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Month: January 2022

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Editorial

Three Tips for Building a Strong Security Posture in Healthcare

Regardless of where your company plays in the healthcare industry or your particular role within an organization, cybersecurity in healthcare is of utmost importance and should be a top responsibility for all members of any organization. Below, we share three tips that we implement here at OMNY, but also recommend for any organization in the healthcare industry. 

Tip #1: CIA Triangle 

The first is the CIA Triangle, a set of guiding principles that help ensure data security. CIA stands for Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability. 1.) Confidentiality is the principle that objects are not disclosed to unauthorized subjects. 2.) Integrity is the principle that objects retain their veracity and are intentionally modified by only authorized subjects. 3.) Availability is the principle that authorized subjects are granted timely and uninterrupted access to objects. For more details, check out this video: 

 Tip #2: Compliance and Certification 

Generally, compliance means adhering to a rule such as a policy, standard, specification, or law. Certification means that your system has been certified to be in conformance (compliance) with all the requirements of a selected standard. A certification is done in five major steps: 1.) Select an industry-standard framework, 2.) Work with a trusted third-party auditor, 3.) Conduct a security gap analysis and remediate gaps, 4.) Undergo the audit and achieve certification, 5.) Maintain certification. For more information, check out this video:

Tip #3: Maintaining Certification 

As you may have guessed, obtaining certification is only the beginning of an ongoing process to maintain that certification. Here are four efforts that your company should implement to maintain a solid security posture at all times: 1.) Make it a company effort, 2.) Automate evidence collection, 3.) Maintain awareness and alert levels, 4.) Set regular security checkpoints. For more information, check out this video:   

We recently implemented all three of these tips with our SOC 2 certification. We found that these three tips were great guidance and hope you can implement some of these to protect your organization as well.

About the Author:

Dr. Maik Lindner is OMNY’s Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). As CISO, he is responsible for the strategic direction and alignment of the Information Security Program. Dr. Lindner has over 25 years of Information Systems experience in multiple industries and currently holds the ISC2 certification CISSP – Certified Information Systems Security Professional. Prior to OMNY he held various positions at Dell and SAP. 

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Editorial

Four Ways to Create Knowledge and Value from Healthcare Data Using Analytics and Data Science

Improving outcomes, lowering costs, and increasing quality — in healthcare, these three objectives are known as the “triple aim.” How does investment in healthcare data and analytics help health systems achieve these goals? This question is important. Too often in this field, workers focus on the “how” while ignoring the “why.” It can be relatively easy for data and analytics teams to build an app or a notebook that “looks cool” or grabs some attention on social media by demonstrating a new functionality; however, the challenge is applying that work towards the healthcare triple aim.  

So how exactly can data and analytics teams contribute towards the healthcare triple aim? At a high level, here are four ways: 

Invest in open-source tools

Sometimes, analytics teams rely on certain tools or software with less favorable properties than others. Some tools are not suited for big amounts of healthcare data and may have file size limitations; some rely on a learning curve that includes “learning where to mouse-click”; some may require expensive licenses. Clinical and healthcare analytics experiences indicate that the future lies in tools that rely/focus on the following: (1) knowledge of coding; (2) open-source, community-based development; and/or (3) repeatable, reproducible, and programmatic processes.   

Embrace new analytics technologies

The field of healthcare can be resistant to change. For example, when automated blood pressure machines were introduced to hospital wards, there was some hesitancy and disbelief that automated cuffs could accurately take blood pressure. Today, these cuffs are a mainstay in hospitals and free up precious time of nurses to achieve other care needs. Analytics technologies that face similar skepticism include specific types of artificial intelligence, including machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing. 

Align with healthcare systems towards product development

To ensure that time consuming product development will benefit health systems, it is important to involve health systems at multiple points throughout the process. For analytics applications, this involvement often involves using a modern agile approach that focuses on rapid sprints and repeated healthcare system touchpoints, releases, iterations, and improvements of a product, rather than a traditional waterfall model that focuses on a single, lengthy iteration of the software development lifecycle. 

Take advantage of new payment models and government incentives

As the United States switches from a fee-for-service payment system towards a value-based care system that rewards quality over quantity of healthcare services, the government is offering many financial incentives for health systems to improve outcomes, quality of care, and satisfaction. An overview of such programs at the federal level can be found here: https://www.cms.gov/Medicare/Quality-Initiatives-Patient-Assessment-Instruments/Value-Based-Programs/Value-Based-Programs .  

Generating useful insights from healthcare data through analytics is not a one-day project — it can take weeks to several years for relevant teams to achieve desired goals, depending on the bottom-line impact amount and the project. These four high-level ideas described above can serve as a starting point to extract value from healthcare data. Looking forward to bringing you more webinars and blog posts throughout the year that will focus on specific, lower-level techniques and tools for creating knowledge and value from healthcare data. 

About the Author:
Vikas Kumar, MD, MS is a Senior Data Scientist at OMNY Health where he works on data science projects that focus on real-world clinical evidence, machine learning, and natural language processing. In his spare time, he has also authored a book on healthcare analytics, contributed to two online healthcare informatics courses, and currently serves as a teaching assistant for a graduate level data science course at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He holds a Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Pittsburgh and a Master of Science in Computational Science and Engineering degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology. s across the country in order to help guide the development of innovative solutions that can sustainably impact patient care.

