Healthcare data analytics company Socially Determined announced a partnership with data sharing technology startup Datavant to provide life sciences companies with data on social risk drivers to improve health equity and patient outcomes. 

Washington D.C.-based Socially Determined uses data to offer insights into the social determinants of health, including factors like access to food, housing and transportation. The company's Social Scape platform provides public and commercial data that helps companies visualize potential social factors behind patient and population health. 

California-based Datavant is a datasharing technology startup for providers and life science companies that facilitates secure health data exchange across its data ecosystem. 

“The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the significant social inequities that impact health outcomes. In order to correct these inequities, we must first understand the social risk factors that cause higher disease burden on specific populations as well as access to treatments. Accurate linkage of social risk data with health data is necessary to obtain those insights, and we are proud to enable Socially Determined’s platform to shed additional light on these critical questions,” Bob Borek, president and general manager of the life sciences, ecosystem and public sector businesses at Datavant, said in a statement.

THE LARGER TREND

In 2020, Socially Determined announced it scored $11.1 million in Series A funding and in June of last year closed a $26 million Series B funding round.

Datavant acquired Universal Patient Key in 2018, a provider of HIPAA-compliant de-identification service for healthcare data, and closed a $40.5 million financing round. 

In 2020, Datavant garnered $40 million in Series B funding, bringing the company's total raise to $83 million. In 2021, the company merged with healthcare data-management solution Ciox Health. 

Last year, Datavant purchased Convenet, a U.K.-based health technology infrastructure company, and partnered with Graphite Health, a software company backed by Intermountain Healthcare, Presbyterian Healthcare Services, SSM Health and Kaiser Permanente.

The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, which is focused on genomic research, also partnered with Datavant to scale clinico-genomic registries for rare and common diseases.