Today Utah-based Health Catalyst, providers of healthcare data warehousing solutions, announced it closed a $33 million in Series B funding led by Norwest Venture Partners (NVP), with additional participation from Sequoia Capital and Sorenson Capital. The company launched in 2009 and has since seen its product being implemented in over 80 hospitals in the U.S. and impacting more than 20 million patients. The funding will be used to scale the company’s operations, product, and team so as to keep up with the demand from healthcare institutions looking to cut costs while minimizing the impact on the quality of services provided.
“We’re seeing a crescendo right now in the marketplace and a lot of it is driven by the unsustainable problems that exist in healthcare. We’re spending way too much money, if you look for example at the rate at which MediCare spending has grown, it’s never going to work for the next generation,” said CEO Dan Burton in an interview with BetaKit. “We help health systems once they go to electronic records from paper records…we build a data warehouse specifically designed and suited for healthcare that can identify these waste reduction opportunities.”
With hospitals migrating their paper records to electronic records and increasingly faced with the challenge of making use of their data, Health Catalyst steps in to help organize that data into tangible information that aligns operations with clinical best practices.
By organizing and making the data visual while layering in analytics capabilities, healthcare practitioners are more quickly able to get to the root of the problem and prescribe procedures and medications best suited to the situation based on both the patient’s history and data aggregations. They can also drill down into various segment datasets to gain specific insights, for example finding issues relating to their pediatrics ward, or all patients with diabetes to assess operations in a given speciality. In addition, the software is also able to prompt the institutions to check discrepancies when costs are rising and quality of the care provided is going down.
“The fundamental problem that health institutions face without a data warehouse is that even if they’ve invested in going from paper based records to electronics records, they really don’t have a way of utilizing that information to reduce costs and reduce waste. They just have a bunch of disorganized data that used to be disorganized paper data,” Burton added.
Other companies that are also looking to service the data warehousing needs of health institutions include industry giants like Oracle and IBM. However, according to Burton, although their solutions may have helped companies in industries as diverse as retail and manufacturing thrive, the complexities of patient care data require an industry tailored solution. He also said there were smaller companies providing point solutions that addressed specific parts of the bigger puzzle when it comes to the reporting and regulatory needs of the health space.
With the additional funding Health Catalyst will continue on track to target hospitals that are making a shift to electronic records and going paperless, in addition to expanding its team of 16 employees. With the need for effective big data solutions that provide data mining and data visualization capabilities in the healthcare industry being greater than ever for cost reductions, companies like Health Catalyst will look to step in to ensure that technology supplements the constrain in resources to ensure a high standard in the quality of healthcare.