Categories
Editorial

Looking Back and Looking Forward: Top Five’s for 2021 and 2022

Happy New Year! We hope your family had a safe and healthy holiday season. 2021 was a busy year for us at OMNY Health, and we made great strides toward building out our ecosystem and supporting our mission of accelerating clinical innovation. To hit the highlights, we’ve put together two Top 5 lists, reminiscing some of our top 2021 achievements and looking ahead at some of the exciting opportunities coming in 2022.

Top 2021 Achievements

Commercial Launch of the OMNY Health Platform

In May, we announced the commercial launch of the OMNY Health Platform, a platform that endeavors to bring together the healthcare ecosystem, centered around data-driven clinical innovation. Since our launch, we have greatly expanded our commercial pipeline with a number of buyers actively evaluating our data offerings and utilizing our platform.  

Successful Completion of SOC 2 Type 1 Certification

In addition to our May product launch, we also achieved SOC2 Type 1 certification that same month. To achieve this our compliance and dev ops teams worked hard to put 25 policies and 90 related controls in place in the first part of the year. Being SOC2 compliant assures our partners that we have the infrastructure, tools, and processes to protect their data and to ensure that organizational controls and practices effectively safeguard the privacy and security of OMNY Health and partner data.  

Massive Integrated Dermatology Data Repository

One month later, we followed our commercial launch with the announcement of our national dermatology data repository. Initially launched with 7.5M+ patient lives, our overall data set now covers 40 of the 50 states, representing 22M+ patient lives, and includes care provided by over 47,000 providers. This represents nearly an 8x growth year over year in our data partnerships. In addition to our Base EHR data offering, we recently launched a product containing Surveys, Questionnaires, and Scores data. This unique offering sets us apart from other vendors, allowing researchers to capture outcomes values provided by providers and patients.  

Research Driven Support for Clinical Innovation

Our biostatistics/data science team has been deep in research mode all year. They have presented over a dozen posters and oral presentations at a number of large conferences this year, including ISPOR Europe, John Snow Labs NLP Summit, ISPE 37th International Conference, DIA Global Annual Conference, and ISPOR Annual Conference. All research has been based on data from our data repository and is helpful to demonstrate the value and utility of the data offerings we provide to customers. These presentations have broached an expansive cross-section of topics from COVID-19 to dermatology to natural language processing (NLP). And despite the holidays, our team spent much of the last few weeks in December hard at work drafting ten submissions for 2022’s ISPOR Annual Conference. 

Strengthened Intellectual Property Portfolio

In addition to one patent that was granted in 2020, we have two new patents that were granted in 2021. The patents granted were Unbiased Drug Selection using Distributed Ledger Technology (US 11,093,552) and Private Currency and Trade Engine (US 11,094,013). We are proud of our innovation team for getting these patents granted.  

Top 2022 Opportunities

Orthopedic and Ophthalmology Data Repository

We’ve been busy signing a number of orthopedic and ophthalmology practices to increase the patient lives and type of data covered in our data repository. Similar to how we built our large dermatology repository in 2021, we expect our numbers in orthopedics and ophthalmology to rival our dermatology data by mid 2022. In addition, we’ve been growing the number of signed health systems and will have broader coverage across additional service lines and specialties coming as well. 

Rapidly Expanding Team

We are growing, and we are hiring! In the last half of 2021, we saw our technical teams double in size, and we expect to almost double in all departments across the board in 2022. We are looking for talented and experienced people who can hit the ground running. We have a number of open roles available on our careers page  and invite you to please send good people our way.  

PandemicX Cohort

In December, we announced that we are one of the fifteen health tech startups accepted into the 2022 PandemicX Cohort. We will be working closely with U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and Mass Challenge Health Tech to use data to help solve the problems of health equity that have been brought to light by the pandemic. This aligns well with our mission, and we cannot wait to get started on this project. 

Data Expansion

In 2021, the introduction of our EHR data sets allowed us to become a major player in the industry. In 2022, we hope to expand those data sets even more with the addition of claims data. The augmentation of EHR data with claims data expands the opportunities and types of studies for which our data can be used. Throughout 2021, we have been building our capabilities for using natural language processing (NLP) to extract structured fields from unstructured notes data. This coming year, we expect to refine our processing and productize much of this data. 

Insights Beyond the Data

In the coming year, our roadmap includes a number of reports and dashboards that take a step beyond just data and into the realm of insights. We have been working closely with both sides of our ecosystem on some beta products that will allow users to make faster, more data-driven decisions. 

As you can see, we did some BIG things in 2021, but have even BIGGER things coming in 2022. Thank you to all of our partners, investors, and customers for your collaboration and support. We could not be where we are today without your help. And we look forward to continuing to build on these relationships in the coming year. Cheers to all the things to come in the New Year!

About the Author:
Dr. Mitesh Rao is the Founder and CEO of OMNY Health. A Board-Certified Emergency Medicine Physician, Dr. Rao has held executive roles at both Stanford’s and Northwestern’s health systems, where he helped lead patient safety and innovation. As a physician leader and executive, he has helped implement systems-level improvements for quality and safety in institutions across the country and overseas that have had lasting effects on care provision. Throughout his career, Dr. Rao has helped implement and scale new technologies within the clinical venue and serves as a mentor to multiple startups and accelerator groups across the country in order to help guide the development of innovative solutions that can sustainably impact patient care.