• Inside CHIME: Transforming Healthcare Through Information Exchange

    Inside CHIME - header

    russ branzell 3.3.16 by Russell Branzell, FCHIME, CHCIO
    CHIME President and CEO

    CHIME and its members are taking big steps to increase information sharing and improve care delivery.

    Every once in a while, it is good to take a step back and see the forest through the trees. As we wrap up a busy and exciting week at HIMSS16, now seems like the perfect time to do just that.

    On Monday night, during her HIMSS16 keynote address, Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell recognized CHIME as one of several organizations that pledged to improve information exchange with consumers and across the healthcare system. This comes on the heels of CHIME participating February 25 in the White House Precision Medicine Initiative Summit. I was honored to represent CHIME and its members at the event where President Obama spoke eloquently about the power of information sharing.

    As you know all too well, this is a critical juncture for healthcare. As we shift to a value-based environment, adopt population health management, extend care across the continuum and better engage with patients, we must tear down the barriers that inhibit the flow of information. That’s largely what the pledge with HHS is all about. CHIME committed to work with government and industry stakeholders to improve access to information, advance standards development and get to a state of true interoperability.

    If you take a step back, you’ll see that CHIME already has several initiatives underway squarely aimed at these goals:

    • As part of the Precision Medicine Initiative Summit, CHIME and OpenNotes announced a partnership to enhance information sharing between patients and providers. OpenNotes is an initiative that urges health systems and clinicians to offer patients easy and secure access to the medical notes that are part of the electronic health record, but often are not available to patients. These notes contain important insights that can better guide patients in their care decisions. Through this partnership, CHIME will work to spread use of OpenNotes across the membership. Currently, five million patients have access to notes thanks to OpenNotes. The goal is to expand that to 50 million within three years. Click here and fill out the contact form to get engaged in OpenNotes.
    • We’ve been working with KLAS for the past couple of years to assess the state of interoperability and information exchange. Last year, KLAS released an important report that identified some common areas where providers and vendors see potential for accelerating interoperability. KLAS is embarking on part two of this research. The findings will further help us home in on ways to solve the interoperability puzzle.
    • Lastly, our efforts around patient identification are foundational to all of this work. We can greatly enhance information sharing by finding a solution that ensures accurate patient identification.

    Viewed individually, these initiatives will help solve discrete problems facing the industry. Put them together and you see the tremendous potential we have to reshape the industry and transform care delivery.

    More Inside CHIME Volume 1, No. 12:

    Posted 3.3.2016

  • Health Catalyst Announces New Products at HIMSS16

    Company integrates analytics at the point-of-care for population health management, personalized medicine & real-time decision support across the healthcare enterprise

    SALT LAKE CITY, UT – March 1, 2016 — 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 is being aided by the company’s recent closure of its $70 million capital raise, announced Feb. 29. The expansion 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.
    Posted 3.2.2016

  • Health Catalyst Raises $70 Million Led By Norwest Venture Partners & UPMC

    Proceeds to fund product-line expansion for population health management, care management, cost accounting & real-time decision support

    Salt Lake City, UT – February 29, 2016 –- Health Catalyst, a leader in healthcare data warehousing, analytics and outcomes improvement, announced the closing of a $70 million Series E funding round. The capital raise was co-led by Norwest Venture Partners, the lead investor in three previous rounds, and UPMC, a world-renowned healthcare provider and insurer that is also a Health Catalyst customer.

    Two additional existing customers of Health Catalyst – MultiCare Health System and OSF Healthcare – also contributed to the funding round, continuing Health Catalyst’s successful model of investment by customers. Other contributors to the round were new investor Leerink Capital and existing investors Sequoia Capital, Sands Capital, Kaiser Permanente Ventures, CHV Capital (an Indiana University Health Company), Partners HealthCare, EPIC Venture Partners, Leavitt Equity Partners, and Tenaya Capital.

    “We are pleased to join Health Catalyst as a customer, an innovation partner, and now as an investor,” said Tal Heppenstall, Executive Vice President and Treasurer of UPMC, and President of UPMC Enterprises, the venture capital and commercialization arm of UPMC. “This investment is a signal of our strong commitment to Health Catalyst, and to our mission of improving healthcare by supporting and developing market-leading companies and innovations.”

