While there are many solutions designed to help healthcare organizations access health data, there are not many for non-healthcare entities. Marble, wants to change that by offering a robust platform that will take care of the necessary patient consent as well as the challenge of retrieving the data from the myriad of systems used in healthcare. Company officials believe the need for this type of solution is growing exponentially.
Non-Healthcare Organizations Need Health Data Too
When we talk about solving interoperability in healthcare, we are usually referring to making it easier for healthcare organizations and health apps/devices to access and share health data. We rarely consider the needs that non-healthcare entities have for that same data.
James Bateman, CEO and Co-Founder of MedChart opened my eyes to that need a few years ago when I met him at a conference in Canada and he explained what his company does.
MedChart offers a platform and services for law firms to gather medical records from healthcare organizations. The retrieval of data is handled electronically where possible, but sometimes paper files are the best available, which MedChart scans into electronic format. The platform also manages patient consent and stores the records in a format that makes sense for lawyers.
Lawyers need medical files when defending or prosecuting cases where someone is injured and for healthcare related cases. Other non-healthcare organizations that need access to health data include:
- Insurance companies
- Employers
- Government agencies
- Educational institutions
- Researchers
- Sports teams
Making it Easy
Marble, a new company co-founded by Bateman, launched this week with the goal of making access to health data easier for non-healthcare and healthcare organizations alike. The company plans to offer a robust set of FHIR-based APIs to streamline and simplify the entire data gathering process.
“Marble offers powerful APIs that helps businesses, apps, and developers get access to patient authorized data,” explained Bateman in an interview with Healthcare IT Today. “Application developers and (non-healthcare) businesses do not have the privilege that healthcare providers do in getting access to health exchange data, EMR data, and other types of health data. What we’re doing is taking all the complexity and simplifying it through a powerful set of APIs that you can build and operate your business on.”
Even though Marble is new, their offering is battle-tested and already used at scale. Bateman and his team are leveraging their experience and technology from MedChart.
“Our APIs will pull data from health care facilities and deliver it to the business that the patient is seeking service from,” continued Bateman. “That business can be from any industry. It could be a life insurance application, virtual care, consumer health applications, life sciences, or clinical trials/studies. These are all businesses can ask their patient population for permission for [their health] data. We facilitate and make that process scalable.”
Hitting the Ground Running
Marble is growing quickly. The company closed a Series-A at the end of 2020 and in the past year they have grown 7x.
The team at Marble is now gearing up for a Series-B funding round. “We’re in the process right now,” confirmed Bateman.
Watch the full interview with James Bateman and Kevin Callahan to learn:
- Why Marble is growing so quickly
- What the company plans for their AppStore and Beta Programs
- More non-healthcare use cases
Learn more about Marble by visiting their website at: https://www.marbleapi.com/
Transcript
[00:00:00] Intro
[00:00:08] James Bateman: Hello, my name is James Bateman. I’m the CEO and co-founder here at Marble.
[00:00:13] Kevin Callahan: My name is Kevin Callahan. I’m the chief product officer at Marble.
[00:00:16] What is Marble?
[00:00:21] James Bateman: What I would like to introduce to you is Marble. Marble is a powerful API that helps businesses and app developers get access to patient authorized data across a vast number of industries. Application developers, businesses don’t have the privilege of healthcare providers of getting access to health exchange data, EMR data and other types of data in the healthcare system.
They rely on patient consent and authorization to get access to this data at scale. And what we’re doing is taking all the complexity around, getting an, integrating that into your business and simplifying it through a powerful set of APIs that you can build it and operate your business on.
[00:00:59] Why is it Important to have these APIs now?
[00:01:04] James Bateman: The reason that this is really important right now is because we’ve seen in the last year with COVID and the pandemic, a real uptake and acceleration of adoption of digital. There’s been over 90,000 applications published in the last year, that makes up twenty-five percent of the market today, and it’s growing. It’s growing fast and there’s a huge demand for access to this data to help them operate, help them run their businesses and use that patient consent. In a similar way if you were to log in and single sign-on to an application with Google and say: “share my demographic information”.
No one yet, has solved the problem of saying: “share my health information and allow those apps to get access to that” And that’s something that there’s a huge demand for right now.
[00:01:48] Why do people outside of healthcare need access?
[00:01:53] Kevin Callahan: Yeah, absolutely. So at Marble we’ve really cut our teeth on legal. And when you start thinking of legal, you think about, you know, things like being a little bit risk averse, thinking about staying with the letter of the law and being able to find product market fit under those circumstance. Have you given us the ability to really think deeply about our infrastructure, our APIs and et cetera.
And so having that, unlocking that for other areas. So if you’re thinking about everything for research, you’re thinking about insurance, you’re thinking about everything, even mental health and fertility. When you start thinking about being able to get the fertility success rate from 80% to 90%, that’s huge and that’s helping a lot of people.
And so I think that our road to this area has now allowed us to unlock that.
[00:02:35] Can you share an example of a non-healthcare use-case?
[00:02:40] James Bateman: Legal is where we’ve had a ton of success over the past few years. And we’d been in business specifically in things like medical, mass torts. So over 40% of the health data that is supporting the Purdue pharma opioids case on behalf of the plaintiffs has been supplied through our Marble APIs over the past two years.
And in that case, what we’re doing is we’re helping the firm ask their claimants to say: “would you permission us to get access to your medical files to support your case?” And then our APIs will pull that data from their healthcare facilities, deliver it to the business that the patient is seeking service from – in this case, the law firm.
