OutcomesMiner, a software application codeveloped by Deloitte and Intermountain, leverages 40 years of clinical data to help analysts glean the "clinical nuances" of comorbidities and various treatment outcomes. How does it work and who will use it?
Can healthcare's Big Data become less of a mountain to be sifted through by experts, and more like a utility to hook up, like water, power or cable TV? We're about to start finding out. Analytics applied to Big Data offers tantalizing possibilities for improved healthcare, but the complexity is enormous.
I spoke last week with Brett Davis, general manager of Deloitte Health Informatics (DHI), following the release of OutcomesMiner, a service that leverages 40 years of clinical data from Salt Lake City–based Intermountain Healthcare to help analysts throughout healthcare glean insights about the relationship between combinations of comorbidities and various treatment outcomes.
HealthLeaders: Where does this fit in the analytics tool universe?
Brett Davis: In a lot of ways, I wouldn't actually think of it as an analytics tool. One of the big things that we and Intermountain coming together are trying to solve is that the secondary use of healthcare data to understand what works for whom, why and in what context and at what cost, is not really a software problem. There's tons of great analytical software and tools out there, but the challenge is bringing together a combination of insights from health systems and firms that have longitudinal clinical data, combining it with analytical tools that provide nuanced understanding of outcomes in subpopulations, and then actually applying that to clinical change and transformation. That's not going to be solved by software alone or data integration tools alone, and so that's why Intermountain Healthcare and Deloitte really came together with our alliance … with this platform, OutcomesMiner, being the first result. OutcomesMiner is a tool at one level, in that there is software, but it's software meeting analytical and clinical insights from the 40-plus years of experience Intermountain has in becoming a data-driven organization—which … led to them being able to prove that you can take variation out of care and increase quality while at the same time reducing costs.