ARTICLE SUMMARY:
Access to data and the use of it are increasingly important components of corporate strategy. How it is valued, structured and owned differentiates companies and raises challenges in dealmaking. A panel organized this month by Medtech Strategist for Weill Cornell Medicine’s BioVenture eLab Accelerator sought clarity, and an innovative, focused venture capitalist separately gives her firm’s creative investment thesis.
Regulatory changes and technological advances are enabling stakeholders to access an unprecedented amount of clinical data, which they are using for different purposes in their pursuit of ambitious business initiatives.
Payors prioritize large, representative claims and clinical data sets for improving risk stratification, benefit design, and value‑based contracts. They often already own much of the data they need. Pharma, on the other hand, tends to pay up for deep, longitudinal, multimodal data (genomics, imaging, outcomes), with which it can de‑risk trials, refine labels, or support access and pricing—especially when it’s unique and tightly linked to real‑world outcomes.
Providers and health systems see data first as an asset to improve internal care and operations, and they become pragmatic“sellers” of their vast stores of data when rights, consent, and institutional policy are clear. In most cases, they require a partner or independent aggregator to turn that data into margin‑enhancing tools that buyers can deploy.
Medtech, on the other hand, increasingly needs high‑fidelity procedural and imaging data to train and validate devices, robotics, and decision‑support algorithms, valuing continuous pipelines plus detailed workflow context. The availability of high-volume data and expectations that applying it judiciously can solve long-standing clinical problems has created new opportunities and led to the emergence of a vibrant healthtech industry, with differentiated agendas, margins, and growth rates that investors gravitate towards and that lead some companies, given a choice, to position themselves as being part of (see sidebar at end of article, “Aclarion’s Choice: Healthtech, Not Medtech”).
