The Health Catalyst® Approach [old]
Click to see a 90-second overview of Health Catalyst
How Did Health Catalyst Start?
Health Catalyst was founded by a team of healthcare veterans with hundreds of years of combined experience leading care transformation at health systems such as Intermountain Healthcare and Northwestern University. That team now believes the lessons learned in their previous experiences should be available to every healthcare system in the country.
These healthcare veterans pioneered a new data warehousing architecture that uses a just-in-time approach to data binding to resolve many of the problems they encountered using traditional data warehousing methodologies. The Health Catalyst Late-Binding™ Data Warehouse combines that architecture with a set of sophisticated analytic applications and services to enable our health system partners to realize measurable value within months of deploying our solutions. Today, Health Catalyst helps clinicians and technicians in about over 250 hospitals and more than 3,000 clinics that collectively care for over 70 million Americans each year. These clients range from large academic medical centers to smaller community hospitals and physician clinics.
Health Catalyst Vision
Our vision and mission is lofty: we are developing the software, data, and professional services that will enable physicians to extend the following commitment to their patients:
“I can make a health optimization recommendation for you, informed not only by the latest clinical trials, but also by local and regional data about patients like you, the real-world health outcomes over time of every patient like you, and the level of your interest and ability to engage in your own care. In turn, I can tell you within a specified range of confidence, which treatment or health management plan is best suited for a patient specifically like you and how much that will cost.”
(Inspired by the Learning Health Community)
How Does Health Catalyst Approach Outcomes Improvement?
We believe that with the right evidence, analytics, and methods, providers can transform healthcare, improving the quality of care delivered to the patients that they serve.
Outcomes improvement consists of three core components that can be addressed by asking the right questions:
- What should we be doing (best practice)? We use best practices and evidence in the literature that tells us the best way to deliver care for a particular condition.
- How are we doing (analytics)? We measure the current care provided.
- How do we transform (adoption)? We implement change throughout the organization to become better at delivering care.
Together, these three components will result in better outcomes and value for patients. It’s important to note that all three elements must be strong. For example, if we are very good at keeping current on best practices and have a strong analytics system, but are not good at deploying that information broadly throughout the organization, then we’ll have pockets of excellence, but not systematic improvement across the entire organization.
What Does Health Catalyst Offer?
Health Catalyst offers a way to use all three elements (Best Practice, Adoption, Analytics) to drive outcomes improvement in your organization. Through these products and services we help our health system partners reach their improvement goals.
Late-Binding Data Warehouse
Our Late-Binding Data Warehouse brings together data from all your disparate sources—EMR data, claims data, timecard information, cost accounting systems, and more. This approach means we can comprehensively and systematically measure many different disease conditions and care delivery processes.
Late-Binding Data Warehouse Explained
Applications
From the data warehouse, Health Catalyst provides a wide range of analytics applications. We have almost 100 of these applications and many are focused on very specific disease conditions or specific care delivery processes. For example, we have an application focused on heart failure readmissions and another in our accountable care suite that focuses on per-member per-month spending.
Health Catalyst Improvement Applications
Services
Finally, through our services, we work with our clients to deploy a systematic approach to creating improvements throughout the organization.
Health Catalyst Professional Services
A Deeper Dive into the Health Catalyst Approach: Sepsis
To demonstrate these principles and systems in action, here is an overview of what you get with the Sepsis improvement application.
A Health Catalyst improvement application set is experience-based, founded on continual learnings from our health systems and their successes in improving outcomes. Below is a sample improvement application.
More Examples of Success
The following examples demonstrate how the Health Catalyst system can work across a variety of health system types and sizes.
How an academic medical center, The University of Kansas Hospital, is managing its data assets to improve outcomes.
Texas Children’s Hospital improves appendectomy care outcomes using advanced analytics.
As an Accountable Care Organization, Partners HealthCare successfully manages half a million risk-contracted lives through a population health strategy.
Community hospital, Thibodaux Regional Medical Center, recognized by The Joint Commission for its improvement methodology and success.
Links to Product Demos
The demos below show analytics applications available from Health Catalyst.
Clinical Analytics & Decision Support
Financial Decision Support
Operations & Performance Management
Population Health & Accountable Care
Care Management & Patient Relationships