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Category: Editorial

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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.

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Editorial

ISPOR Annual 2021 Sheds Light on Impact of COVID-19

The International Society of Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) annual conference was held May 14-17, 2021. Although the conference assumed a virtual format like last year due to the pandemic, it did not disappoint, as it was filled with lots of thought-provoking content and engaged interactive discussions. As expected, many of the sessions were focused on COVID-19 and its impact on health economics and outcomes research (HEOR). Here are a few highlights:

The opening plenary session, which consisted of a diverse group of panelists from around the globe, focused on the response of various health systems on the COVID-19 pandemic. Topics of discussion included the strengths and weaknesses of health systems exposed by the pandemic, their swift and cohesive responses, and the collaboration with the pharmaceutical industry to help bring vaccines to market in record time. Other particularly interesting sessions on the first day included access and inequalities of COVID-19 vaccines, quantitative bias analysis in measuring treatment effects in real-world data, and the effect of the pandemic on the real-world evidence generation.

The second- and third-day plenary sessions generated several lively discussions on methodological issues of HEOR assessments in the wake of the pandemic and the new types of collaborations in the HEOR space between traditional players (e.g., regulators, payers, and providers) and new players (e.g., digital health startups and technology companies). General sessions and issue panels focused on various topics, including access to combination therapy in oncology, the application of public health data to evaluate COVID-19 interventions, the increasing dependence on real-world evidence, handling missing data in analysis, real-world data transparency, and machine learning methods as they relate to HEOR topics.

Finally, the poster sessions provided much valuable information on a diverse range of HEOR topics. OMNY Health contributed 4 posters based on the analysis of real-world data from our platform on the topics of psoriasis, pressure ulcers, identifying COVID-19 patients from unstructured clinical notes, and the COVID-19 hospitalized patient experience.

These though-provoking sessions that primarily revolved around COVID-19 provided interesting perspectives into the impact of the pandemic on the acceleration of innovation in healthcare. As we re-surface from the pandemic and additional data and discussions about the reach of healthcare and utilization of data evolve, it will be interesting to see where the remainder of 2021 takes us.

To learn more about this story and how to partner with OMNY Health, please contact us.

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Editorial

The Road to Recovery for Hospitals

Most health system executives will agree: this pandemic has made an already tough situation worse. According to a 2018 BCG report, around 50% of US hospital capacity had a negative operating margin. Health systems were facing financial insecurity long before COVID-19, mainly from the twin pressures of declining reimbursement rates and rising operating costs.

Unfortunately, the end of the pandemic might not mean the end to providers’ financial problems. With elective surgeries postponed during COVID-19, revenue projections for this year have dropped sharply; there are estimates that about 25% of rural hospitals are at risk of closing due to financial strain. To simply stay solvent, many hospitals have found themselves faced with the decision to lay off front-line workers at a time when they are needed the most.

As the country begins to normalize and we begin exiting our first post COVID-19 peak, leaders at hospitals will have to start facing some tough decisions. The stimulus bills passed by Congress have helped, but not enough, and at best hospitals will currently recover only a fraction of the costs they have incurred. Based on recent figures from the American Hospital Association hospitals stand to collectively lose $202.6 billion through June. Last month (April 2020) has been one of the worst on record for hospital finances: operating margins plummeted almost 300% compared to the same period last year. The solutions for hospitals in the past have always been operations focused: opportunities around system efficiencies, revenue cycle management, and value-based care to improve cost-savings. New challenges require new approaches, and we at OMNY Health™ feel there is an important untapped channel to explore: leveraging data to create new opportunities for healthcare systems.

Over the past two years, our team at OMNY Health have worked with some of the largest health systems in the country to operationalize their data assets and drive new innovations in the life sciences space. In partnership with our team, these providers have taken control of their data’s destiny via our secure, compliant, and friction-less platform. Via OMNY, our health system partners have turned their latent data assets into a means to support patient care and clinical innovation. In this current crisis, every healthcare organization needs to explore new options to stabilize their future – our nation’s health care infrastructure depends on it.