Allina Health

Headquartered in Minneapolis, Allina Health is a 13-hospital health system with more than 90 clinics across Minnesota and Wisconsin. This past Jan. 2, its CEO, Penny Wheeler, MD, entered into an unprecedented shared-risk partnership with a vendor she had done business with since 2008. Allina invested $100 million in data warehousing and analytics company Health Catalyst. The deal combines the two organizations' analytics technology, clinical content and personnel to "turbocharge" financial, operational and clinical outcomes improvement via a "living laboratory" for healthcare transformation, Health Catalyst CEO Dan Burton said in announcing the pact.

Over the past seven to eight years, Allina had been working on its analytics platform and doing a good job, Ross Gustafson, told Healthcare IT News. Through the new partnership, Gustafson has the dual role of vice president at Allina and Health Catalyst. Working with the Health Catalyst analytics platform and sharing intellectual property, tools and apps, will enable Allina to improve more clinical outcomes and do so more quickly.

Health Catalyst now thinks of itself as an outcomes company, Gustafson said.

"It just so happens that their core competency is around data management, or data warehousing and analytics," he said. "But, you know, a number is just a number until you can interpret it and actually do something with it to keep someone out of the hospital, keep someone's diabetes in control, keep someone's weight management under control or whatever it may be."

[See also: Allina goes all in for outcomes with Health Catalyst.]

Intermountain

Intermountain, known for its early work in data analytics, even before the advent of Excel spread sheets offered a tool for analysis, is three years into a five-year partnership with consulting firm Deloitte to tap the data Intermountain has accumulated – going back to the1970s. The data, amassed from Intermountain’s 22 hospitals and 200 clinics, is particularly effective for medical studies and analyzing optimal treatments for many health conditions, according to Intermountain. The products are available on a subscription basis.

"The use of our technologies will allow clinicians and researchers to more quickly discover practices that improve quality and keep costs lower," Intermountain CIO Marc Probst told us in a 2013 interview. "Research studies that previously might have taken years to complete could be conducted in just a few weeks instead.”

More recently, as Probst worked with the Cerner team on Intermountain's rollout of its new EHR system, dubbed iCentra, the team built in the 350 care process models that patient safety and analytics guru Brent James, MD, developed over many years.

James, chief quality officer and executive director of the Institute for Health Care Delivery Research at Intermountain, is known around the world as a longtime champion for standardizing care by employing data collection and analysis. Now the data he knows works best for patient care is part of the digital system accessible to all Intermountain clinicians.

[See also: Intermountain live with Cerner EHR.]

So many more

There are countless more examples of big data already at work making a big difference in healthcare organizations across the country.

Earlier this year, L.A. Children's Hospital announced it would expand its Center for Personalized Medicine. The investment in the center will focus on three areas: cancer, inherited diseases and infectious diseases. "This is just one example of bench-to-bedside translational research involving pediatric cancer genomics already under way at CHLA," said Alexander R. Judkins, MD, executive director of the Center for Personalized Medicine at CHLA and head of the hospital's department of pathology and laboratory medicine, when CHLA announced its expansion plans in February.

[See also: L.A. children's hospital gets personal.]

Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic and others are making their algorithm analytics on Apervita, a startup that bills itself as an analytics marketplace.

Then, there's the broad and expanding reach of IBM's supercomputer, Watson. IBM announced at HIMSS15, it would build a business unit called Watson Health. On May 5, the computing giant announced it would work with EHR company Epic to develop patient treatment protocols, personalize patient management for chronic conditions, and intelligently assist doctors and nurses by providing relevant evidence from the worldwide body of medical knowledge, putting new insight into the hands of clinical staff. IBM's Watson Health is also collaborating with 14 leading cancer institutes to accelerate the ability of clinicians to identify and personalize treatment options for their patients. Collaborations with more cancer centers are in the offing, IBM announced.