Health Catalyst, a provider of healthcare analytics, decision support and outcomes improvement has launched the Health Catalyst Data Operating System (DOS), a breakthrough engineering approach that combines the features of data warehousing, clinical data repositories, and health information exchanges in a single, common-sense technology platform. The solutions has already been deployed at two Health Catalyst sites.
DOS is Health Catalyst’s response to a simple truth: The future of healthcare will be centered around the broad and more effective use of data. From population health management to value-based care, healthcare providers face a quagmire of reimbursement schemes and quality initiatives, each requiring precise analysis of clinical, financial and patient data.
Yet to get there they must unravel a Gordian knot of diverse information systems that cannot communicate with each other and that separately lack the data needed to succeed. The explosion of information from wearables, mobile phones, genomics and other sources outside the traditional healthcare sphere is exacerbating these problems while also enabling personalized healthcare and management as never before, assuming organizations can manage the transformation.
Health Catalyst Data Operating System (DOS™) Solution Overview
DOS provides the answer: a vendor-agnostic digital backbone for healthcare. For the first time, organizations using DOS will be able to populate workflow information systems with critical point-of-decision insights, significantly increasing the value of the EHR to care providers.
Based on modern software and data engineering tools adopted from Silicon Valley, and the outcome of a multi-year $200 million development process, DOS was designed from the beginning to leverage open source technologies and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). With DOS, Health Catalyst’s new generation software applications can be designed and developed in a fraction of the time, and with a “decision support first” mindset by reusing existing data. The same applies to third-party application development, which can leverage DOS for the benefit of Health Catalyst’s clients.
The seven attributes of the Data Operating System are:
-
Reusable clinical and business logic: Registries, value sets, and other data logic lies on top of the raw data and can be accessed, reused, and updated through open APIs, enabling third-party application development
-
Streaming data: Near or real-time data streaming from the source all the way to the expression of that data through the DOS, supporting both transaction-level exchange of data and analytic processing
-
Integrates structured and unstructured data: Integrates text and structured data in the same environment. Eventually, incorporates images, too.
-
EHR Integration (closed loop capability): The methods for expressing the knowledge in the DOS include the ability to deliver that knowledge at the point of decision-making, including back into the workflow of source systems, such as an EHR
-
Microservices architecture: In addition to abstracted data logic, open microservices APIs exist for DOS operations such as authorization, identity management, data pipeline management, and software application telemetry. These microservices are built specifically to enable third-party applications to be built on the DOS.
-
Machine Learning: The DOS natively runs machine learning models and enables rapid development and utilization of these models, embedded in all applications
-
Agnostic data lake: Some or all of the DOS can be deployed over the top of any healthcare data lake. The reusable forms of logic must support different computation engines (e.g. SQL, Spark SQL, SQL on Hadoop, et al).
“For the vast majority of organizations, health information exchanges, traditional data warehouses, personal health records, and EHRs have all failed to make the necessary information for decision support available at the point of decision. The state of software engineering in healthcare is mid-1990s, if not older. I include Health Catalyst in this criticism; we’ve been valuable to our customers, and are ranked Best in KLAS, but we’re not satisfied. We need to be much better, for the sake of the healthcare problems we face in our country. DOS is that next and necessary step towards something much better. Even though DOS might sound ambitious and dreamy, the reality is, it’s a common-sense step forward. We have the technology, tools, and experience to make it happen, thanks in large part to Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Twitter. Like our Late Binding in data warehousing, I expect and encourage other vendors to borrow our DOS ideas and concepts, for the obvious reasons of competition but also because DOS simply makes sense for everyone,” said Dale Sanders, executive vice president of product development for Health Catalyst.
