Integral: The Privacy-First Healthcare Data Analytics Platform

Why automating compliance is the wedge to unlock the next generational healthcare data analytics platform

From time to time, we ask our founders to share their stories with our subscribers directly. This week, we’re featuring Shubh Sinha, CEO & Co-founder of Integral, a healthcare data empowerment platform whose cutting-edge compliance software reduces time to insights from months to days. We first met Shubh in August 2022 when we invested in his pre-seed round, and last week they announced their oversubscribed $6.9M seed round led by Haystack. Read on to learn more about how Integral is building the modern, privacy-first healthcare data analytics platform.

---

Integral is building the first healthcare data empowerment platform deeply rooted in privacy principles. Our customers use Integral to compliantly unlock the full potential of their data without compromising the quality of insights.  Our product accelerates time to insights for groundbreaking healthcare innovations across clinical, geographic, demographic, and advertising applications, doing in days what used to take months.  

Why the world needs Integral: Healthcare data is rich with information that, when paired with modern data analytics capabilities like machine learning and artificial intelligence, can unlock a treasure of insights. The rich analysis and secure sharing of healthcare data serve as pivotal tools with the potential to reshape the very foundations of patient care, research methodologies, and public health paradigms. Here’s just a few things improved healthcare data analytics capabilities could accelerate: 

• Epidemiologists diligently tracking real-time disease outbreaks such as Covid-19

• Pharmaceutical companies harnessing the power of vast clinical trial datasets to optimize drug safety and efficacy, and 

• Healthcare providers identifying trends that not only enhance patient outcomes but also bring about cost control.  

The Regulatory Catch: Healthcare data is, rightfully, a heavily regulated field that requires the strictest protections on individual patient information. This bottlenecks the ability to draw insights from this treasure trove of data.  To work with this information, one must strictly adhere to the stringent standards of HIPAA data compliance, which requires de-identification of individual patient information before it can be used in any data analytics applications.  

Expert Determination…Integral’s Wedge: Before Integral, a third party consultant with expertise in statistical analysis and data re-identification conducted an analysis and Expert Certification of the de-identified dataset, a process that typically took months to complete and resulted in low fidelity datasets.  De-identified healthcare data can be likened to an intricate art form, where every trace of personally identifiable information vanishes, rendering any attempts at tracing data back to individual patients virtually impossible. However, the process goes far beyond superficial changes like deleting social security numbers or shortening names to initials. De-identification demands meticulous measures to safeguard even the seemingly innocuous data points, such as demographics, ensuring absolute resilience against privacy breaches.

In my time as a Product Lead at LiveRamp I conducted these analyses countless times, engaging consultants in endless rounds of model edits and data transformations before we were able to push our analytics tools into a production environment.  This process culminated in the creation of a comprehensive compliance documentation report whose output was often flawed datasets delivered behind schedule and over budget.    

Integral’s 10x Solution: Enter Integral. Our platform automates this manual, consulting-driven process using cutting edge, privacy-native software purpose-built for healthcare analytics applications across pharma, insurance, health tech, and more. We’ve meticulously engineered our platform to streamline the expert determination process. Our software conducts continuous privacy assessments, affording our customers the freedom to experiment with various dataset configurations while concurrently generating a HIPAA-compliant dataset copy and the indispensable compliance documentation. It’s the go-to place for all of our customers’ de-identified data compliance needs. Through this wedge, we’re able to expedite our customers’ journey to data-driven insights by integrating this core compliance capability with a native analytics suite, making Integral the one-stop shop for healthcare data compliance and analytics.  

Where We’re Headed: At Integral, we’re ruthlessly customer focused, aiming to deliver immediate value to them for all their healthcare data privacy needs.  By serving that customer well and building trust, we unlock a massive opportunity to deliver healthcare data insights in a fraction of the time currently required.  With the advent of connected healthcare devices and AI in healthcare, we’re at the cusp of an explosion of healthcare data availability that will serve as the foundation for greatly improved healthcare outcomes for all of humanity. We’re excited to be the linchpin that allows everyone to deliver those outcomes quickly, accurately, and without compromising security.  

If you’re interested to learn more, you can check us out at https://useintegral.com/, and follow us on Twitter at @IntegralPrivacy.  

-Shubh