Datavant Acquires Ontellus

Date: June 24, 2025

Datavant’s acquisition of Ontellus is worth a closer look.

This isn’t about dashboards or analytics layers. It’s about access i.e. to medical and billing records that often don’t show up in standard claims pipelines.

Ontellus retrieves source records directly from providers and health systems. That’s different from the large-scale claims aggregators many of us rely on, which collect data from switches, payers, or clearinghouses.

The tradeoff? Ontellus offers more complete, original records But it’s slower, more manual, and less analytics-ready

Still, this kind of data becomes valuable when you need: - Deep timelines for clinical feasibility - Pre-index lookback for safety signals - A bridge between unstructured chart notes and claims-based patient journeys

It’s worth noting: Switch-based claims panels cover a high percentage of commercially insured lives (varies by therapeutic area). Ontellus has no built-in panel coverage—it’s request-driven, so the focus shifts from scale to depth.

As Datavant integrates Ontellus into its network, we may start to see record-level clinical detail linked to broader datasets—especially useful for high-stakes analytics where context matters more than counts.

Now more than ever, it is important to ask where data came from and what it was designed to capture.

Curious how others are thinking about retrieval vs. panel-based claims access.

#DataStrategy #HealthcareData #RealWorldData #ClinicalFeasibility #RWE #CommercialAnalytics