On October 22, 2024, datma, a frontrunner in federated Real-World Data (RWD) platforms, announced the launch of datma.FED, a revolutionary marketplace poised to transform the healthcare data landscape. This two-sided marketplace is designed to address a persistent challenge in the healthcare industry: the secure, efficient, and profitable exchange of healthcare data between health systems, labs (data custodians), and pharmaceutical companies or research organizations (data consumers). With datma.FED, datma is delivering an innovative federated model that redefines how healthcare data is accessed, monetized, and applied, providing a sustainable and secure data-sharing ecosystem.
The Healthcare Data Conundrum: Opportunities and Challenges
Healthcare data is widely regarded as one of the most valuable resources for advancing medical research, improving patient outcomes, and driving pharmaceutical innovation. Every day, health systems, hospitals, and reference labs generate massive volumes of data through electronic health records (EHRs), laboratory tests, molecular diagnostics, and genomic research. This data contains critical insights that, when analyzed correctly, can lead to breakthroughs in drug discovery, precision medicine, and population health management.
However, healthcare data is often fragmented, siloed, and governed by strict privacy regulations, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in the United States, and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe. These regulations, while essential for protecting patient privacy, also create significant barriers to data sharing. Data custodians, including health systems and labs, face immense challenges in monetizing their data due to the complexity of sharing agreements, privacy concerns, and the need to ensure compliance with industry standards.
Additionally, traditional data-sharing models are inefficient and risky. They typically involve transferring large datasets from one organization to another, raising concerns about data breaches, loss of control, and security vulnerabilities. These inefficiencies have deterred many healthcare organizations from participating in data-sharing initiatives, resulting in missed opportunities for both data custodians and data consumers.
Amid these challenges, datma.FED emerges as a groundbreaking solution designed to overcome the traditional barriers of healthcare data sharing while unlocking new financial opportunities for data custodians and providing data consumers with access to high-quality, real-world data.
datma.FED: A Federated Marketplace for Healthcare Data
At the heart of datma.FED is its federated data access model, a revolutionary approach that addresses the core issues of privacy, security, and control. Unlike conventional data-sharing platforms that require the physical transfer of data from one organization to another, datma.FED allows data to remain within the infrastructure of the custodian. Instead of sending data to data consumers, datma.FED sends queries and algorithms directly to the data custodians, where they are processed locally. The results of these queries, fully anonymized and aggregated, are then shared with the data consumers.
This federated model provides several key benefits:
1) Full Data Control: Data custodians maintain full control over their data. Identifiable patient data never leaves their infrastructure, ensuring compliance with privacy regulations such as HIPAA. This eliminates the risk of data breaches and loss of control.
2) Privacy Compliance: datma.FED is designed with privacy in mind. All transactions within the platform are fully compliant with HIPAA and other relevant privacy laws. A secure federation hub routes all requests, ensuring that data custodians are protected by a complete audit trail, preserving data security and privacy.
3) High-Quality, Actionable Data: For data consumers, datma.FED provides access to rich, tokenized datasets, including genomics and molecular data, that fill critical gaps in their current data collections. These datasets are ready to use and can be integrated into downstream analytical models to drive discovery and enhance market access strategies.
As Noah Nasser, CEO of datma, states, “datma.FED represents a significant leap forward in how healthcare data is shared and utilized. Our mission is to empower data custodians to unlock the value of their data while maintaining control at every step. Simultaneously, we offer data consumers a way to fill crucial gaps in their datasets with ready-to-use, high-quality, tokenized, RWD complementary to existing data assets. With datma.FED, we are creating a secure, mutually beneficial ecosystem that advances both sides.”
Value for Data Custodians: Monetizing Healthcare Data
For data custodians, datma.FED opens up new opportunities for monetization without compromising privacy or control. Traditionally, health systems and reference labs have struggled to unlock the financial value of their data, despite sitting on vast repositories of real-world health information. datma.FED addresses this issue by introducing a shared upside revenue model, enabling labs to generate revenue in proportion to the value of their data.
The value of a lab’s data is determined by several factors, including the scope of the data, its completeness, its recency, and its longitudinal coverage. The more comprehensive and up-to-date the data, the higher its value in the marketplace. As more data consumers, such as pharmaceutical companies and research organizations, join the datma.FED network, data custodians will see an increase in demand for their data, leading to higher revenue potential.
