Health Catalyst Introduces Rapid Response Analytics to Accelerate Analytics ROI

New software solution drives 90 percent faster insights for health system analytics teams

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Jan 29, 2019, 08:01 ET

SALT LAKE CITY, Jan. 29, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Health Catalyst®, Inc., today takes another significant step forward in the company's leadership of healthcare analytics with the release of the Rapid Response Analytics Solution, a force multiplier for data assets and analytics staff.

Health Catalyst Rapid Response Analysts Solution. Reduce your analytics development time by up to 90%, increase analytics productivity by up to 10x!

Developed based on Health Catalyst's unprecedented experience in the trenches of healthcare data management and analysis, the solution supports three fundamental concepts and needs: dramatically increasing the efficiency and productivity of data analysts and data scientists so they can operate at the top of their skills; improving analytic consistency and data governance; and reducing the total cost of ownership for data platforms and enterprise data warehouses.

The industry's need for greater analytics efficiency, consistency and ROI is clear. According to a 2018 survey by HealthLeaders Media, organizations are prioritizing the hiring of analytics staff over that of every other role except care coordinators. At the same time, they are increasing investments in analytics technology to support the analysts, ranking clinical analytics their No. 1 area of IT investment over the next three years.

The Rapid Response Analytics Solution's curated data content and tools will help to satisfy the industry's demand for more efficient and affordable data analysis. The solution maximizes value from healthcare's most strategic business asset—data—by providing agility, speed, and consistency to analytics engineers and data scientists.

The result, confirmed by early deployment at client sites, is a 90 percent decrease in the time required to develop new analytic insights, which can translate into up to a 10x efficiency multiplier in developing analytics.

"Like every healthcare IT department that I know of, we have historically faced significant delays in responding to requests for data analysis, simply because the process has always required a data analyst," said John Sanders, Chief Information Officer of Health Share of Oregon, that state's largest Medicaid coordinated care organization, serving more than 210,000 Oregon Health Plan members. "Rapid Response Analytics is quickly making us—and our clinical partners—significantly more productive by enabling us to get data slicing and access out of the hands of the IT department and into those of less technical people who can now use applications to answer their questions themselves, without our help. It's a breakthrough that promises to make healthcare data far more accessible and useful to more people."

"The Rapid Response Analytics Solution is a game changer," said Mia Taylor MSN, FNP-BC, APRN-RX, Director of Community & Post-Acute Care Services at The Queens Health Systems in Hawaii. "We can bring timely, relevant data to providers and can partner with providers in the community to more effectively manage the total cost of care. EMRs are not built to perform the type of analytics we need to improve the health of populations. And it is challenging to provide effective longitudinal care when you have disparate EMRs. The Health Catalyst analytics platform and applications allow us to bridge that gap."

Analytics problems solved
Informal Health Catalyst surveys of healthcare data analysts and data scientists reveal that they spend 80-90 percent of their time moving, organizing and curating data, and only 10-20 percent of their time on analytics that benefit their organization. Healthcare executives have long complained that the turnaround time for data analysis is too long; their organizations suffer from inconsistent, labor intensive, and sometimes outright wrong quality reporting and outcomes improvement analytics. Similarly, many healthcare CIOs complain that the cost of supporting and maintaining data warehouses and analytics staff eventually becomes unscalable.

To help address these concerns, Health Catalyst began developing the Rapid Response Analytics Solution three years ago. Today, the first version is available to the market and installed at all client sites.

The Rapid Response Analytics Solution consists of two primary elements: curated, modular data kits called DOS Marts; and Population Builder, a powerful self-service tool that lets any type of user, from physician executive to frontline nurse, explore their data and quickly build cohorts of patients without relying on IT staff and with no need for sophisticated and customized SQL and data science coding.

DOS Marts integrate multiple data sources, harmonize the terminology, and make the most common data elements easy to use, facilitating the rapid development of analytic reports and applications. Built on the Health Catalyst Data Operating System (DOS™), DOS Marts provide a curated, reusable, customizable layer of data content, logic and algorithms. They are designed to address a large number of analytic scenarios, while encouraging governance and the efficient reuse of logic for consistent analytics. DOS Marts also provide standardized vocabulary mappings to key data elements and incorporate over 400 clinical definitions from nationally standardized data sources such as CMS.

