Health IT

Working without a plan helped big data startup find new healthcare customers

It isn’t really fair to say health IT startup Explorys has changed its plan since […]

It isn’t really fair to say health IT startup Explorys has changed its plan since it started. That’s because when the company started, it didn’t have a plan.

That might not be so rare in the tech world that founders Steve McHale (CEO) and Charlie Lougheed (president and CTO) hail from, but it’s a little less common in healthcare.

“A lot of people thought we were crazy to start without a business plan,” Lougheed said, but it was all part of a discovery process.

McHale and Lougheed did know one thing in the beginning: The U.S. healthcare system is awash in more data than the organizations and companies in the industry are able to make sense of.

“They had a big data problem on their hands and we knew if we solved that even a little, we’d be successful,” Lougheed said.

So Explorys, a three-year-old company spun out from technology developed by Dr. Anil Jain at Cleveland Clinic, set out to help researchers from pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies mine their data in real time to gain clinical insights, such as information on drug safety. And that’s primarily what Explorys did for its first year, until things changed.

It didn’t take Explorys long to pivot and realize it could better serve hospital and health system clients.

There was no one “aha!” moment associated with the pivot. Rather, it was an accumulation of a number of factors — federal health reform’s push toward pay for performance and accountable care organizations, the industry-wide recognition that costs must come down and the company’s own limited resources all played a role.

But more than anything else, conversations with C-level health system executives convinced Explorys that hospitals had a greater need for the deep data analytics that the company could provide.

While there are plenty of health system financial dashboard products on the market, what hospitals were lacking was a tool that could connect clinical outcomes to that financial data and query vast amounts of data in real time while giving clinicians new insights into the most cost-effective treatments, according to McHale.

So, Explorys took those conversations to heart and switched focus. It now has 10 health system clients and is looking to double that number this year, along with its number of employees to 100.

“If there’s anything I want our company to be known for, it’s our ability to be coached,” Lougheed said. “We’ll listen to our customers.”

Plus, the company still plans to eventually circle back to the drug industry, and in a few years, grow its business there, as it’s doing with hospitals now.

“When we master [the] healthcare [market], we can partner with pharma anytime we like,” McHale said.

 

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