"One thing that really gets us up in the morning is contributing a health platform to really change healthcare for the better," Dan Burton said. "We've been very excited to see the kind of tangible results that Allina has achieved." Burton mentions a length-of-stay project that resulted in a $10 million cost savings for that one project. 

Wheeler, an obstetrician/gynecologist, highlighted another project  -  one in her area of expertise. It's "black-and-white science," she said, that you must not induce labor in a pregnant woman before 39 weeks gestation "because it increases the risk of Caesarean section; it increases risk of babies going to expensive special care nurseries or neo-natal intensive care units; and it increases labor time, which doesn't do a lot of good things for experience."

Until Health Catalyst, Allina had no way to know whether induction pre-39 weeks occurred and how often.

"While all of my colleagues said, 'We never do that; we know we're not supposed to do that,' we found out through this data pull that they were doing it 14 percent of the time."

With Health Catalyst, Wheeler said she is able to correlate this finding not only to quality of care, but also to cost and to where variations in care might be occurring.

"So we can say, it looks like for heart catheter stents, maybe there's a lot of variability there," she said. "We better look at that and see is there any way that we can improve the quality, and make sure that any variation that's occurring is because what the patient needs and not just because we all think we should do things differently."

As Cozzens sees it, the type of inquiry into relevant data that is taking hold at Allina and other health systems across the country is "the next big thing in healthcare." n