Population Builder is a powerful and elegantly designed tool that simplifies exploration of the DOS Marts and dramatically boosts analysts' productivity. Population Builder is specifically designed to support the precise definition of patient cohorts, as well as the publication, governance and reuse of national and local definitions for patient cohorts. Clinicians, researchers, data analysts, and data scientists can use Population Builder in a real-time, collaborative work setting, exploring different definitions for patient cohorts, and then saving that work for downstream analytics.

Unburdened by traditional code-based methodologies, analysts using Population Builder can uncover actionable insights within minutes rather than hours or days. Users without SQL or technical expertise can build logic to define populations of interest, based on a breadth of dimensions ranging from ICD codes to genomic profiles. Additionally, Population Builder's visual building experience generates easy-to-understand documentation, enabling more direct and effective collaboration between clinicians and analysts, as these teams can review graphical representations of patient populations, rather than complex SQL code, to refine population definitions. Finally, Population Builder allows the defined populations to be published and governed into DOS, where they can be reused across a variety of analytic and software applications.

"We field numerous requests for ad-hoc reports and knew that Population Builder would be a great tool to quickly gather patient populations around specific illnesses," said James Henderson, senior manager of quality analytics for the Wolff Center at UPMC, a leading integrated health system that owns a financial interest in Health Catalyst. "As a first test, we used Population Builder to find patients who had been diagnosed with endocarditis, and in under 5 minutes we had our patient population. That search would have taken a couple of hours with our current tool."

Dale Sanders, Health Catalyst's President of Technology, commented, "With Rapid Response Analytics, we provide pre-packaged data that's been harmonized to industry terminology standards and value sets. It dramatically improves the efficiency of data analysts and data scientists. Our Chief Data Scientist, Jason Jones, who spent many years at Kaiser Permanente, Bayer, and Intermountain Healthcare, almost cried with joy when he first saw the conceptual design for Rapid Response Analytics. It's like a meal-delivery kit, so data analysts and scientists don't have to go shopping and build their own data sets from scratch, but they retain the ability to adjust the data to their local and unique needs.

"We give them what amounts to data kits that they can tailor and quickly turn into a gourmet meal," Sanders added. Other products on the market today force data analysts and scientists to operate in one of two modes, either conducting their analysis under the constraints of highly-structured, monolithic data models, like star schemas—that's the 1990s frozen TV dinners of data analysis—or laboriously piecing together the data that they need to build their own schema, store it, then build and maintain the data extraction and loads. That's the equivalent of spending their time shopping at the grocery store and cooking every meal from scratch."

Sanders continued, "The Rapid Response Analytics Solution lets analysts and data scientists devote their time and skills to actual analysis, not rote data movement and modeling. It also improves data governance by enabling more consistent analytic results. And, over time, it radically decreases the proliferation of data objects in the data warehouse which is a major source of increasing infrastructure and platform performance cost. Prior to coming to Health Catalyst, I was a data-driven healthcare CIO who had to either pay for all of these inefficiencies or eliminate them. My teams and I eliminated them and now the same data technology is available to the market. We feel very fortunate to provide that."

For more information about the Rapid Response Analytics Solution, visit: https://www.healthcatalyst.com/product/rapid-response-analytics-solution/.

About Health Catalyst
Health Catalyst, Inc. is a next-generation data, analytics, and decision-support company, committed to being a catalyst for massive, sustained improvements in healthcare outcomes. We are the leaders in a new era of advanced predictive analytics for population health and value-based care with a suite of machine learning-driven solutions, decades of outcomes improvement expertise, and an unparalleled ability to unleash and integrate data from across the healthcare ecosystem. Our Health Catalyst Data Operating System (DOS™)—a next-generation data warehouse and application development platform powered by data from more than 100 million patients, and encompassing over 1 trillion facts—helps improve quality, add efficiency and lower costs for organizations ranging from the largest US health system to forward-thinking physician practices. Our technology and professional services can help you keep patients engaged and healthy in their homes, communities, and workplaces, and we can help you optimize care delivery to those patients when it becomes necessary. We are grateful to be recognized by Fortune, Gallup, Glassdoor, Modern Healthcare and a host of others as a Best Place to Work in technology and healthcare. Visit www.healthcatalyst.com and follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

Media Contact:
Todd Stein
Amendola Communications
510-417-0612
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SOURCE Health Catalyst