At Datavant we are relentless about taking big swings at hard problems in healthcare. We were the first to tokenize clinical trials and now have tokenized more than 70 of them. We are digitizing the release of information for healthcare providers and have onboarded 90 health system sites.
Recently our team was approached with a novel healthcare challenge, connecting employee health data to improve employee benefits and health outcomes.
Most of us don’t tend to think of employers as healthcare providers or payers but often they are. Many employers take on the full risk of paying for employees’ medical and drug costs and often employers are looking for ways to (1) reduce costs while (2) ensuring their employees have the right benefit offerings to stay healthy. Employers want and need to remain competitive by offering the best programs available.
Employee Health: Fragmented health data makes it impossible to measure
A large U.S. employer came to us spending hundreds of millions of dollars on health benefits and employee wellness programs. They could not say which were used, whether their employees’ health improved, and whether they were cost-effective.
They paid for many wellness apps and digital health programs for diet, exercise, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, sleep, mental health, and more. These feel like simple questions to answer. The problem is that these data sets are kept by dozens of different organizations that don’t have permission to share that data.
We can better understand employee health needs and the impact of health programs using privacy-compliant linkage of employee medical and drug benefit data to health apps and wellness program data.
Additionally, connecting data like social determinants adds information like ethnicity, home ownership, access to transportation and family composition which can impact health.
Lastly, historical insurance claims reveal a full medical history so you can clearly understand employee health needs while protecting each employee’s privacy. Until now, there hasn’t been an organization that could connect all this data in a privacy-compliant way.
Datavant Connects Employee Health Data:
The client sought Datavant out because we are the largest connector of health data in the U.S. More than 500 real-world data companies from health apps to insurers, electronic health record companies, lab companies, groups with social determinant data, grocery purchases and dozens of other data types de-identify and link their data to other partners with our technology.
This employer will use Datavant to de-identify their employee insurance claims and all their wellness vendor program data and link it all together. It will be the first time they will be able to see which employees are using these programs and whether they help improve their health.
The Start of a Trend:
As the leader of our Emerging Business division, I love opportunities to make new markets and Employee Health and Wellness Benefits is going to be a big one.
We can help employee benefits consultants, large employers, analytics companies, wellness apps and large benefits brokers who all share the goal of improving employee health.
Connecting employee health and wellness data is going to change the paradigm of how benefits are chosen and measured. I am thrilled to go on this journey and to see Datavant help our clients usher in the next generation of employee health and wellness and help improve health outcomes for employees and their families.