New Health Tech Start-up Aims to Automate Healthcare Data Compliance Within the Industry

Integral, a new health tech company, launched late last month the first end-to-end collaborative software suite to automate healthcare data compliance – improving the ability to quickly evaluate sensitive healthcare data and drive patient-centric analysis.

Emerging from stealth, the company announced a pre-seed funding round and launched the Integral Platform – a suite of automation and collaborative tools that enables healthcare data compliance in hours to days, rather than months, and enables businesses to make quick, informed decisions to improve everyday people’s health.

Big data in the healthcare system is becoming increasingly important 

Globally, the big data analytics segment is expected to be worth more than $68.03 billion by 2024, driven largely by continued North American investments in electronic health records, practice management tools, and workforce management solutions. Global big data in the healthcare market was expected to reach $34.27 billion by 2022 at a CAGR of 22.07%.

Healthcare organizations stock data for patient care and patient use, which means sensitive information should at least be capable of securely moving from one place to another. EHRs typically include different types of data, such as medical history, test results, images, allergies, immunization, other personal data, such as billing information. 

In the wake of global consolidation and the recent growth of the health information exchanges, healthcare providers are facing the following four core challenges with data interoperability, information exchange, and data sharing across different electronic health record systems.

Providing the best healthcare services to patients is highly dependent on a variety of factors. Correctly Identifying the problem at the right time, providing proper treatment, ensuring that the patient remains focused throughout their journey back to health. Hospitals and health systems have to ensure that all the parts of the machine are getting along well with one another to ensure they don’t have a negative impact on future healthcare results. One of the growing concerns is healthcare data quality issues – something which can make or break patient outcomes.

Since health records are worth 40 times more than credit card data on the black market, and  hackers increasingly target this type of data, cybersecurity is one of the priorities for healthcare executives.

Hospitals from all around the world are already using artificial intelligence and machine learning to ease their administrative burdens and improve patient health outcomes. Now, AI is being used in cybersecurity to help augment human efforts and ensure the safety of patient data. 

Integral directly integrates with data storage systems

Until now, there was no way to automate the privacy certification of healthcare datasets to comply with regulations like HIPAA. Today it is a slow, cumbersome, manual, and expensive process typically performed as a consulting service. Integral directly integrates with data storage systems such as AWS (Amazon Web Services) or GCP (Google Cloud Platform), continuously runs a set of privacy assessments, and enables users to resolve privacy violations through an easy-to-use interface. Integral powers real-time compliance so companies can work with data safely and more quickly than they ever have before.

“Today, healthcare data compliance is done on an episodic, ad-hoc basis rather than a continuous process,” said Shubh Sinha, co-founder and CEO, Integral. “I believe there needs to be a continuous solution to solve this continuous problem. By speeding up the compliance process for healthcare data, Integral makes it possible to create bespoke patient experiences, streamline drug development research, and more while ensuring patient privacy. This is critical to creating a better healthcare system.”

Pre-seed funding came from experts in the field

Integral is backed by experts in healthcare and tech. The pre-seed round funding was led by Virtue Ventures and joined by Caffeinated Capital, GreatPoint Ventures, Array Ventures, LiveRamp Ventures, as well as angel investors Joel Jewitt, co-founder and vice president at LiveRamp, Michel Tricot co-founder and CEO at Airbyte, Sam Whitaker, founder and CEO at Mural Health, Abhishek Chandra, co-founder and CEO at Recora Health, Andrew Arruda, co-founder and CEO at Flexpa, and others. Advisors to the company are Jason Brenner, regional vice president for healthcare and life sciences at LiveRamp and Bradley Malin, vice chair for research and professor of biomedical informatics at Vanderbilt University.

The Integral Platform consists of collaboration tools so companies can efficiently manage their data partners, automated documentation generation for easy history tracking, and a robust privacy engine to customize and remediate data.

About Integral

Integral was founded in 2022 by Shubh Sinha and John Kuhn when they saw a lack of information communication between systems in healthcare, during the height of the pandemic. Integral enables healthcare companies to create compliant datasets for analysis, sharing, machine learning, and more. By making data compliant throughout the healthcare ecosystem, Integral is building the data enablement layer to automate healthcare data compliance. Integral is based in San Francisco and is backed by Virtue Ventures along with Caffeinated Capital, GreatPoint Ventures, Array Ventures, LiveRamp Ventures and several angel investors.