In a recent webinar, the HealthVerity team including Alexa Woodward, Ph.D., Director of Strategic Accounts, and Veronica Ansolabehere, Senior Director of Data Product Management at HealthVerity walked through how taXonomy Pathways is shaping the way researchers study the patient journey by connecting closed claims with labs and EHR including physician notes.
Veronica Ansolabehere began by describing the foundation that makes it all possible, the proprietary resolution of patient identity. “We assign a unique but anonymous identifier, what we call an HVID, for individuals regardless of location within our ecosystem,” she explained. “That identifier is persistent across all suppliers and sources”. This identity layer, combined with strict privacy certification and data governance, ensures that “the totality of the dataset remains de-identified, linked, and privacy compliant”. With more than 85 interoperable data sources spanning claims, EHR, labs, chargemaster and consumer data, the HealthVerity Marketplace is “the largest and most diverse in the marketplace today."
“Our aim is to provide not only longitudinality, depth, and nuance, but to help you maximize the utility of this data…and we think taXonomy Pathways is the answer."
- Alexa Woodward, Ph.D., Director of Strategic Accounts
Legacy tokenizers fall short vs. the Marketplace model
Veronica contrasted this marketplace model with legacy data aggregators and tokenizers. While aggregators are “easy for consumers,” she said, “these data are siloed,” and tokenizers “helped unsilo the data” but required extensive work to “source, contract, privacy certify and wrangle all the sources into one usable dataset.” The HealthVerity Marketplace “goes above and beyond the aggregator and tokenizer models” to deliver both transparency and trust for data suppliers and users. After outlining the taXonomy closed claims model we introduced taXonomy Pathways as the next evolution. “By definition, pathways connect one place to another,” she said. “We chose this name because we’re literally connecting one data type to another within our marketplace to provide your one-stop-shop RWD solution for breadth and depth.”
“By definition, taXonomy Pathways connect one place to another, and we chose this name because we’re connecting one data type to another within HealthVerity Marketplace to provide your one-stop-shop RWD solution for breadth and depth. We view the combination of taXonomy and clinical data types in HealthVerity Marketplace as the best option for comprehensive and longitudinal patient journeys.”
- Veronica Ansolabehere, Senior Director of Data Product Management at HealthVerity
taXonomy Pathways expands beyond closed claims
taXonomy Pathways is anchored by, "the largest source of closed-payer claims available, spanning more than 350 million patients and 300 payers with over nine years of adjudicated history”. On top of that, it integrates EHR, labs and more than “3.6 billion de-identified clinical notes across 340 million encounters for 43 million patients” she adds.
Dr. Woodward described taXonomy Pathways using a familiar metaphor: “We previewed pathways and introduced this kind of metaphor of layers on Google Maps with notes being the street view,” she said. “Today, I’m going to actually zoom back out and talk through the value of each one of these layers of data”.
Comprehensive data for every therapeutic area
The webinar highlighted three therapeutic examples—obesity, congestive heart failure, and psoriasis—illustrating how the combination of claims, EHR, labs and physician notes gives greater clinical depth and longitudinal insight that would otherwise be missed. In obesity, Dr. Woodward noted, “When looking at an obesity cohort especially, having BMI is extremely important, and having longitudinal BMI measures is even more important”. BMI is revealed on EHR data and not possible to obtain using closed claims alone. In heart failure, she showed how integrating claims with registry-grade clinical and lab data “allows us to see why a patient is diagnosed, improves, or declines. Not just that they did”. And in psoriasis, Woodward demonstrated how unstructured physician notes reveal “body surface area, pain metrics, morning stiffness, and Rapid 3,” with emtelligent’s NLP models extracting these features “quickly and efficiently.”
Watch the taXonomy Pathways webinar replay
If you missed the live session or want to revisit the details, you can watch the full taXonomy Pathways webinar replay on demand to see how HealthVerity is redefining real-world data for comprehensive and reliable patient journeys.
