Tuva Health launched out of stealth Thursday and announced a $5 million seed round led by Virtue with participation from Box Group and Y Combinator along with notable health tech angel investors.
The healthcare data transformation company is also announcing partnerships with Oscar Health and CareAbout Health that will contribute to its open-source data network.
Tuva offers the first open-source healthcare data transformation pipeline. Academics and industry experts that know how to transform raw healthcare data into structured, usable data can contribute to the free model, the company said. Tuva has 1,500 experts working in collaboration on the model.
The Tuva data model transforms large data sets to do analytics on relevant information for health systems like cost, quality, utilization and what drugs are best for what populations.
Tuva was founded by Aaron Neiderhiser and Coco Zuloaga, who formerly worked at Health Catalyst and Strive Health, respectively. Both Neiderheiser and Zuloaga are data scientists. They met playing squash in Salt Lake City, and, after discussing their work, they realized that they were both working on the same type of data transformation models at their separate companies.
Knowing that healthcare companies were working on the issue separately, Neiderhiser and Zuloaga joined forces to create the first open-source healthcare data transformation model.
The data pipeline takes raw healthcare data and structures it to help data scientists find answers to pharmaceutical questions, population health questions or operational questions.
“You would think that your health system knows how many people took Tylenol last week, right? It's like 2024, almost 2025, there's Gen AI, and they don't because Tylenol is made up of almost 700 different codes from multiple coding systems,” Neiderhiser said.
Healthcare organizations are continuing to gain more access to data, which can make analysis more complex, Neiderhiser said. Because of the interoperability push by the federal government, most of Tuva’s customers have access to between five and 30 data sets from payers, health information exchanges and medical records.
“We've made a lot of progress on the data access side of things, yeah, but we really have not focused as much on this data transformation piece, and that's what we're really trying to solve,” he said.
Neiderhiser said other healthcare data companies do not reveal the ways they transform raw healthcare data into usable data. In fact, it’s usually their intellectual property.
Tuva operates on the premise that the open-source approach will lead to a better model for more people than a few people in a room deciding how the data should be handled.
The ability to work on the open-source data model not only helps Tuva create a better data transformation model, it also gets the word out about the organization. While the data model is free, Tuva also offers paid services for data management and transformation.
“Now we have a community of nearly 1,500 healthcare data and analytics practitioners that we're having conversations every day around you know, what is the right way to do to build these different types of intelligence into the data model so that supports advanced analytics out of the box,” Neiderhiser said.