Health Catalyst reaches $1 billion valuation sifting through hospitals' data

[Forbes, February 07, 2019] Health Catalyst, a data analytics provider to hospitals, has raised $100 million in debt and equity financing, tipping the Salt Lake City startup’s valuation to more than $1 billion, the company announced.

Hospitals use Health Catalyst’s software to link the data that they already have housed in a number of siloed databases, like the ones used to track insurance claims, patient satisfaction and, of course, the electronic health record. Once that data is linked, it’s analyzed to help hospitals find new insights into how their patients are receiving care and how much money they’re spending to do it.

For example, Dr. Penny Wheeler, President and CEO at nonprofit health system Allina Health, which is made up of 12 hospitals and over 90 clinics in and around Minneapolis and western Wisconsin, says they’ve been able to look at their data in a new way to determine how many opioid pills were being prescribed to patients and under what circumstances. Since they got that information back, they’ve been able to decrease the number of opioids they prescribe to patients by 10%, or 2 million pills, in the last year.

“We realized that although the electronic medical record is a wonderful thing, it was insufficient to give us all the data we needed to make sure we were delivering the right care,” says Wheeler. Allina has also used Health Catalyst's system to try to figure out ways to decrease the amount of time patients spend in the hospital. For patients coming in for colorectal surgery, there’s been a 19% reduction in their stay, which Allina reports saved them $90,000 in a six-month time span.

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