Digital fitness company Whoop and Datavant, a Californian company that helps healthcare organisations securely connect their data, are connecting wearable data to improve health insights.

The partnership should enable de-identified linking of vital signs and biomarker data including heart rate variability, resting heart rate and sleep to other real world data.

Massachusetts-based Whoop is a personalised round-the-clock digital fitness and health coach that helps people make meaningful lifestyle changes via actionable feedback on sleep, recovery and strain. The Whoop subscription includes a coaching platform designed to optimise behaviour with insights grounded in biomarker measurement. Studies show that after a year using Whoop, members experience longer and more consistent sleep, improved physiology, and enhanced physical performance.

“Through our partnership with Datavant, we are enabling clinicians, researchers and payers to unlock a new level of insight,” said Will Ahmed, CEO of Whoop. “Together, Datavant and Whoop will empower healthcare professionals to deliver personalised medicine, accelerate clinical research, and improve the cost and quality of care.”

The partnership will enable healthcare, life sciences, providers and payer organisations to link human performance measurement data in a secure, compliant way to support outcomes research and improve understanding of the full patient health journey.

“Traditionally, medical information is collected only when patients visit a doctor’s office, creating huge gaps in understanding the everyday health of patients,” said Travis May, president of Datavant. “The ability to safely connect wearable data with real-world data will provide unprecedented insight into the relationship between daily indicators of wellness, development of disease and the impact of treatment.”

Whoop membership comes with a coaching platform designed to optimise behaviour, and a community of high performers. Members include professional athletes, Fortune 500 CEOs, fitness enthusiasts, military personnel, frontline workers and anyone looking to improve their performance.

Founded in 2012, Whoop is based in Boston and has raised more than $400m in venture capital.

Datavant works to reduce the friction of data sharing across the healthcare industry by building a neutral, trusted and ubiquitous technology that protects the privacy of patients while supporting the exchange of identified and de-identified health data across tens of thousands of healthcare institutions.

It recently announced that it was collaborating with health systems to protect patient privacy while supporting critical clinical research and improved care delivery. The collaboration should enable greater participation in research on life threatening diseases and improve insight into patients’ care needs with enhanced privacy features and data controls. Geisinger, Emory Healthcare, Bon Secours Mercy Health and Lee Health are among a group of health systems adopting Datavant Switchboard with a total of 50 million patients.

“Datavant’s technology allows us to protect our patients’ data while supporting key research and care improvement initiatives like caring for vulnerable populations,” said David Vawdrey, chief data informatics officer for Geisinger.

Pete McCabe, CEO of Datavant, added: “We are thrilled to partner with these leading health systems committed to delivering the best care to patients. Datavant’s privacy-preserving data connectivity will add a level of granular insight into their patient populations enabling tailored care delivery and ground-breaking research that could yield life-saving therapies for patients.”