An all-too common obstacle for basic healthcare analysis

Since launching in 2022, more than 50 healthcare organizations have adopted Tuva’s open source data model to accelerate high-quality research and analytics.  However, any data model is only as good as the data being fed into it.  And most healthcare datasets are missing one of the most critical and basic pieces of information:  Did the patient survive or not?  

Unfortunately, access to accurate and complete mortality information is surprisingly difficult to come by.  The National Death Index (NDI) provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which is considered the authoritative mortality data source, can take up to one year to publish validated national mortality data and is only available for non-commercial research.  

Further complicating matters, connecting mortality data (if you can access it) to health data incurs cumbersome privacy and security restrictions under HIPAA, GDPR, and similar regulatory frameworks. 

Solving for access to mortality data

Due to the limited availability of mortality data from government sources, and challenges aggregating disparate sources, healthcare stakeholders have often excluded this vital statistic from their analytics workflows. To solve that problem, Veritas Data Research is using new data collection techniques to create a complete and timely mortality dataset from public sources, which do not have the same use restrictions or access challenges as government sources. This accessible Fact of Death Index from Veritas allows the healthcare industry to leverage mortality data as a foundational element of their data analytics platforms.  

Veritas has over 130 million mortality records from 1935 to the present, updated weekly, making it the largest and most up-to-date collection of mortality data on the market today.

Unlocking mortality data use cases

With this partnership, Tuva customers can augment their existing mortality data (e.g. from medical records, claims, etc.) with comprehensive mortality data from Veritas.  This data can then be used for more accurate research and analytics such as: 

• Estimating or predicting mortality across different patient population

• Estimating measures that depend on mortality more accurately (e.g. readmissions)

• Keeping patient panels up to date to prevent unwanted and unneeded patient outreach

Learn More

For interested customers, Tuva will provide a mortality data quality assessment, comparing your mortality data to gold-standard mortality data from Veritas.  

Contact Tuva Health to learn more.