Cancer-Related Mortality Analysis

We partnered with HealthVerity to produce an analysis of cancer-related mortality using our Cause of Death algorithm. Mortality is one of the most important variables to add to outcomes and survival analyses when researchers want to include only relevant mortality events related to a specific disease under study.

What did we find?

• Primary and secondary Causes of Death can be calculated for over 1.7M individuals within the HealthVerity Mortality Masterset for 2022 alone.

• 27% of deaths had neoplasms as a component of death, which closely matches the 25% reported by the CDC.

• When we further break mortality down by individual cancer type, the highest percentage of deaths are attributed to respiratory, lymphoid, and digestive system cancers.

• For individuals where neoplasms are calculated to be a comorbidity, we also report the most common primary causes of death.

View the results in this downloadable handout or email sales@veritasdataresearch.com to learn about how you can apply this novel dataset to your analysis.

Veritas is SOC 2 Type 2 Certified

Veritas Data Research is now a certified SOC 2 Type 2 organization! We are happy to share our updated SOC 2 Attestation with you here. For more information, reach out to our Compliance Team. More security certifications are coming this year as we focus on further protecting our product assets and our customers’ data.

Healthcare AI Needs Contextual Data

Our CEO Jason LaBonte published a post on Medium this week, our first in a series outlining the market niche we think needs filling in the RWD and health analytics space! He discusses how transactional real-world data (RWD) is used today and discusses how contextual data is a key factor that is missing from health analytics. Check out a snippet of the article below and read the full post here. Make sure you follow Jason because we have more interesting topics and posts already in the works!

The availability of real-world data (RWD) has undoubtedly revolutionized the time, cost, and utility of analytics in healthcare. However, despite this emergence of new business models, approaches, and value propositions, the insight we expect to be inherently available from RWD remains elusive or imprecise. Why might this be? By “big data” in healthcare, what most people mean is “transactional” data generated from individual healthcare encounters like filling a prescription or visiting a doctor. And while this transactional RWD has become critical in letting us know “what” is happening to patients in near real time, AI and other advanced analytics are going to struggle to answer “why” patients have different experiences and outcomes because we are missing a key ingredient: contextual data.

Verify

Veritas’ Verify solution notifies you of which individuals from your cohort are deceased by matching against our comprehensive historical Fact of Death Mortality Index. Rather than ingesting our full data file and designing your own matching algorithm, Verify customers simply send a list of the individuals they want verified to Veritas, and receive back a list of confirmed deaths in that cohort. The Verify algorithm’s flexibility and precision ensures accurate matches, providing valuable insights without the need to set up any infrastructure in your environment. Reach out to sales@veritasdataresearch.com to learn more about how this could be the perfect solution for your company!

Veritas Compared to Claims Data

Many Providers and Payers try to use their own claims data to understand the mortality rates in their population, but don’t realize that claims are a highly incomplete source of mortality data. Mortality information is generally recorded in a claim when a patient dies during inpatient care (including hospice). The claim for that event contains specific codes for expired patients, which are often discharge codes for expiry and occurrence codes for the date of death. However, most patients do not expire in a healthcare setting – on average, only 20% of deaths are available in national claims data.

Covered entities need to augment their mortality information with external sources if they want to better understand the health outcomes of their patients, remove deceased individuals from their patient communications, and design better population health models and risk-based interventions. A recent study from UCLA confirms this issue, finding that 1 in 5 seriously ill patients believed to be alive in their medical records were actually deceased.

At Veritas, we are committed to providing this missing information in an accessible and affordable manner. If you are interested in learning more about our mortality data, please reach out to us via sales@veritasdataresearch.com.

Please reach out to us via email sales@veritasdataresearch.com or send us a message via our website if you have questions about anything mentioned.