With Privacy Hub, Datavant Strengthens Protections for Patient Privacy in Health Data Exchange

San Francisco, CA – November 10, 2021 – Datavant, the leader in helping healthcare organizations securely connect their data, today announced the launch of Privacy Hub to raise the bar for patient privacy and compliance across the healthcare industry; as well as the acquisition of Mirador Analytics, a leading provider of HIPAA expert determination services and technology.

Today, there are too many challenges to bringing together de-identified health datasets for analysis in a way that preserves analytically useful information and offers robust protections for patient privacy under HIPAA. As an integrated component of Datavant’s Switchboard, Privacy Hub will simplify and accelerate this process with technology-enabled expert determination (commonly known as certification) while strengthening patient privacy protections.

Using Datavant’s Privacy Hub, data holders and independent experts can:

• Reduce bottlenecks and speed time to HIPAA compliance with seamless integration of expert determination and automated remediations
• Integrate preliminary privacy risk assessment into the data configuration process to anticipate risks that may occur downstream
• Monitor and remediate data feeds for compliance with expert determination when linking data through Datavant

(Read Datavant President Travis May’s blog post on the future of privacy-preserving technologies.)

Privacy Hub will be available to all data sources, data recipients, and independent experts.    

Mirador Analytics has delivered more than 600 expert determinations for leading pharmaceutical, insurance and data analytics companies. Mirador is known for its rigorous and conservative approach to the protection of patient privacy, while maximizing data utility to allow for innovation, efficiency, and development in healthcare. To ensure independence, the Mirador team of 20+ experts will report directly to the President of the Datavant Group.

“Mirador and Datavant have worked closely over the past 18 months as founding members of the COVID-19 Research Database cross-sector coalition,” said Dr. Mark Cullen, the Founding Director of the Center for Population Health Sciences and a Professor of Medicine, Biomedical Data Science, and Health Research and Policy at Stanford University. “In the wake of the pandemic, we have seen firsthand the growing demand from the research community for linked real-world data sources that can answer complex questions while simultaneously ensuring patient privacy. Privacy Hub will undoubtedly help address this acute and growing need.”

“Datavant’s vision for Privacy Hub can help the industry address one of the biggest challenges of our time: connecting critical datasets to answer pressing research questions while safeguarding patient privacy,” said Dr. Niall Brennan, President and CEO of the Health Care Cost Institute. “This will accelerate research using privacy-preserving record linkage in ways that will make it easier to ensure health data is used more effectively and efficiently for patient benefit.”

“As more health data comes online each year and needs to become HIPAA compliant, we are seeing strain placed on existing models as well as increased risk introduced by the joining of bespoke datasets across the industry for a variety of valuable use cases — from recruiting rare disease patients to conducting more accurate survival analysis,” said Jamie Blackport, Chief Executive Officer of Mirador Analytics. “We are thrilled to join the Datavant team to help power the connection of health data to improve patient outcomes while ensuring that we both maintain and increase the exceptionally high bar we have for the protection of patient privacy.”

“Protecting privacy is now existential for the healthcare industry,” said Travis May, Founder and President of Datavant. “As more and more health information becomes usable, there is an unprecedented need to ensure that patient data is adequately and consistently de-identified with little room for error. We are excited to join forces with Jamie and the team at Mirador. By automating major components of the disclosure risk assessment process, we can dramatically shorten the time it takes to provide the necessary protections for patient privacy and the time to valuable insights that can lead  to improved patient outcomes.”

About Datavant Group

Datavant’s mission is to connect the world’s health data to improve patient outcomes. Datavant works to reduce the friction of data sharing across the healthcare industry by building technology that protects the privacy of patients while supporting the linkage of patient health records across datasets. Learn more about Datavant at www.datavant.com.