But that business that the patient’s seeking service from can be from any industry could be a life insurance application, it could be virtual care, it could be consumer health applications, , life sciences applications, real-world evidence, or clinical trials and studies. These are all areas where those businesses can ask their users and their patient population for permission for data and we facilitate and make that process scalable.
[00:03:46] What non-healthcare verticals does Marble hope to help?
[00:03:51] Kevin Callahan: We have a number of different verticals that we’re really chasing right now. the first one is helping mass tort, litigants, with their process. So that’s one of them. The other one is thinking around using our digital services. various lawyers with their, onboarding and the various bits of information that they require.
We’re also looking at non-legal. So we have a number of different verticals, talked about, health. We talked about insurance. We talked about fertility. But there’s various other types of companies that are saying, “you know, we require this data, but we haven’t really had an opportunity to be able to get it in an easy way.”
So now that we’re able to bring it into our process, we think we can unlock a lot of value. We also spent, as you probably know, a couple of years in, the PI industry, the personal injury industry, and there is a whole business around being able to manually pull your data within the U S. That entire industry is evolving and because we’ve come from that area, and we know the players, and we know the process, we think that our product is going to be able to power them to their next phase.
There’s a number of other industries we’re interested in, but those are some of the ones I’d love to highlight right now.
[00:04:05] James Bateman: The mass tort and personal injury product lines that Kevin spoke about are really interesting because what they do is they build on our original product line, which was called MedChart.
The MedChart product is still being offered and sold into the legal line of business. And now it’s really positioned as a shining example of the type of, of services and products you can build on the base of Marble APIs.
The Marble APIs, what they do is they open up the flood gates to saying to all others in the industry: “If you would like to build these types of products, we’re going to give you access to the underlying technology so that you can do and replicate the success that we’ve seen on MedChart for the legal space.”
The MedChart product is evolving as well. It’s evolving in mass tort – now integrating more digital connected electronic exchange data that’s being delivered to help them with their case, discover. As well as in the personal injury space, integrating connected electronic data that lawyers can get within minutes instead of weeks and months, and using that information to make quick decisions on their case files and be able to get to a result faster in a way that previously was just inaccessible to that industry altogether.
So that’s super exciting.
[00:06:19] Can you share an example of a healthcare use-case?
[00:06:24] James Bateman: A really good use case is, we’re seeing all these digital health apps emerge. The first thing that they need to do is to find out some medical history on their users in order to make sure that those users can be matched to the appropriate services and offerings that those apps have.
So for example, in the fertility case, or let’s say a diabetes management. They often require you as a new user to submit all sorts of medical background information through a questionnaire. That’s information that really is pre-existing on you, that you have in your medical file, that you can share into that service through our APIs, that would allow your users to permission the data, to flow into your application. Then your application can use that to make a much more seamless onboarding experience and deliver a better service to your users at the end of the day.
[00:07:11] Are your APIs FHIR-based?
[00:07:16] James Bateman: In terms of how we built our APIs, we’ve taken a standard’s approach to make sure that we’re adopting something that is going to stand the test of time. So we’ve adopted HL7 FHIR in terms of how we’re structuring and servicing that data through the APIs.
We’ve also built a suite of proprietary APIs to simplify all the other processes around actually getting the data in your hands – for patient identity and consent, for how we connect to the health data sources on the backend, aggregating that data, providing some analytics. and on normalizing that information into a single standard to deliver to you. Then of course, you’re having the FHIR based standards for you to be able to integrate and ingest that into your system.
[00:08:01] Marble has been growing very quickly. Can you talk to us about that?
[00:08:06] James Bateman: That’s true are we’ve been on an incredible growth pathway. So we closed our last round of financing, a series a in that the end of 2020. And in the past year, we’ve been focused on deploying that, building out a world-class product team. We’ve had Kevin join, who has had tremendous success in building out a team of almost 30 engineering developers in order to build out the APIs and the Marble vision that we’ve had from day one.
Since we closed those funds, the overall company has grown about 7x and we’ve just seen an incredible trajectory and this is just the beginning. There is a ton of opportunity here. This is a $10 trillion global healthcare market that is transforming to really focus on these digital applications where a consumer can permission their data to be used for unconventional methods. And this is only going to get bigger.
[00:09:04] You’re fundraising right now, aren’t you?
[00:09:09] James Bateman: That’s true. So we’re in the process right now. We’re actually kicking off our series B fundraising, as part of this interview right here right now. So thank you for asking. We’re looking to get and find that next investor that wants to jump on this journey and help us become the leader in patient authorized health data APIs.
[00:09:30] What’s ahead for Marble?
[00:09:35] James Bateman: Looking forward the beta, our Marvel API beta program, where we’re looking to other industries to say: “Hey, take a look at how we implemented something like MedChart. You can use this technology and build your own version of the same for all of the other industries that I spoke of around life insurance, real world evidence, clinical trials, consumer health.”
This is a real opportunity to make this data accessible to everyone and really make an impact and real change in the industry.
[00:10:06] Kevin Callahan: We are also bringing the concept of an app store. So we’ve spent many years trying to, aggregate various demand sources from lawyers to insurance and many other ones that James is talking about. And so now what we’d love to be able to do is unlock that demand for various other companies. We’re partnering with a number of them to be able to add them to the app store, the Marble app store, so that they can bring their services to our mutual customers
[00:10:31] Where can people go to learn out more about Marble?
[00:10:36] Kevin Callahan: MarbleAPI.com
[00:10:36] Outro
