It seems incongruous that Herb Smaltz refers to Health Care DataWorks as “a young company with a long history.”
While the Columbus, Ohio emerging health IT startup has been around less than three years, its healthcare data warehousing technology stretches back a decade farther than that.
The former chief information officer with Ohio State University Medical Center (OSUMC) led a team that licensed from the university the technology that Health Care DataWorks was founded on. The company spent about a year adjusting and enhancing the software, which had been developed and used for about 10 years at OSUMC, to create a customizable package that can be implemented in hospitals throughout the country.
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Now, the health IT startup could be poised to capitalize on what’s expected to be an explosion in healthcare data — and hospitals’ struggles to make sense of it all.
“The problem our company solves is the ‘Tower of Babel‘ of data that exists in most hospitals and health systems,” said Smaltz, the company’s CEO. “We bring it all together in a homogeneous way to provide a unified view of all of the data that runs throughout an organization.”
Health Care DataWorks has already enjoyed some early victories, having implemented its technology at various stages in five hospitals, with negotiations ongoing at several others. Clients include Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus; BayCare Health System in Tampa, Florida; and Orlando Health in Central Florida. The company was also included in a list of five cool healthcare vendors by research firm Gartner earlier this year.
With its enterprise data warehouse, Health Care DataWorks aims to help hospitals organize and combine the vast amounts of data that are generated by hospitals — patient records, billing information, scheduling systems, purchasing records — and that’s just a few examples. The popular industry term for the separation of data into separate applications typically involves the word “silos.” Harnessing the power of so-called “Big Data” could help hospitals combine data that’s now isolated in numerous silos, boost efficiency, cut costs and improve care, the thinking goes.
“Big Data will become a key basis of competition, underpinning new waves of productivity growth, innovation and consumer surplus,” according to a report from consulting firm McKinsey & Co. That’s probably even more true in the field of healthcare, in which billions of dollars in federal government incentives for electronic medical records is expected to create vast amounts of electronic data that, for the most part, lived only on paper before.
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology said that big data holds the potential to “transform” the U.S. health system. That’s where Health Care DataWorks comes in.
The company’s enterprise data warehouse provides a pre-built model to organize the massive amounts of data flowing through a hospital. The advantage for hospitals is that it saves them the substantial time, expense and effort required to build their own data warehouse. Health Care DataWorks’s package also comes with dashboards and reporting tools to help hospital executives analyze the data.
Smaltz said it’s tough to arrive at a dollar figure illustrating the company’s market potential, but with more than 5,000 hospitals in the U.S., the company isn’t lacking for potential customers.
Perhaps the biggest challenge facing Health Care DataWorks is the size of its competition. Huge names in the world of technology such as Oracle, IBM and Microsoft are players in the enterprise data warehouse market. When asked why a hospital would choose a young startup over such established players, Smaltz acknowledged that he gets that questions “all the time.”
Smaltz said he answers those concerns by burnishing his status as a former hospital CIO and talks about the many years the company’s system has been in place at OSUMC. “We’ve walked a mile in their shoes,” he said. “We have credibility in that we come from a health system. ”
That credibility has helped the company add about 10 employees this year, bringing its total to 26. Smaltz projects adding another 15 or so employees by the end of the year.
Part of the reason for the hiring binge is anticipated demand for the company’s cheaper, web-based, software-as-a-service version of its system, which would be ideal for smaller hospitals, Smaltz said. “We really think that’s going to be the future,” he said.
