Intermountain Generating Population Health Data, Revenue

The second healthcare toolset Deloitte and Intermountain have launched this year applies treatment and outcomes across an entire population of patients, and is able to focus on specific therapeutic areas. Licensing the data is a revenue stream.

Deloitte Health Informatics (DHI) and Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Healthcare are expanding their population health analytics tools. The organizations announced their collaboration earlier this year to leverage Intermountain's vast healthcare data warehouse for insight into population health.

PopulationMiner, the newest analytic tool, launched in mid October. According to a statement from Peter Haug, director of Intermountain's Homer Warner Center for Informatics Research, the data generated with PopulationMiner will "provide insights into a broad range of medical conditions and clinical care."

This is the second healthcare toolset Deloitte and Intermountain have launched this year. In June, they unveiled OutcomesMiner, which analyzes the relationships between healthcare conditions and outcomes for a patient.

PopulationMiner is slightly different in that it applies treatment and outcomes across an entire population of patients, such as women over 40 years old, asthma patients, etc.

"This is a more narrow tool focused on specific therapeutic areas," says Katherina Holzhauser, assistant vice president of IS commercialization for Intermountain. "The market told us, 'Great, you have something for asthma, but we're interested in the broader population.' So we leveraged our understanding from the first tool, OutcomesMiner."

Intermountain's forward thinking (it started using computers to store healthcare information in the 1970s) has been a boon for researchers, but now has even more significance with the current focus on population health and value-based reimbursement.

"They've been collecting data and using it to improve care for so long … you can look at long-term trends," says Asif Dhar, managing director for DHI. "We found that the average, hospital systems that may have great data may not have all the tools in place for population health."

Dhar and Holzhauser both say that hospitals who sign up to use the tool will be able to better understand care patterns that lead to certain outcomes across a population of patients. The data that accompanies patient information is double-blinded to protect privacy, and includes 2.5 million records.

Intermountain's data is specific to its regional area, and there will be some variation, but Holzhauser says that shouldn't impede analysis from a provider that's hundreds or thousands of miles away.

"On one hand, some of the social variation may not reflect the nation as a whole," she says. "For example, we do have patients who have come to Intermountain for a good part of their life. But, we have a long, longitudinal view. There's value when you're wanted to look at real world information."
Holzhauser says that when other providers use the tool, in increase the richness of population health data overall.

"We're not suggesting intermingling the data," she says. "Rather, if they use the same toolset (PopulationMiner), for women over 40 with COPD, for example, then they may notice that at Intermountain, patients have a shorter length of stay, and then start to analyze why."

Another key part of developing this subscription-based population tool is based on the financial reality of increasing costs. Licensing healthcare data to other organizations to use is a new revenue stream, Holzhauser concedes.

"We are looking out into the future," she says. "We looked at accountable care and said, 'That's not enough,' so we asked ourselves, 'How can we be better, and also do we have value that others are willing to pay for?' "