My brother, Jacob was born with a chronic neurological condition that caused him permanent physical and mental disabilities. As the only other child in a single-parent family, I was often with Jacob during his frequent hospital stays and doctor visits. This drove me to find ways to address the challenges we experienced during his care to help other patients and their families, and ultimately led to my purpose: co-founding Trove Health and creating a more equitable, transparent, and patient-centered solution for health data exchange.

Like any patient or caregiver, I’ve experienced the pain of managing and sharing multiple sets of medical records. What I didn’t learn until later from my co-founders, Satish and Venkat, is that a similar challenge exists for organizations that use health data in medical research and patient care. While there are millions of patients in anonymous healthcare databases, the data itself is low fidelity, without any easy way to contact those patients. And healthcare organizations struggle to access patients’ full health history in a format they can use. 

We got to thinking: what if we could build a solution to solve this problem for patients, researchers, and healthcare organizations, one where patients could control and own their identifiable health data in one place? This way researchers could contact patients directly for more information, or to inform them of research opportunities. But that wouldn’t be enough. We knew an effective solution needed to benefit the patient in a way that hadn’t been done before. It was with this ethos that we founded Trove Health: pay people for their health data, and let them choose whether and how to share it.

Paying patients for their data is a novel thought, and might make some people very uncomfortable. But, here’s the dirty truth: someone else is already making money off health data, yours (likely) included. The good news is that the real power is in identifiable patient data. In the past, anonymous patient data was a necessary evil; today, it’s no longer necessary. 

This is our founding vision for Trove Health: a shared treasure that recognizes and rewards patients for contributing to the advancement of life-saving treatments and allows healthcare providers to get the data they need to deliver the best care to those patients. Trove builds for patients first and establishes a new social contract between patients, researchers, and healthcare organizations that is more equitable, transparent, and effective. 

Will you join us?