Medical data management company Explorys Inc. has added three Northeast Ohio hospital systems to its emerging member network that’s aimed at harnessing information from burgeoning electronic records to improve patient outcomes.
MetroHealth System and University Hospitals in Cleveland, and Summa Health System in Akron, are joining Cleveland Clinic, the inaugural network member that helped launch Explorys last year. The regional collaboration is a model for how Explorys hopes to expand nationally in coming months.
“Expanding our network of participating healthcare providers, particularly within the same competitive region, demonstrates our ability to address the privacy and security needs necessary to foster cooperation between health care providers,” said Stephen McHale, Explorys CEO, in a written statement. “Now that we have proven that the model can scale, our next objective is to expand nationally.”
Founded in 2009 by data management veterans McHale and Charlie Lougheed, Explorys provides data services and applications that enable healthcare providers, accountable care organizations, and biotech and pharmaceutical companies to improve treatment, as well as to accelerate research and product development at the same time they measure performance and drug safety.
Explorys has curated more than one billion clinical records from participating healthcare providers in a privacy-protected and HIPAA-compliant platform for high-speed search and analytics.
“In addition to creating a network of peers for conducting break-through research, Explorys provides healthcare providers with a massively scalable and cost effective, dynamic data platform that enables them to leverage their expanding data to identify opportunities for improving care and cost of delivery,” said Lougheed, president and chief technology officer, in the statement.
Making the vast (and growing) amount of medical information searchable and understandable to doctors and researchers is key.
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“Every provider continually looks for ways to improve patient outcomes” said Greg Kall, senior vice president and chief information officer for Summa. “This platform will allow us to look at a comprehensive patient data set from across the region in new ways to better understand how to improve the health status of the communities we serve.”
Dr. Achilles A. Demetriou, president of University Hospitals, agreed. “We are very excited to be part of this initiative as we believe it will advance our ability to carry out meaningful clinical research in the future.”
In August, Explorys raised $2.55 million in Series B funding from Sante Ventures and Cleveland Clinic Innovations. The company’s Series A round of $1 million in October 2009 was led by 23Bell LLC of Cleveland, McHale’s and Lougheed’s investment company. And early this year, it snagged a $17.6 million, 10-year job creation tax credit from Ohio for potentially creating more than 300 jobs.
