The New Data Frontier: Carelon and Manifold's Blueprint for RWE

BOSTON, MA – August 11, 2026 – In a move poised to reshape how life sciences organizations interact with real-world data, Carelon Research, the research arm of insurance giant Elevance Health, has joined forces with enterprise agent platform Manifold. The strategic partnership announced today aims to provide researchers with secure, on-demand access to one of the nation's most comprehensive health datasets, tackling a core challenge that has long throttled the pace of medical innovation.

This collaboration arrives at a critical juncture for the global Real-World Evidence (RWE) solutions market, an industry projected to exceed $6 billion by 2033. As regulatory bodies like the FDA increasingly accept RWE to support drug approvals and monitor post-market safety, the demand for high-quality data has skyrocketed. Yet, this demand runs headlong into the non-negotiable mandates of data privacy, security, and compliance. The Carelon-Manifold partnership doesn't just address this market need; it proposes a new paradigm for resolving its central conflict.

A Revolution in Secure Access

The partnership's most significant innovation may be its solution to the industry's Gordian knot: how to enable robust analysis while ensuring ironclad data security. The answer, they propose, is to bring the analytics to the data, not the other way around. Through Manifold's secure platform, researchers can query and analyze Carelon's vast Real World Data (RWD) alongside their own or other third-party datasets without ever moving or copying the sensitive source data from its protected environment.

This “federated” model is a game-changer. It sidesteps the immense risk and compliance overhead associated with transferring massive, patient-linked datasets between organizations. “Organizations are under increasing pressure to generate timely real-world evidence and insights, while maintaining standards of data security and compliance,” said Mark Cziraky, president of Carelon Research, in the announcement. This new model directly addresses that pressure by creating a secure sandbox where different datasets can be analyzed in a unified way, while remaining physically separate.

Manifold's technology underpins this security promise with a suite of formidable credentials, including SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, and HIPAA compliance. Its platform is engineered to enforce strict access controls and provide a complete audit trail, ensuring that every query is logged and governed. This approach effectively creates a trusted research environment where speed and security are not mutually exclusive.

Democratizing Discovery

While access to data is one challenge, the ability to use it effectively is another. The collaboration aims to flatten the learning curve for researchers, offering a flexible toolkit that caters to a wide spectrum of technical expertise. The platform includes no- and low-code analytics tools for business analysts performing feasibility assessments, as well as support for advanced, high-code methodologies for data scientists building complex predictive models.

This democratization of data analysis is key to accelerating discovery. It empowers a broader range of stakeholders within a life sciences organization—from clinical trial designers to health economists—to ask and answer questions directly. "Life sciences teams need real-world data they can trust and infrastructure that lets them work with it at speed," noted Vinay Seth Mohta, Co-Founder and CEO of Manifold. He emphasized the goal is to create an environment "where teams can go from questions to insights in days, not months."

By streamlining the arduous, often manual workflows of cohort discovery and feasibility analysis, the platform promises to shave critical time and cost from the early stages of research. For an industry where time-to-market is measured in billions of dollars, such efficiencies are not just a convenience; they are a profound competitive advantage.

Beyond the Clinic: The Power of Holistic Data

What truly sets the foundation of this partnership apart is the remarkable depth of Carelon's data asset. Built over decades, the Healthcare Integrated Research Database (HIRD®) contains longitudinal health information for over 90 million Americans. As a payer-sourced asset from Elevance Health, it provides a uniquely comprehensive view of the patient journey across commercial and Medicare plans, with records dating back to 2006.

But the data's power lies in its integration. Carelon RWD masterfully weaves together closed claims data with unstructured clinical data, including doctors' notes and laboratory results. Crucially, it goes beyond traditional medical information to include a rich tapestry of social determinants of health (SDOH)—factors like food access, employment status, educational attainment, and income. This holistic view is becoming increasingly vital for understanding the true drivers of health outcomes.

By enabling analysis of this integrated data, the partnership allows researchers to explore questions that were previously impossible to answer at scale. How does a patient's zip code impact their response to a new oncology drug? What is the correlation between food insecurity and hospital readmission rates for cardiac patients? Providing the tools to investigate these complex, multi-faceted issues moves the industry from a purely clinical view of disease to a more holistic, patient-centric understanding of health.

Navigating a Crowded and Regulated Landscape

Carelon and Manifold are not entering an empty arena. The RWE solutions market is a hotly contested space, with giants like IQVIA and Optum commanding significant market share. However, the partnership's federated, privacy-centric model, combined with the unique depth of Carelon's payer-sourced data and SDOH integration, carves out a distinct and compelling strategic position.

Carelon Research, formerly HealthCore, is a veteran in this field, with nearly three decades of experience in custom health research. Its recent move to license its data directly, now supercharged by Manifold's platform, signals a strategic evolution from a service provider to a platform enabler. Manifold, for its part, is a well-capitalized and ambitious technology firm aiming to fundamentally rewire life sciences workflows with its AI-native platform.

By combining Carelon's deep data and research expertise with Manifold's agile and secure technology, this partnership offers a potent solution that is both powerful and compliant. It represents a forward-looking approach that acknowledges the realities of a data-driven, security-conscious, and rapidly evolving healthcare ecosystem.