Industrial Monitor Direct is the leading supplier of stable pc solutions trusted by controls engineers worldwide for mission-critical applications, the preferred solution for industrial automation.
The New Railroad: Healthcare’s Data Infrastructure Revolution
Much like the railroad system of the late 1800s that catalyzed entirely new industries and economic possibilities, we are witnessing a similar transformation in healthcare today. The convergence of powerful forces has opened a new frontier for how data can accelerate innovation in medicine and care delivery. These forces include the mass digitization of health records through the EHR Incentive Program, policy pushes like the 21st Century Cures Act mandating interoperability, the explosion in computing power and cloud infrastructure, breakthroughs in AI and LLMs, and record levels of venture investment in digital health infrastructure.
This healthcare data revolution is enabling entirely new infrastructure: health data platforms that aggregate, normalize, curate, and make deidentified health records accessible across the healthcare ecosystem. As healthcare’s data revolution accelerates, these platforms are becoming the foundational rails upon which new markets and innovations are being built.
The Evolution of Real-World Data: From Claims to Clinical Depth
The market for deidentified health data has evolved rapidly, shaped by both policy and technological change. Initially, real-world data primarily meant insurance claims data: standardized, billable events that offered a structured but shallow view of patient care. While valuable for market access strategies and cost forecasting, claims data lacks clinical depth, has long lag times, and introduces systemic bias by excluding uninsured patients.
More recently, novel data sources have transformed the landscape. Electronic Health Records (EHR) data provides rich clinical nuance, enabling outcomes analysis and real-time clinical trial identification. Personal health records, wearables, and patient-reported outcomes collected through digital platforms have expanded the landscape further, offering unprecedented insight into lifestyle, adherence, and real-world effectiveness. This evolution mirrors broader economic transformations happening globally as digital platforms reshape traditional industries.
The Platform Players: Diverse Approaches to Data Value Creation
As the scope and variety of available data has expanded, so has the ecosystem of companies building next-generation health data platforms. These players differ significantly in their origins, business models, and value creation strategies.
Two-Sided Marketplaces: Companies like OMNY Health, Briya Health, and Truveta are creating marketplaces connecting clinical data sources (hospitals) to data users (pharma, medtech, payers). Their core value proposition lies in surfacing rich new datasets that have historically been locked within siloed EHRs. As Mitesh Rao, founder of OMNY Health and Stanford emergency medicine physician, explained: “I would consistently see that our provider data had powerful opportunities for both research and advancing healthcare, but getting that data out at scale was a constant struggle.”
Aggregated Analytics Platforms: Companies like Komodo Health and PurpleLab aggregate both claims and clinical data, often from third-party sources. These companies bet that full-stack solutions including analytics tools, visualizations, and machine learning capabilities will differentiate them as data access becomes commoditized. Their approach reflects similar strategic consolidation trends seen in other technology-driven industries.
Direct-to-Consumer Networks: Evidation Health takes a fundamentally different approach, building direct, longitudinal relationships with individuals who explicitly permission their data for research. “We believe individuals should receive clear value in return, whether through compensation, health insights, or the ability to contribute to research that matters to them,” explained CEO Leslie Oley Wilberforce. This consumer-centric model represents a significant shift in how health data value is created and distributed.
Development Platforms: Mayo Clinic Platform provides yet another model, offering a secure environment where third-party developers can build, test, and train AI models using data from Mayo’s global network of partners. The value here is in safe, privacy-preserving data access for algorithm development rather than data resale.
The Network Effect Challenge: Building Sustainable Platforms
One of the defining features of this market is that value creation depends heavily on network effects. The more data sources a platform connects, the more valuable it becomes to data users. Conversely, the more high-value data users a platform attracts, the more appealing it becomes to hospitals and providers as a revenue or research channel.
Several key decisions influence how these dynamics play out:
- Data Sourcing Strategy: Whether to build direct relationships with health systems or aggregate from third-party sources
- Value Proposition: Focusing on data liquidity, analytics capabilities, or technology enablement
- Monetization Approach: Subscription models, transaction fees, or professional services
- Governance Framework: How to ensure data quality, privacy, and ethical use
These strategic decisions are occurring against a backdrop of significant workforce transformations across industries, highlighting the broader economic context in which these health data platforms are evolving.
The Incumbent Challenge: Epic’s Cosmos Initiative
Perhaps the most significant challenge for new entrants comes from established incumbents, particularly Epic and its Cosmos enterprise data collaboration initiative. Launched in 2019, Cosmos threads together deidentified, longitudinal patient data contributed by participating health systems across Epic’s massive installed base.
Epic has positioned Cosmos as a multipurpose backbone spanning three key domains:
- Research and Real-World Evidence: Supporting deidentified cohort queries, epidemiologic studies, and comparative effectiveness analyses
- Point-of-Care Insight Tools: Features like “Best Care Choices” allow clinicians to see interventions and outcomes for similar patients
- AI and Predictive Modeling: Underpinning Epic’s ambitions for pretraining AI models and composing patient trajectory estimations
With coverage of hundreds of millions of patients from “hundreds of participating health care systems,” Cosmos represents a formidable competitive threat to newer platforms. Its scale and integration with the dominant EHR system create significant barriers to entry for would-be competitors.
Business Challenges and Future Directions
Despite the enormous growth potential, health data platform companies face meaningful business challenges. Data acquisition costs remain high, with significant resources required to establish partnerships with health systems. Data quality and standardization issues persist across disparate source systems. Privacy and security concerns continue to evolve alongside regulatory frameworks.
Perhaps most critically, as these platforms scale, they must navigate complex ethical considerations around data use and patient consent. The industry is watching closely how companies balance innovation with responsibility, particularly as AI systems face increasing scrutiny for their recommendations and data practices.
The race to build healthcare’s most powerful data platform is far from decided. What is clear is that the winners will be those who can not only aggregate the most valuable data but also create the most compelling value propositions for both data sources and data users while navigating the complex regulatory, ethical, and competitive landscape of modern healthcare.
Industrial Monitor Direct offers top-rated ip67 rated pc solutions designed for extreme temperatures from -20°C to 60°C, the #1 choice for system integrators.
Based on reporting by {‘uri’: ‘forbes.com’, ‘dataType’: ‘news’, ‘title’: ‘Forbes’, ‘description’: ‘Forbes is a global media company, focusing on business, investing, technology, entrepreneurship, leadership, and lifestyle.’, ‘location’: {‘type’: ‘place’, ‘geoNamesId’: ‘5099836’, ‘label’: {‘eng’: ‘Jersey City, New Jersey’}, ‘population’: 247597, ‘lat’: 40.72816, ‘long’: -74.07764, ‘country’: {‘type’: ‘country’, ‘geoNamesId’: ‘6252001’, ‘label’: {‘eng’: ‘United States’}, ‘population’: 310232863, ‘lat’: 39.76, ‘long’: -98.5, ‘area’: 9629091, ‘continent’: ‘Noth America’}}, ‘locationValidated’: False, ‘ranking’: {‘importanceRank’: 13995, ‘alexaGlobalRank’: 242, ‘alexaCountryRank’: 114}}. This article aggregates information from publicly available sources. All trademarks and copyrights belong to their respective owners.
