Data exchanges are increasingly becoming popular hosts for companies that want to buy and sell data, as company and government regulations tighten — including Amazon Web Services (AWS) Data Exchange, Infutor, LiveRamp, and Narrative, to name a few across industries ranging from finance and retail, insurance and health. 

“It’s not quite point-and-click at this time, but it’s certainly easier than before,” said Todd Gottula, Clarify Health Solutions president and co-founder. “The data exchange provisions what’s called an S3 bucket that’s secure. The vendor supplies the data to AWS, for example. AWS puts it in the S3 bucket, and we pick it up from there.”  

Clarify Health, an enterprise analytics company that provides real-world insights to healthcare companies, accesses Infutor’s data through Amazon Web Services (AWS) Data Exchange.

Infutor announced in late July that its data is now available through the AWS Data Exchange.

The collaboration makes it easy for employees from companies like Clarify Health to find and access the privacy-compliant, deterministic third-party identity and attribute data to support its own.

Gottula says the company works with cohorts, similar to Google’s latest strategy. Cohorts are defined as a group of users who share a common characteristic.

The company takes a “massive” amount of data and processes it through an enterprise analytics platform to deliver business applications to insurance companies, hospitals, doctors’ groups, and care facilities wanting to better understand their patients and what they need related to healthcare. The data helps to deliver higher-quality care, according to Gottula.

“Insights are based on historical medical information like how someone received care, the quality of care, and the way in which it has been paid for,” he said. “You can also gain insights on what the person went through to find the proper health care.”

These insights can include the ways a group of unidentified cancer patients, privacy protected, may have found a surgeon, ranging from surgical to reconstructive to oncologist — through a review, referral or recommendation — and can reflect, for example, when these patients may not have access to transportation, frequently uses certain services, or may choose not to use a doctor based on that doctor’s approach and demeanor.

Knowing this type of information can help to personalize the service and can reduce the cost of health care.

The data can lead to a decline in re-admissions for the same reason, or the hospital or doctor offering transportation credits to help the patient get to their treatments.

Gottula says the partnership with Infutor brings in the data that identifies groups that do not have access to transportation, or whether they are a frequent consumer of in-store or online purchases, for example.

Clarify Health has on-staff epidemiologists who integrate the types of data acquired through Infutor into the factors that influence healthcare outcomes and analysis. Infutor’s data is accessed through the AWS Data Exchange.

Accessing the information through AWS gives Clarify Health one place to get all the data they need.

Gottula says the company sees a benefit to doing it this way, such as a much more reliable receipt.

Clarify Health does license other anonymized data through AWS Data Exchange. “We’re seeing more data vendors offer data through the AWS Data Exchange,” Gottula says. “We expect a good portion of the data we acquire will end with us coming through the exchange.”