    Proceeds from the financing will support a significant expansion of Health Catalyst’s outcomes improvement solutions for healthcare organizations.

    “Amid a very challenging capital environment, we are honored to have been oversubscribed for this latest round of financing at an increased valuation relative to our most recent round, continuing a trend that we have been fortunate to experience throughout our history,” said Health Catalyst CEO Dan Burton. “We are grateful that new investors UPMC, MultiCare, OSF and Leerink, as well as our existing investors, have provided us with the opportunity to continue to grow and expand.”

    Burton added, “As our customers have come to depend on us for data warehousing and analytics to drive outcomes improvement, they are also asking more of us. This new financing will help us to meet that request by expanding the breadth and depth of the solutions we provide for managing the cost and quality of care across whole populations of patients. We anticipate that this is the company’s last round of capital as a private company as we expect to be cash-flow sustainable by the fourth quarter of 2016.”

    Accelerating product evolution

    The arrival of new value-based reimbursement models is requiring providers to adopt new models of care centering on more proactive management of the highest-risk populations of patients. In response, Health Catalyst is evolving from an offline data aggregator and analysis company to a real-time data production and decision support company, integrating the knowledge derived from its unmatched data content and analytics into the decision workflow of clients and their patients, anywhere and on any device. This year, Health Catalyst expects to release new solutions for activity-based costing, care management, and real-time clinical decision support.

    “Our new products, funded by this round, will enable better, faster decisions, from the population level to the individual patient level,” said Burton.

    2015: A breakthrough year

    The market’s rising valuation of Health Catalyst as a leader in healthcare outcomes improvement was secured by the company’s stellar performance in 2015. During the year, Health Catalyst experienced significant expansion in the number of patients served by its customers to over 65 million, doubled its bookings backlog, doubled its revenue, nearly doubled its customer footprint and increased the number of team members nationwide from approximately 230 to over 400.

    Also in 2015, Health Catalyst grew the number of published outcomes improvement case studies to 61, reflecting the depth of its partnership with customers. In addition, Health Catalyst acquired important intellectual property from customers including Allina Health, Partners HealthCare, and UPMC to help catalyze outcomes improvement for healthcare organizations across the country.

    Posted 3.1.2016

  • Nordic partners with Qlik to bring deeper, more accessible data, insights to clients

    MADISON, WI – February 29, 2016 — Nordic, a trusted advisor to healthcare systems, today announced its partnership with Qlik, a leader in visual analytics. Nordic uses Qlik Sense® to bring insights to clients through flexible and interactive visualizations to optimize performance across financial and clinical operations.

    Nordic, ranked #1 by KLAS for Epic Services, seeks solutions for its clients that can simplify the process of getting from data to decision. Healthcare systems benefit from federated reporting models where their users can query data directly instead of waiting weeks for IT to respond to a request. In addition, organizations are asking questions that can’t be answered using just the data in their EHRs. They need an easier way to merge outside data such as claims, supplies, or social media. With Qlik Sense, Nordic combines its healthcare IT expertise in best practices and operational processes with visual analytics software that puts user-friendly data in the hands of the practitioners — right where they want it — within the Epic environment.

    “Arming our clients’ clinicians and operations staff with reliable data at their fingertips is critical to their ability to analyze and make decisions in real time,” Nordic’s VP of Business Line Development Matt Schaefer said. “Qlik delivers deeper insights to our clients. The visual data and analysis tools empower them to make data-driven decisions in a way that’s integrated seamlessly with their EHR and their workflows.”

    By partnering with Qlik, Nordic continues to bring the next level of service to its existing and future clients. Not only will the partnership increase the speed in delivering accurate, actionable data, but also offer a new, combined Qlik-Nordic community in which to share best practices and innovative approaches to data and analytics.

    “The partnership between Nordic and Qlik brings together two industry leaders in the healthcare space, enabling mutual clients to dive deeper into their organizational data and uncover insights to inform decision making,” Qlik Vice President of Enterprise Healthcare Sales in North America Brad Copeland said. “Together, Qlik and Nordic bring an unmatched expertise in healthcare and Epic environments, along with top-notch quality services and software, enabling healthcare customers to truly become agile as they face unprecedented change.”

     

    Posted 3.1.2016
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