Expanding Access to Trusted Real-World Data: Our Collaboration with Carelon Research
At Manifold, our mission is to accelerate life-changing medicines to patients. That work runs on generation of real world evidence (RWE), and some of the most valuable evidence in our industry comes from trustworthy real-world data (RWD). Too often, though, that data is hard to reach. Getting to it means navigating data-sharing agreements, security reviews, and the slow, risky process of moving data from one place to another. By the time a research team finally has what it needs, weeks or months have passed and the research hypothesis or program direction has changed.
Today I'm glad to share a step toward changing that. Manifold is collaborating with Carelon Research, a subsidiary of Elevance Health, to give the entire life sciences industry secure, scalable access to high-quality, analysis-ready real-world data.
Through this collaboration, teams can analyze Carelon RWD alongside third-party, public datasets without moving data outside their respective organizations. That one change, working with the data in place rather than moving it, reduces risk, strengthens data protection, and removes one of the biggest sources of delay in real-world evidence work.
Carelon RWD is a rare asset which brings together longitudinal claims across commercial and Medicare populations with clinical data such as medical records and lab results, along with health-related information like social determinants of health.
Accessing data across organizations has usually been the hard part. It means moving sensitive data, working out who can see what, and taking on weeks of delay and added risk before the first analysis runs. A lot of good research never gets done for that reason. Through this collaboration teams can easily access Carelon RWD and run the analysis without moving data outside their respective organizations, under the controls and governance required for that data.
What matters most is what this makes possible for the people doing the work. A business analyst or a scientific researcher can find the data they need, make sense of it, and start working with it directly, without waiting on a specialized team or a long queue, all within a secure research environment built for the privacy, compliance, and governance life sciences requires. That is the shift I care about most: less time spent getting to the data, and more time spent on the questions that move drug programs forward. It's what lets teams go from questions to insights in days, not months.
The first research projects are expected to begin later this year, and we'll keep working with Carelon Research to expand what teams can do with trusted data in a secure environment.
If you'd like to explore how your team can leverage Carelon datasets on Manifold, we'd love to hear from you.
You can read the full announcement from Carelon Research here.
With gratitude to the team at Carelon Research and across Elevance Health, and to everyone at Manifold who brought this to life.
