provides an “experiment link” service that allows doctors to find patients in their practice that may be suitable for clinical trials Axon registration system, which tracks the efficacy of multiple sclerosis, migraine, epilepsy and other diseases, and provides value to the healthcare ecosystem.
At present, Verana has signed a data collection agreement with the American Academy of Ophthalmology to establish a large database of desensitized patients, which can be used for drug development, population health analysis, and medical research. Although Verana currently only covers ophthalmology and neurological diseases, it plans to expand into other therapeutic areas next year, while integrating imaging and genomics data sources into its database.
Although Verana Health has always emphasized removing patient identity information and desensitizing data processing, in fact, this approach is not so safe when it comes to health-sensitive information.
For example, in June 2019, the University of Chicago Medical Center and Google were accused of violating HIPAA regulations, and the two parties shared “improperly identified” cases. Google used these massive cases for data analysis.
Coincidentally, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services also warns that desensitization data may still be associated with corresponding patients. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that a new type of machine learning function developed by Google and other companies can re-identify desensitized patient data and map the desensitized data back to the patient’s real name.
Data privacy is a common problem faced by the industry, and players still look cramped.