From the floor of the HIMSS16 Conference and Exhibition in Las Vegas, Health Catalyst announced it is launching the most significant update to its technology and product strategy since the introduction of its industry-changing Late-Binding Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) in 2008.
The expansion of Health Catalyst’s product development program comes with the strong endorsement of customers as the industry rapidly evolves toward accountable care, population health management and personalized medicine.
With the Health Catalyst EDW and analytics platform still as its foundation, the company has reorganized its product development around nine product lines, all under the umbrella of population health and accountable care:
- Population Health and Accountable Care
- Care Management and Patient Relations
- Clinical Analytics & Decision Support
- Research Informatics
- Precision Medicine
- Financial Decision Support
- Operations & Performance Management
- CAFÉ (Collective Analytics For Excellence), comparative effectiveness solution
- The Health Catalyst Analytics Platform
Health Catalyst’s new product roadmap is designed to give every healthcare professional the same experience of real-time information, collective intelligence, and dynamic decision support they have come to expect in other aspects of their lives, whether via Facebook, Google, Yelp or Amazon.
Some of the notable initiatives currently under development or in beta mode include:
- Adding text data and natural language processing to the core platform
- A Bloomberg-style dashboard for decision support for personnel from the Board level to department managers
- The integration of clinical data with genomic data for phenotyping and pharmacogenetic decision support
- An Activity-Based Costing system
- Several applications for ‘closed loop analytics’ embedded in the EHR user interface
- The integration of very granular, de-identified data from 65 million patient records into a single data repository (CAFÉ).
In developing its new product roadmap, Health Catalyst has adhered to a simple product development mantra: “Deliver the right data, at the right time, to the right person, and in the right modality.”
“The core of our business remains the ability to aggregate and integrate virtually any source of healthcare-related data, to expose that data to our analytics and algorithms, then to turn that knowledge into measurable outcomes improvement for our clients,” said Dale Sanders, Executive Vice President of Product Development for Health Catalyst. “Taking the final step toward outcomes improvement requires using the power of our analytics at the point of decision making, such as during a clinical encounter with a patient. Studies have shown that physicians are 15 times more likely to adjust their treatment protocols if you give them substantiating data at the point of care, rather than in a meeting or other setting later on.”
Sanders continued, “We don’t believe in the commonly-held opinion that healthcare providers, especially physicians, harbor a cultural resistance to change. Instead, we believe there’s a problem with the software that supports them in their day-to-day decision making. We’re building the products that will make it easier for healthcare providers to do the right thing, whether it’s population health management or personalized medicine for individual patients.”
Advanced care management and patient relations solution
One of the first examples of Health Catalyst’s new thinking and roadmap is its web- and mobile-enabled Care Management and Patient Relations application. After an extensive review of care management solutions on the market revealed none that lived up to the company’s expectations, Health Catalyst launched development of its own tool. The first of five applications in the care management product suite has already been deployed at client sites and Health Catalyst is on-track to release the next four applications in the next few months.
“The functionality of our new care management suite, powered in the background by our analytics, is going to leapfrog anything that is available in the market today,” Sanders predicted.
Learning from the nation’s best health systems
In developing its new solutions for population health management, Health Catalyst is relying on intellectual property and experience gained from partnerships with several existing customers, including:
- Partners HealthCare. Health Catalyst and Partners HealthCare recently launched the Partners HealthCare Center for Population Health to train clinical and administrative teams in best practices for care management and population health. Health Catalyst also licensed technology, content and analytics innovations that Partners HealthCare, the Massachusetts General Physician Organization and the Brigham and Women’s Physician Organization developed as part of its decade-long, nationally-recognized care management and population health management programs.
- UPMC: Health Catalyst licensed technology, content and analytics innovations developed by its customer UPMC as part of that health system’s effort to advance patient care while lowering costs. Since deploying its cost management tool in 2014 to blend quality data with physician- and patient-specific cost data, UPMC and its physician leadership have been able to drive significant changes in clinician behavior leading to improved care at lower cost.
