Tech-Health-Explore: Breaking Down the Companies Tracking Our Bodies

Exploring Health Catalyst, Part 1 – An Introduction

As a rule, we follow the technological advancements of corporate giants in tech health to help inform those of us individuals choosing to define for ourselves who we are and what we want to be. That means knowing the world and those tracking us, good and bad.

Incredible advancements are made every day by health companies seeking to do good in the world, no doubt. However, we need to follow and examine them to enhance our own capabilities and positioning. We are not victims, we are active agents in our lives.

In this new topic within the theme, we are exploring a company ready to help make the healthcare industry efficient and reflective of market factors. I know, I know, we thought this day would never come. Well, it has come indeed, the real question is are we, the masses, ready for it?

Big Brother is Now AI, at Least in Terms of Our Health

As we leap into the age of Artificial Intelligence there is no doubt that we, as the masses, need to recognize that massive business is being built on our data. We are used to that in social media perhaps, are we prepared for our health data to be treated the same way?

Making Healthcare Efficient, A New Ecosystem Model Built for Healthcare: Three Elements

For Health Catalyst, the new opportunitiy they provide as a company lies in the reformation of how healthcare is understood. By creating a model that is built on the entire ecosystem of data produced by the individual business agents (hospitals, clinics, etc.) of the healthcare system, and the clients they portend to serve, their claim is that management of those systems can be pushed forward in efficiency, creating scaled value through lower costs and higher profits.

Fair enough on the surface. Building a new OS that is tailored to the healthcare industry with intuitive design, new levels of diagnostics capability through machine learning and artificial intelligence, and the service metric offered by Health Catalyst seems a straightforward way to interpret, effectuate and mediate data diagnostics on an industry well known for its data issues. Now, Health Catalyst is asking the industry to accept a single point of contact to envision a health care universe built on a holistic data aggregate.

1. The New Healthcare OS (Operating System)

The initiation of this system is a conversion to a new operating system. This means the point of data collection and integration. Clean interfaces, more intuitive understanding and reliability to the system, speedy and efficient data models built on the cloud, and full-scale interoperability across data sets, purport to be the entry to this system.

Simplified data interaction, with the clean transfer, is apparently the goal, and the integrated machine learning to this OS proposes to make data integral and maximize its use within the interface whereby care itself goes from “reactive to predictive, proactive, and preventative.”

2. Modeling Data for Efficiency

As for the modeling, this is where Health Catalyst truly seems to shine. Their software offerings provide a single point of contact for the industry to aggregate data and draw large-scale, executable solutions from AI inference.

All of these newly modeled services, like refill management, all come with a cost that is not illustrated within the proposals above. While all good things that would certainly benefit the industry, and likely the consumer within the masses, the issue left out in the cold is data security.

It is assumed that data aggregation makes the solutions better, which I would certainly grant that presupposition, however, at what cost? Aggregated data in one location provides a hefty target for bad actors already working across this industry with ease. Again, please reference the noted recent issues.

Ultimately these services do offer a unique means of cleaning up the data mess that is healthcare. Are we trading one problem for a bigger, more singularized one? At the heart of this whole discussion is the data of the patient, from billing to health metrics, it is the data of the masses being acquired, stored, and utilized to make these systems run.

3. Service Advisor

As any good business should, Health Catalyst closes the model loop with a services component. Offering an agency to step in and assist the healthcare industry agents with implementation and operation is key toward seeing the full benefit.

After all, heavy proposed benefits, when combined with ease of use, is always a recipe for successful integration. But does that mean that it’s safe?

Only Just Begun…

While we’ve only just begun our investigation into Health Catalyst we are going to leave off here for today. Always better to let new info settle in.

And just for full disclosure, we are long on Health Catalyst and do maintain a position in our portfolio, for we see a tremendous opportunity in Wealth and benefit with a company like this. A flip from above we know, we choose to be critical but also recognize opportunity and a means to expand our individualized integration.

In any case, next week, we’ll continue our drive and break down the tech a little further. We’ll look further into the services offered by Health Catalyst and more importantly seek out the companies stance on security and their proposal to ensure data safety for the masses.

As always, make sure we are thinking for ourselves out there, doing our own homework, and cyberize our lives with the best in disruptive tech. We aren’t doctors or professional investors, we’re just the average guy out there in the free flow of the masses looking for understanding and wanting to share.

For those fueled by health tech make sure to explore our BCB Cyber Health Section in more detail! See you next time on BCB Cyber.