Data alone doesn’t make evidence: Savana joins Better Marketplace

Healthcare systems have spent the past decade digitising records. What they have not solved, in most cases, is what happens after the record is captured: how that data moves, how it is governed, and how it becomes a clinical asset or research information that teams can actually leverage. Digitisation, although a great solution for storage, did not solve usability, and for most organisations those remain two entirely different problems.

This is the gap that the partnership between Savana and Better is built to close. Better owns the parts of the healthcare data ecosystem responsible for capturing, managing and sharing longitudinal health records on open standards. Savana is responsible for the layer above that: turning clinical data, especially the free text that most systems never access because it often remains locked in silos, into real-world evidence and AI-powered insights. Making Savana available through Better Marketplace puts both capabilities in the same place for the organisations that need them.

The timing is not incidental either. Regulators and Health Technology Assessment (HTA) bodies are asking for more complete, better-governed real-world evidence than the industry has typically been able to produce, and they are asking multiple national bodies to review the same evidence at once. That raises the bar on both ends of the data lifecycle: the record has to be trustworthy and interoperable from the point of capture, and the evidence extracted from it has to withstand scrutiny once it reaches a reviewer’s desk. Few organisations are equipped to solve both problems well on their own.

Why open, longitudinal data matters before evidence generation can start

Clinical data quality problems rarely start with the analytics. They start earlier, with how the data was captured, whether it followed a patient across their trajectory, and whether the organisation that holds it can adapt that infrastructure as its needs change.

Better Platform addresses that layer directly. Its openEHR and FHIR-based clinical data repository gives healthcare organisations a vendor-neutral foundation: patient records that are structured consistently, portable across systems, and not locked into a single proprietary EHR vendor’s data model. Paired with tools for building on top of that data, Better Platform lets care teams and IT leaders move faster on digital transformation projects without giving up control of the underlying record.

It is the bedrock on which evidence is built.

The layer that comes after data governance: turning records into evidence

This is where Savana’s role begins. Savana EHRead was built specifically to extract regulatory-grade, structured variables from clinical records, including free-text notes, discharge summaries and specialist letters that carry the majority of clinically meaningful information in a patient’s history, but rarely make it into a coded field. Line of therapy, disease staging, physician-assessed treatment response and documented reasons for treatment discontinuation are the kind of variables that regulators and HTA bodies increasingly require, and they are also the variables that structured-only datasets systematically miss. Savana EHRead was trained exclusively on real electronic health records rather than general-purpose text, which is what makes it possible to extract those variables with the traceability, explicability, and reproducibility that regulatory-grade evidence generation requires.

Savana NGR turns that extraction layer, and that network, into a Living Evidence Hub: an always-on evidence capability that a pharma company, health system or public health body operates on its own terms, expanding across indications, therapeutic areas and internal functions without being rebuilt each time a new question appears. It runs on a federated model, which is a precise claim rather than a general one. Raw, identifiable clinical data never leaves the source institution; what is shared for multi-institutional analysis is anonymised or pseudonymised, under the governance of the institution that holds the record.

For a clinician or clinical researcher, this distinction is not academic. A physician’s note documenting disease progression, rather than an adverse event, as the reason for a treatment switch is often the only place that clinical judgement survives in the record – and it is exactly the nuance that shapes how a case contributes to a treatment-response pattern across a population. For partners and clients already running programmes with Savana, the same extraction layer that reads that note is what already powers their real-world evidence work; what changes with this partnership is how much faster that data can be reached, and how much less integration work stands between a Better-managed record and a Savana-ready dataset.

Better Platform gets a longitudinal, standards-based record in place. Savana turns that record into variables and insights that a clinical, regulatory or research team can actually use.

Each layer depends on the other to be genuinely useful. Data governance without an extraction and evidence layer means an organisation can prove a record exists but not explain how a patient’s disease actually progressed. Analytics without a well-governed, interoperable data foundation means evidence is being built on data that cannot easily scale, or be trusted, across institutions. Better and Savana address each half of that problem, so an organisation is not left solving one and hoping the other resolves itself.

What this means in practice for organisations using the Better Platform

For a healthcare organisation running on Better Platform, the practical value of this partnership is straightforward: Savana’s analytics and real-world evidence capabilities become available through Better Marketplace, integrated within the Better Platform.

That integration matters for reasons that are more operational than they might first appear. When advanced analytics are natively accessible through a platform an organisation has already adopted, the adjustment path is shorter. Implementation complexity, which is usually the largest hidden cost of bringing a new capability into a healthcare IT environment, is reduced because the underlying data infrastructure and governance model are already in place. Because the two systems are designed to work together, organisations get more usable value from clinical data they are already collecting, rather than needing to stand up a separate extraction and integration effort from scratch.

In practice, that can mean the difference between a months-long integration project and a capability a team can start using within an existing workflow. A research or informatics team does not need to export data out of the Better Platform environment, reconcile it against a separate schema, or negotiate a new data-sharing agreement before Savana’s extraction layer can be applied to it.

For healthcare IT leaders evaluating how to close the gap between the data they hold and the evidence they are asked to produce, that combination, open standards-based capture through Better Platform and regulatory-grade evidence generation through Savana, addresses both halves of the problem in a single, integrated path rather than as two separate procurement and integration exercises. That matters not only to IT teams weighing procurement decisions, but to the clinical research, pharmacovigilance and population health teams downstream who are the ones ultimately asked to answer a question with whatever evidence the organisation’s data infrastructure allows.

Why this is a structural fit, not a feature bundle

It is worth being precise about what kind of partnership this is, because the distinction matters for how organisations should think about evaluating it. This is not two vendors packaging their products together for commercial convenience. It reflects a genuine division of work across the clinical data lifecycle: one layer responsible for capturing and governing the record on open, interoperable standards; another layer responsible for extracting the clinically decisive information that record actually contains, including the substantial share that lives in free text rather than coded fields, and turning it into evidence that can withstand regulatory and HTA scrutiny.

This kind of division is not unique to healthcare data, but it is becoming more visible in it. As healthcare organisations move away from single platforms that try to do everything and towards a stack of specialised, interoperable layers, the question stops being which single vendor to trust with the whole problem, and becomes which combination of vendors, each excellent at one layer, can be trusted to work together without creating new silos in the process. Better Platform and Savana, connected through open standards and a shared marketplace listing rather than a proprietary integration, are an example of what that looks like in practice.

That division is increasingly what the evidence landscape requires. As real-world evidence is asked to carry more regulatory and reimbursement weight, and as frameworks like the EU’s Joint Clinical Assessment bring multiple national bodies into the same review process, both halves of that chain, trustworthy data governance and rigorous evidence extraction, need to hold up independently.

Where to find it

Savana Manager Suite is now listed on Better Marketplace, giving users direct access to Savana’s clinical NLP and analytics layer alongside the platform they already use to capture and manage patient data. Savana DeID Station, which prepares clinical free text for safe secondary use, is listed alongside it.

It is worth being explicit about what sits behind those listings. Savana Manager Suite is the hospital-native layer: it structures and harmonises the clinical record so that an organisation can use its own data for care, operations and research. Savana NGR, and the Living Evidence Hub it delivers, are built on that same extraction layer, which is what allows a hospital-level deployment to become the starting point for multi-institutional evidence generation rather than a separate programme of work.

For organisations already generating real-world evidence with Savana, it also means a clearer path to the open, standards-based data foundation that evidence depends on.

Explore the listing on Better Marketplace.

To learn more about Better Platform and its approach to open, standards-based healthcare data, visit better.care.