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 Today in Health it, Tru Veta is announced. And my three suggestions to get this off on the right foot. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week in Health IT a channel dedicated to keeping health IT staff current. And engaged today. No sponsor. Just wanna make you aware of a service we offer.

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So have have your team subscribe and get the conversation started on the right foot. Alright, today's story. . This is a big one. Tru Veta has been launched and the launch is impressive. New data platform. I'm just gonna read from their, this is from their press release. There's a lot of stories out there around it.

I'm just gonna do the press release. Here we go. New data platform will help to deliver personalized medicine, advanced health equity, and empower the health community with insights on how to best treat patients. Great. . Uh, great opening. Here we go. Leading health providers have come together in unprecedented fashion to unite around a goal of improving the lives of those they serve.

Through data insights, health provider innovators, advent Health Advocate, Aurora Health, Baptist Health of Northeast Florida Bonds Accords, mercy Health, common Spirit Health, Hawaii Pacific Health, Henry Ford Health System, Memorial Hermann System. Northwell Health, Novant Health Pro, Providence Health System, Sentara Healthcare, Tenin Healthcare and Trinity Health have formed Tru Veta, a new company with a vision to save lives with data.

Wow. I mean, think about that roster. This is a, an an impressive amount of data and a, an impressive partnership that has come together. Uh, through structuring and normalizing and de-identifying data from these health providers, a new data platform will be built with careful protection of patient privacy and security.

This new platform, using the power of AI and machine learning, will enable unprecedented insights as providers are able to learn from each other with statistically significant scale and representation of diverse populations. Again, great goals it goes on to say, together these 14 healthcare providers. Uh, care for tens of millions of patients and operate thousands of care facilities across 40 states.

The health providers will govern Tru Vetas Ethical Pursuit insights from an, from this unprecedented de-identified dataset. We can argue de-identified dataset. I'm not going to in this episode, suffice it to say I've talked to data scientists who feel like you can un de-identify most data sets, but regardless.

Great effort. This is what they're gonna do, this is how they're gonna approach it. And that is the common approach to doing this. De-identifying the dataset. Alright, it goes on one last paragraph here. The Covid 19 pandemic has shown us how much, uh, how much the world needs to learn faster so we can better serve our communities.

Said Terry Meyerson, CEO of Veta. So Terry, if you're not familiar, comes from Microsoft. He has done endeavors like he was on Xbox development, he was on Windows development. And some other things at Microsoft. So, uh, good, uh, enterprise development background, maybe not necessarily healthcare, but you know, we all had to learn healthcare at some point.

Uh, he goes on to say, our vision is to save lives with data. We want to help researchers find cures faster, empower every clinician to be an expert and help families make the most informed decisions on their care. We believe the Tru Veta platform. Can help improve health equity and advanced personalized medicine.

We are honored to be partnering with innovative and world-class health providers in this pursuit. It goes on. There's headlines like Saving Lives with data Health provider led and governed commitment to health equity, patient privacy, and ethical. Innovation. How can you argue with that? They're saying all the right things.

Couple of notes on this and the, the first is just, I don't know, just an observation. This is taking the pull position back from Epic Cosmos was designed to do almost the same thing, uh, beyond all the wonderful things. This is an assertion that the data is an epics to control. I, you know, I'm going to go one step further in a moment with one of my, my three, three and a half suggestions for the entity, but let's suffice it to say that this is.

Th this, there are people in Madison talking about what does this mean right now? Alright, so here I'm just gonna go right into my So what. As you know, we look at each story, we look at, we do a, so what, why does this matter and, and why should we be talking about it? This is a big deal. I mean, this is a big announcement.

A lot of major health systems, a lot of data moving into this, into this entity. It does have the power to do some things, but with great power, . Comes great responsibility. So I have three suggestions for the leadership team. Three and a half. Uh, let me start with, this is a good endeavor led by people with good intentions and hopeful for great outcomes.

Now they are building the equivalent of what I would think is an atomic weapon of data and in the wrong hands. This could be used for nefarious purposes, but let it be noted that . This isn't how this started out, and don't hear this as a criticism of the endeavor. It is good and right. It just needs to have the right guardrails to ensure that it never gets used against the very people it is designed to serve.

I know this may sound conspiracy theory esque, but it is more of an acknowledgement that our security has not always been the best in healthcare. We don't always control who's accessing the information, and governments have been known to overstep their bounds with regard to privacy from time to time.

So my first suggestion is to ensure that your protections and governance have a keen eye on privacy and protection to the data. My second suggestion. Your, your new CEO is great. I'm looking forward to seeing what he does in healthcare, but I believe you should provide your new CEO with people who have been down this road before.

You can just put some advisors around him that have done this. Right. Hired Dale Sanders, formerly with Health Catalyst or Charles Boise, currently with Clear Sense. These guys have been doing this for, for, they've been bringing healthcare data together for decades. You can easily bring them on as advisors.

You can, uh, learn all these things from scratch or pay a little money and have advisors that can help you to sidestep some of these easy landmines that you, you really wanna avoid. So hire some advisors who have been there, done that. Healthcare data's a little different. There are some, uh, unique challenges to it, and there are people that have been doing this for a while.

That have some really good suggestions and can help along the way. Okay, my final suggestion, well, it's not my final. I have I half of one at the end finally, and I realize this is a stretch. This is the biggest stretch of all the things I'm asking here, but I'm going to put on my patient advocacy hat for just one minute.

I would suggest one last step before you pull all my data and my data is in this data set and put it into this repository, create an app. The app will show people all the information from their health record accumulated from these sources. My data and my family's data included. The app has two functions and two functions only to show me the patient what information you have on me and to give me the ability to opt in or out of the program at any time.

That's it. I only want it to do those two things. You don't have to put a huge development team together and you don't have to think through how it's presented, those kind of things. I just wanna see it and opt in or opt out. A patient first approach to this project would go a long way. It provides a safeguard for the future and a, a platform of trust going into the program.

That's it. Those are my three suggestions. Oh, and here's, here's the fourth that I talked about. And if, if there was a fourth, it would be to have a patient advocate on the board, perhaps an e-patient, Dave type person or something like that. But that's it. There you go. My suggestions for Tru Veta, for what it's worth, uh, if you agree, send this to the one of the health system CEOs that's participating and see if it gets any traction.

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