Turquoise Health taps Komodo Health to democratize payments data, build new platform

Turquoise Health has teamed up with Komodo Health to harness claims data and build out a new platform in the name of price transparency.

Turquoise will use the long-term partnership to analyze claims data available through the Komodo healthcare map on 330 million lives to better understand patient care journeys. The insights will then be available on a new platform Turquoise plans to build out over the next year, the company told Fierce Healthcare. By tracking and compiling codes used to make up a service bundle, Turquoise Health hopes to drive down healthcare costs and fuel better payer-provider price negotiations.

“That is what Komodo brings to the table – the connection of all these different sources of data,” Turquoise’s head of strategic partnerships Tejas Inamdar told Fierce Healthcare. “With this massive dataset, we can start to extract associations.” 

The database is intended to include an open-source methodology. The company hopes to be “a neutral party where we're offering the data for everyone," Inamdar said. The eventual platform will consist of two parts. One will be available to providers and payers likely for a fee, and will break down pricing data for various services across providers and offer insights on utilization and reimbursement. The other publicly available for use by the general public.

“It’s exciting to work alongside a data-driven, digital-first company like Turquoise Health that shares our passion for disrupting the status quo in healthcare and finding ways to meaningfully reduce the enormous burden on patients as they navigate the healthcare system,” Aswin Chandrakantan, M.D., chief medical officer at Komodo Health, said in a press release. “Our collaboration will help democratize access to valuable cost information that has historically been too difficult to understand and interpret at scale.”

Turquoise is participating in policy discussions on price transparency, according to Inamdar. Recent regulations have ushered in a new era that is “set to dramatically change the way we pay for healthcare,” Inamdar said. “These ideas are being talked about, but ultimately there's a matter of building these out and getting these things out to market.” 

Editor's note: This story has been updated to accurately reflect that Komodo Health's healthcare map is based on claims data from 330 million patients.