Health Catalyst on Tuesday launched its Data Operating System, a new platform aimed at taking its analytics, clinical decision support and outcomes improvement to transform the role that enterprise data warehouse products can play in healthcare. 

“The traditional view of a data warehouse, we need to evolve it into something different,” said Dale Sanders, executive vice president of product development at Health Catalyst. “That’s when we coined the term “Data Operating System.’” 

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Sanders said the DOS combines the features of data warehousing, clinical data repositories, and health information exchanges in a single platform into which Health Catalyst engineers also embedded text analytics and machine learning. He added that the biggest impact to the industry might be the real-time nature of data and the decision support the company can provide. 

DOS was designed from the beginning to leverage open source technologies and application programming interfaces. With DOS, Health Catalyst’s new generation software applications can be designed and developed in a fraction of the time it used to take, Sanders said, and the same applies to third-party application development, which can leverage DOS for Health Catalyst’s clients.

Industry analysts were also bullish about the new product. 

Chilmark Research managing partner John Moore said that DOS holds the promise to get healthcare organizations thinking beyond merely collecting data for billing purposes. 

“The Health Catalyst concept of a data operating system puts the analysis of data at the core of operations to deliver insights at the point of care,” Moore said. 

“It’s a profound recognition that the degree of data challenges that we’re confronted by in healthcare require a different level of industrial strength,” 

Laura Craft, research director at Gartner’s Healthcare Industries Research Group, called DOS, a profound recognition of just how challenging handling healthcare data is today. 

“They are one of the first comprehensive analytics vendors that I’ve seen really paying attention to the implementation of this layer of their architecture,” Craft added. “They needed to retool their foundational platform, and they’ve done it in a very smart way.”

Sanders said that company invested about $200 million in the project, which involved 243 engineers. DOS has been deployed at two Health Catalyst client sites to date.

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Email the writer: bernie.monegain@himssmedia.com