Dive Brief:
- Healthcare analytics startup Nuna, based in San Francisco, has built a cloud-computing database of 74 million Medicaid patients and their treatments, The New York Times reports.
- Using flexible and interactive cloud-based technology, the database permits real-time monitoring of emerging disease clusters, billing patterns and program impacts.
- The database — developed in collaboration with the federal government — grew out of Nuna founder and CEO Jini Kim’s participation on a team of tech experts called on in 2013 to help fix HealthCare.gov.
Dive Insight:
Because Medicaid is administered state by state, information historically has tended to be siloed. CMS acting Administrator Andy Slavitt called the database “near historic,” providing the first “systemwide view across the program.”
“This kind of data can help move health care policy from a partisan ideological debate to one informed by knowing who the people affected are and what will likely happen to Medicaid recipients,” said Drew Altman, president of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, according to the report.
The database, revealed Monday at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, is hosted on Amazon Web Services. Nuna, launched in 2010, has raised $90 million in venture funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and several individual investors.
Kim, a former product manager on Google Health, knows Medicaid intimately due to the costly medical needs of her younger brother, who has severe autism. Forty percent of Medicaid is spent on the disabled, and the program pays for half of all long-term care in the U.S. Moreover, Medicaid covers half of all children born in this country.