Flatiron Health

Flatiron Health

Flatiron Health was founded in 2012 by Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg, two serial entrepreneurs who previously sold their digital advertising company, Invite Media, to Google in 2010. The company emerged from the startup accelerator Seed Capital, now part of Big Path Capital. Flatiron built a network of over 280 community and academic oncology practices, standardizing patient data from disparate EHR systems into a curated real-world database used for clinical research, regulatory submissions, and drug development. Its primary product, Flatiron OncoEMR, is a certified EHR designed for oncology workflows; the company also operates a platform that links clinical data with genomic, molecular, and claims data. The company's strategy centers on an end-to-end data network: it ingests structured and unstructured clinical data from participating clinics, normalizes it using proprietary ontologies and machine learning, and licenses the resulting de-identified datasets to pharmaceutical companies for trial design, real-world evidence generation, and post-market surveillance. Flatiron's clients include over 20 of the top 20 global biopharma firms by revenue. The company's technology was validated by a 2020 regulatory approval from the FDA for a supplemental new drug application based on Flatiron's real-world data — a first for the agency. Geographic coverage concentrates on the United States, with the largest clinic network in the Southeast and Midwest, and expanding partnerships in Europe through Roche's network. Flatiron Health is owned by Roche since the 2018 acquisition, which gave the diagnostics giant direct access to Flatiron's data platform and clinical decision support tools. The company employs over 1,000 people across its three US offices. Philanthropic structures are not disclosed; the firm has no known foundation or family office. In 2023, Flatiron launched a collaboration with the FDA to evaluate the use of real-world data for regulatory decision-making in oncology (per FDA, 2023). The company's operating model combines a regulated medical device business (the EHR) with a data analytics and clinical research business, a structural hybrid rare among health tech firms. Flatiron Health's structural differentiator is its dual nature: it operates as both a regulated health IT company (its EHR is certified by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT) and a data analytics firm embedded in the life sciences revenue cycle. This dual license allows it to capture structured clinical data at the point of care and then repurpose it for commercial research — a vertical integration model that competitors lacking an FDA-approved EHR cannot replicate. The company's governance under Roche provides access to global capital and therapeutic expertise, but Flatiron retains operational independence as a separate subsidiary with its own board and management team.