Health IT

Health Catalyst unveils new data operating system

Through its data operating system, the Salt Lake City big data company is seeking to reimagine traditional data warehousing.

In an effort to improve how the healthcare ecosystem deals with data, Health Catalyst has introduced its own data operating system (DOS), which brings together the elements of data warehousing, clinical data repositories and health information exchanges in one platform.

DOS comes after a $200 million, multi-year development process, but its roots run deeper than that.

In a recent phone interview, Health Catalyst Executive Vice President of Product Development Dale Sanders explained that it all started when he was CIO of the Northwestern Medical Faculty Foundation from 2005 to 2009.

“My team and I designed and developed a next generation information warehouse,” he said. “We were applying it to Cerner and Epic.”

When he came to Health Catalyst years later, he and his team dusted off the concepts from Northwestern and started re-architecting them, dubbing the new solution the Catalyst Analytics Platform.

Soon after, Sanders was attending an event at Matter, a Chicago-based health tech incubator. While listening to startups’ pitches, he noticed a trend.

“The pattern that I saw in all the brilliant ideas is they had no answer for the complicated nature of healthcare data,” he said.

Thus, he decided to expand Health Catalyst’s vision of the platform by focusing on the data layer. It was renamed the data operating system.

It hasn’t all been easy — it’s been complicated to put together. 

We’ve spent the better part of $200 million on the ability to ingest healthcare-related data from just about any source you can imagine,” Sanders said.

But with DOS, the Salt Lake City-based company is offering numerous benefits to its clients, including hospitals, payers, specialty clinics and more.

Through the vendor agnostic system, healthcare organizations can more effectively manage large amounts of data, thereby enabling everything from greater physician satisfaction to better population health management techniques. Patients will also benefit, as they will receive a more personalized level of care. Overall, DOS enables greater clinical decision support, thereby increasing the value of EHRs.

DOS’ key characteristics include EHR integration, machine learning and the ability to stream data.

It has already been deployed at two of Health Catalyst’s existing clients. The company’s new clients are also being deployed on the system.

Sanders neatly summed up the need for organizations to keep an eye on systems like DOS moving forward.

“Every C-level in healthcare has to be a bit of a technologist right now,” he said. “They need to understand this world. If you’re not aware of technology, it puts you … at a strategic disadvantage.”

Photo: triloks, Getty Images

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