Digital health technologies are changing how care is delivered, but how do we substantiate claims that these innovations are effective? Proving that a platform improves health or saves money is essential, yet many organizations still lack the tools or data needed to measure the impact.
Truven combines real-world data, advanced healthcare analytics, and member engagement solutions to provide a platform that enables organizations to translate complex data into actionable insights. This data-driven approach has enabled companies such as Lantern Specialty Care to transform how they validate their impact by uncovering significant variations in reimbursement rates across care settings and geographic regions. Lantern partnered with Truven to conduct a regional pricing analysis of common musculoskeletal procedures.
Lessons learned from these market-based comparisons show that healthcare organizations can identify where costs are unusually high or low by examining how much providers are paid for the same services. They can also determine whether those differences reflect variations in quality, and make smarter decisions about the providers to include in their networks or how to negotiate fairer, value-driven prices.
Tracking user engagement in health platforms
Before we dive into Lantern’s success, we’ll explore how Truven aids user engagement in health platforms. Truven’s Measurement Strategy provides the structure and credibility that digital health organizations need, enabling them to quantify Return on Investment (ROI) and Value on Investment (VOI), which have become essential for securing leadership buy-in and guiding long-term planning.
Organizations can assess patterns of user engagement, track adherence rates, and identify utilization trends that reveal how patients are interacting with services. This provides insights into the areas where interventions are succeeding and where further engagement or education may be required.
Such data also makes it easier to pinpoint the characteristics of high-performing user segments who respond more positively to specific products or services. By understanding these segments in depth, digital health providers can tailor their strategies, improve targeting, and refine future iterations of their offerings.
Truven Health Insights and MarketScan, a Truven data solution, are two complementary tools that deliver actionable insights to Truven customers. Health Insights synthesizes diverse datasets, such as medical and pharmacy claims, to help organizations better understand their health and benefits programs. The information drawn from Health Insights then feeds directly into MarketScan, which provides comprehensive, de-identified claims databases. Together, the two platforms create a dynamic feedback loop. Health Insights delivers clarity on internal programs, while MarketScan supplies external, real-world data.
One of Truven’s key strengths is combining disparate data sources and aligning them with healthcare standards. The ability to standardize non-standard data ensures that organizations are working from a single, reliable source of truth. Truven’s expertise ensures that comparisons across regions, populations, or time periods are meaningful and that insights can confidently inform strategic decisions.
Demonstrating program effectiveness and product impact
MarketScan is built on a broad repository of claims sourced directly from more than 350 large employers and over 40 health plans. After rigorous curation, quality assurance, and de-identification, the data becomes part of one of the most comprehensive and trusted real-world datasets available in healthcare.
The platform encompasses three core claims databases, including Commercial, Medicare, and Medicaid, as well as several specialized datasets. This offers 99% completeness across medical claims, eligibility, and actual costs. MarketScan also covers every US state and age group, providing users with a panoramic view of the healthcare landscape.
Some digital health organizations choose to license MarketScan data directly, providing them full analytical control and the ability to build custom benchmarks or compare results with similar populations. Others prefer MarketScan Benchmarking, which provides analytically ready-to-use benchmarks, saving time and resources while maintaining analytical rigor. A third option is linking to MarketScan, which allows organizations to securely connect their own data to MarketScan’s closed claims via third-party tokenization.
Transforming health decision-making with data-driven analysis
Truven’s work with Lantern Specialty Care is one example of how data-driven analysis can transform decision-making.
By leveraging MarketScan’s rich dataset, Lantern evaluated regional cost and utilization trends across ten major Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), amounting to more than a quarter of the US population. The analysis examined reimbursement for each procedural component across multiple care settings, including inpatient facilities, outpatient hospitals, and ambulatory surgical centers.
Lantern identified clear regional price variations at the procedure-code level, enabling them to make informed decisions about contracting, resource allocation, and pricing transparency. This includes insights into how implants are often excluded from administrative claims and omitted from standard cost analyses, distorting the true picture of procedure expenses. MarketScan’s comprehensive claims data allowed Lantern to correct those omissions, revealing the real cost structure and enabling more accurate financial modelling.
MarketScan: A Truven data solution
Truven receives closed, fully adjudicated claims from MarketScan to ensure that every record reflects real transactions and verified reimbursements. Each dataset is carefully compiled, standardized across employers, and then de-identified to protect individual privacy.
Through third-party tokenization, MarketScan data can be securely linked to external datasets such as electronic health records or digital health platform usage metrics, enabling richer longitudinal analyses and real-world evidence generation without compromising privacy, making MarketScan uniquely suited to help digital health organizations bridge the gap between clinical outcomes and financial realities.
MarketScan enables organizations to validate program performance, benchmark outcomes against national standards, and uncover opportunities for efficiency and improvement.
To learn more about the capabilities offered by MarketScan, download the document below.
