Verana Health Raises $150M to Enhance EHR Data Analysis

Verana Health Secures $150 Million in Series E Funding

Verana Health, a firm specializing in the aggregation and organization of extensive medical datasets, announced the completion of a $150 million Series E funding round on Friday.

This investment arrives as the company expands its focus to encompass novel categories of medical data, enhances its capabilities in structuring traditionally disorganized information – such as physician documentation – and strives to derive more actionable intelligence from Electronic Health Records (EHRs).

Data Organization and Partnerships

Verana Health organizes and analyzes electronic health record systems maintained by three prominent professional organizations: The American Academy of Ophthalmology, The American Academy of Neurology, and The American Urological Association.

Subsequently, it delivers valuable insights to medical practitioners, research institutions, and companies within the life sciences sector. Since its inception in 2018, Verana has established itself as the exclusive data management partner for these professional networks, as stated by CEO Sujay Jadhav to TechCrunch.

Investment Details

This funding round was spearheaded by Johnson & Johnson Innovation and Novo Growth.

Existing investors, including GV (formerly Google Ventures), Casdin Capital, and Brook Byers, also participated. Additionally, new investors such as Merck Global Health Innovation Fund, THVC, and Breyer Capital contributed to the round.

Core Product Offerings

Currently, Verana concentrates on three primary disease areas: ophthalmology, neurology, and urology.

From this foundation, Verana offers two key products. VeraQ, a “population health engine”, encompasses data from 90 million patients over a seven-year period. Qdata links existing data with supplementary information – like insurance claims or medical imaging – to create tailored datasets for specific observational studies.

Delivering Data-Driven Insights

A pertinent question for any data-driven insights provider is: What specific insights are being delivered?

Jadhav provides illustrative examples.

Recently, the company collaborated with a startup undertaking a study on a rare disease often absent from standard ICD-10 billing codes.

Verana leveraged natural language processing and manual review to analyze patient symptoms and procedural histories, identifying clinics potentially possessing a sufficient patient population for study participation.

On the commercial front, a client utilized Verana to monitor the post-market safety and adoption rates of a medical product.

Verana facilitated this by analyzing treatment patterns and the demographic characteristics of product users, proactively identifying potential safety concerns.

Patient Privacy and Data Security

Patient privacy is of utmost importance when dealing with health records.

Jadhav emphasizes that all patient information undergoes de-identification. “Internally, we maintain a strict access control system. Only 27 individuals have access to identifiable data, which is then de-identified before being provided to pharmaceutical companies and other stakeholders,” he explained.

De-identified health records are routinely used for research purposes. EHR analysis, for example, enabled rapid studies on the real-world safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines.

However, concerns have been voiced regarding the potential for “re-identification” of de-identified data through machine learning or integration with other datasets, as highlighted in a 2018 study published in “JAMA Health Policy” concerning physical activity data.

Patients have the option to withdraw consent for data sharing at any time.

The most direct method is typically through their physician’s office; for example, you can formally request your ophthalmologist not to share your EHR data with IRIS, the dataset provided by the American Academy of Ophthalmology.

Expanding Data Capabilities

Currently, Verana’s dataset is primarily centered around these patient registries.

However, the company is actively investing in both enhancing the insights derived from these records and integrating additional data types.

Verana is employing natural language processing to extract key themes from physician notes that do not conform to conventional data structures.

The de-identification of textual data within EHRs is an ongoing area of research, but Jadhav notes that these physician notes represent a significant untapped resource in certain therapeutic areas, particularly urology.

“In specific therapeutic areas, such as urology, we observe some structured data. However, a substantial portion of the value resides in unstructured data, specifically physician notes.”

The company has also integrated insurance claims data and developed a technique for incorporating imaging data.

For instance, they published an abstract detailing an algorithm capable of matching IRIS EHRs and imaging data with 83% accuracy.

Future Plans and Funding

With this latest funding round, Verana intends to “fuel current growth” based on its existing business model, according to Jadhav.

Specific plans include improving the quality of existing analyses, expanding clinical trial insights, and supporting natural language processing initiatives.

This round brings the company’s total funding to $280 million.