The $7 billion transaction by Datavant with Ciox Health will be the nation’s largest “neutral and secure health data ecosystem.”
In a $7 billion transaction, San Francisco-based Datavant is merging with data network company Ciox Health to create the nation’s largest “neutral and secure health data ecosystem.” The combined company will be branded Datavant, connecting patients, providers, payers, health data analytics, government agencies, life science companies and patient applications for secure patient data exchange.
“The fragmentation of health data is one of the single greatest challenges facing the healthcare system today,” said Pete McCabe, CEO of Ciox Health.
The COVID-19 pandemic brought to light the level of health data fragmentation, particularly in the US. A lack of centralized healthcare means no centralized healthcare data. These informational silos can result in expensive and redundant care, decreased patient outcomes, less understanding of contributing factors which can lead to the slower discovery of underlying risks and drug interactions. Linking data across these health data silos is critical to solving national healthcare issues during the current pandemic and beyond.
“Every decision made in healthcare should be informed by data,” said Travis May, CEO of Datavant.
“Our goal is to create a ubiquitous, trusted, and neutral data ecosystem where parties across the healthcare system can seamlessly and securely exchange data – unlocking better outcomes, faster research, and healthcare at a lower cost. The combined company is positioned to transform America’s health infrastructure and power the health data economy.”
Co-founded by one of biotech guru Vivek Ramaswamy’s “vants,” Roivant launched Datavant in 2017 to connect the world’s healthcare data. Last spring, Datavant joined a consortium called the COVID-19 Research Database, a secure repository of HIPAA-compliant, de-identified, and limited patient-level data sets made available to public health and policy researchers to extract insights to help combat the pandemic.
With a privacy-preserving patient linking technology, the database is a repository of real-world data, including medical claims, pharmacy claims, electronic health records and demographic data.
“Roivant created Datavant with Travis because we needed this data ecosystem to exist to fulfill our own mission of accelerating the development of novel medicines for patients,” said Matthew Gline, CEO of Roivant Sciences. “The combination of Datavant and Ciox Health massively expands the reach of that ecosystem and will unlock significant value for us, patients, and for the entire pharmaceutical industry. We look forward to developing additional differentiated technologies at Roivant going forward.”
Merging with Croix Health, Datavant’s combined ecosystem will include over 2,000 US hospitals, 15,000 clinics, 120 health plans, 100 health data analytic companies, 30 life science companies, 70 academic research institutes and 75 government agencies.
“Datavant’s groundbreaking tokenization technology and the strength of Ciox’s expanded network across providers, payers, health application developers, and life sciences markets makes this combination compelling,” said R. Martin Chavez, Vice Chairman and Partner at Sixth Street. “We are believers in healthcare technology investment that drives improvement in patient outcomes and attempts to solve our most pressing healthcare challenges. This combination has the potential to enable the US healthcare system to become more patient-centric and data-driven through its breakthrough capability for secure collaboration across all industry stakeholders.”
Supported by a handful of investors – New Mountain Capital, Roivant Sciences, Merck, LabCorp, Sixth Street and more – the merger is expected to close in the third quarter of 2021.
