Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Eric Rosow, CEO of Diameter Health (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What are the different repositories that you are drawing data from?

Eric Rosow: Lots of HIEs have vast arrays of clinical data from disparate sources – from in-patient, ambulatory, and emergency room encounters. That’s where we started but we’re finding that payers are in great need of pushing the envelope by going into deeper realms of clinical data. They, too, are getting data as well as any certified EHR throughout the country.

Sramana Mitra: On the application side, what kinds of applications are you encountering that use that data effectively? What are some of the best examples of data-driven applications that you’re seeing?

Eric Rosow: Certainly, the evolution into value-based care arrangements are looking to bend the cost curve. The interoperability we’re seeing is being pushed not just by the government but is required for true advanced technology to work.

I was inspired a couple of years ago by Eric Schmidt who gave the keynote at HIMS. Specifically, he said that in his 40 years in technology, every industry needed that middle tier of that data to really make it work. That second tier of that would supplement but not replace the electronic health records in our world.

We feel, very strongly, that in order for healthcare to really achieve the promise of interoperability, you have to have this second tier. We believe Diameter can be an important contributor to that. To give an example, when we look at apps like Lyft or Waze, they all work beautifully at scale because you can only have one GPS location.

In healthcare, you can have hundreds of different codes for different allergies, medications, and problems. We recently published a paper that over 80% of allergies aren’t even coded properly at all. How can you do analytics when you have blaring gaps such as that?

Sramana Mitra: Where do you see opportunities for new application companies to start leveraging the kind of data that you are making available to the world? This is from the point of view of a new entrepreneur who’s looking for open problems to solve. 

Eric Rosow: One area that certainly comes to mind is the whole consumerization of healthcare with evolving standards, one of which is called FHIR. We see various apps that are out there. Many of them have been around for some time.

We’re now getting into this entirely new and very exciting realm of personalized medicine that can be enabled and captured by the consumer on their iPhone or Android device. Assuming that the normalization and middle-tier has been solved, I think that opens up an unlimited realm of opportunity to do analytics that has never been done before.

The challenge is data overload, dirty data, and duplication. That’s where the middle-tier is foundational to enabling those opportunities for new apps. The other area would be the slow transition from value-based care. It’s clearly the right thing to do and is where the industry is headed. It’s something that’s happening now and will grow.

Sramana Mitra: Any other idea?

Eric Rosow: Diversifying all of the different points of care data capture just to compress timeline from diagnosis to treatment, telemedicine, mini-clinics, and devices that can augment the primary care providers.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Eric Rosow, CEO of Diameter Health
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