Flexible Privacy Controls and Transparency: datma.FED offers data custodians full transparency into how and when their data is accessed. The platform provides flexible privacy controls that allow custodians to decide which queries to process and under what conditions. This gives labs the ability to securely manage their data assets while ensuring compliance with industry regulations. All requests are routed through the secure datma FEDERATION HUB, which maintains a complete HIPAA audit trail to ensure that all transactions are compliant with privacy laws.
No Data Transfer, No Risk of Breach: One of the key benefits of the federated model is that data custodians do not need to physically transfer their data to data consumers. This eliminates the risk of data breaches, loss of control, or misuse of patient information. By keeping the data within their infrastructure, custodians can monetize their data assets without the typical risks associated with traditional data-sharing models.
Value for Data Consumers: Access to High-Quality Real-World Data
For data consumers, such as pharmaceutical companies, biotech firms, and academic researchers, access to real-world data is critical for advancing drug discovery, improving clinical trials, and developing precision medicine strategies. However, obtaining comprehensive, high-quality datasets has traditionally been a challenge due to the fragmented and siloed nature of healthcare data. datma.FED addresses this challenge by providing access to tokenized, high-quality lab datasets, including genomics and molecular data, that are often difficult to obtain through traditional data-sharing methods.
Filling Critical Data Gaps: One of the primary advantages for data consumers is that datma.FED allows them to fill critical gaps in their current data collections. For example, pharmaceutical companies often rely on real-world data to supplement clinical trial results and gain insights into how their drugs perform in real-world settings. However, obtaining comprehensive, longitudinal data that includes genomic and molecular information has been difficult due to privacy concerns and data fragmentation.
With datma.FED, pharmaceutical companies can access these valuable datasets while ensuring that patient privacy is protected. This allows them to accelerate discoveries, enhance market access strategies, and improve the development of precision medicine initiatives.
AI-Enabled Tools and Analytical Models: In addition to providing access to high-quality data, datma.FED supports data consumers with a variety of AI-enabled tools and analytical models that can be applied to the datasets. These tools allow data consumers to analyze the data and derive actionable insights that can be used to drive drug development, improve clinical trials, and develop targeted therapies.
A Growing Market for Real-World Data
The launch of datma.FED comes at a time when the global demand for real-world data is surging. According to recent market research, the global market for real-world data (RWD) and real-world evidence (RWE) is expected to reach $23.7 billion by 2027, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.6%. This growth is being driven by the increasing use of real-world evidence in regulatory decision-making, drug development, and precision medicine initiatives.
Pharmaceutical companies, in particular, are increasingly turning to real-world data to supplement traditional clinical trial results and gain insights into patient outcomes, drug safety, and efficacy in real-world settings. In 2023, a significant number of regulatory approvals for new drugs and therapies were based on real-world evidence, highlighting the growing importance of RWD in the pharmaceutical industry.
datma.FED is uniquely positioned to capitalize on this growing market. By providing a secure, federated marketplace that connects data custodians and data consumers, the platform addresses the key challenges of privacy, control, and data access while enabling both sides to benefit from the growing demand for real-world data.
The Future of Healthcare Data Sharing
The launch of datma.FED represents a significant milestone in the evolution of healthcare data sharing. With its federated data access model, shared upside revenue opportunities, and AI-enabled tools, datma.FED is set to revolutionize how healthcare data is shared, monetized, and utilized.
As healthcare continues to generate more data, platforms like datma.FED will play an increasingly critical role in ensuring that this data is accessible, secure, and actionable. By empowering data custodians to monetize their data assets and providing data consumers with high-quality, real-world datasets, datma.FED is helping to drive the next wave of healthcare innovation, improving patient outcomes and advancing medical research.
“datma.FED represents a significant leap forward in how healthcare data is shared and utilized,“ Noah Nasser, CEO of datma, explains. “Our mission is to empower data custodians to unlock the value of their data while maintaining control at every step. Simultaneously, we offer data consumers a way to fill crucial gaps in their datasets with ready-to-use, high-quality, tokenized, RWD complementary to existing data assets.“
As we look to the future, one thing is clear: the secure, efficient exchange of healthcare data is key to unlocking the full potential of medical research and precision medicine. With the launch of datma.FED, datma is leading the charge in creating a more connected, data-driven healthcare