Empiric Health: Using Analytics to Unlock Improvements in Surgery

By Rob Lubeck

Today we are featuring our first cornerstone and anchor partner, Empiric Health. We highlight how Empiric Health is using the BurstIQ Platform to deploy powerful analytics in order to identify unwarranted clinical variation, which in turn improves patient outcomes and increases the affordability of surgery.

In healthcare, particularly in the field of surgery, there can be considerable variance when it comes to outcomes, quality, and costs – even when comparing data from a relatively simple outpatient procedure such as laparoscopic cholecystectomy. Such areas of unwarranted clinical variation present a significant opportunity for different facilities to become more aligned and make standardized, cost-effective decisions. Empiric Health was born out of a program developed by Intermountain Healthcare in Utah which devoted several years of effort and focus to investigate this sort of variance, in order to make healthcare more affordable while improving quality and outcomes.

By taking an innovative approach of refining very similar surgical cases into well-defined buckets, the program was able to make precise comparisons and highlight differences – a process which Empiric Health Chief Technology Officer, Justin Schaper, likens to not just comparing apples, but specifically Granny Smith varieties to one another. Empiric used a complex set of rules to narrow down case categorization and identify sources of variance, looking closely at surgeon-driven decisions in the OR, as well as, outside factors such as length of stay or the prescribed path post-discharge. Owing to the success of this system, Intermountain was able to achieve substantial savings of $90 million over a period of 3-4 years.

Seeking to take their work to the next level, Empiric’s team realized that they would need to operate extensively in areas such as natural language processing, clinical documentation, predictive analytics, and machine learning, so that the work that had already been done internally could be brought up to a commercial-grade level. In order to succeed, they would need the right partner for platform analytics and software engineering – which is where BurstIQ came into the picture.

As Empiric Health prepared to enter full-scale production by early 2018, they found great value in BurstIQ’s ability to take Intermountain’s pre-existing robust library of cohorts and data processing rules, and implement that within BurstChain for secure data management, auditability, and traceability. BurstIQ’s agnostic approach and use of blockchain methods to sign and attest objects and their state makes it possible to connect multi-dimensional sidechains and build complex data structures, driving machine learning and improving the usability of dealing with tested datasets. As a SOC 2 Type II compliant system, BurstIQ manages complex consent structures and multi-owner, multi-use permissions at a granular consent level, and encrypts data within the system.

Although blockchain technology was just one of many considerations in their infrastructure stack, Empiric was able to work with BurstIQ and leverage its benefits of immutability and encryption without having to dilute internal focus on priority areas. As CTO, Justin especially appreciated how the partnership with BurstIQ enabled him to continue prioritizing broader strategic decisions, and the team as a whole to meet their target of commercialization within a short window of time. Now on Empiric ProComp version 2.0 of the product, they have over 2 million surgeries’ worth of data across more than 100 facilities in their database, identifying opportunities for their clients to improve quality and cost savings in the tens of millions of dollars.

Looking towards the future, Empiric sees their vision of improving healthcare with a focus on surgery as a key element in building towards an ecosystem of benchmarking and analytics on the national level – something in which many other organizations have also expressed interest. Having already gathered so much data from multiple hospital systems, Empiric’s next step is to enable insights into best practice and create a cognitive marketplace for surgeons to understand their own performance against a national landscape. The partnership with BurstIQ will continue to be a core part of achieving that goal, as BurstIQ also seeks to extend the supply chain ecosystem, opening up the platform from partnering with large enterprises, research initiatives, and tapping into the needs of the greater community. Together, our efforts will help to set the foundation for broader benchmarking and collaboration across companies and even individuals with like conditions, enabling the transport of health profiles across different application domains.