Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Eric Rosow, CEO of Diameter Health (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I have a slightly different question based on all the things that we just talked about. What is the penetration of the kind of data normalization and cleansing work that you’re providing?

What percentage of hospitals or payers are adopting the kind of middleware that you are offering to provide cleansed and normalized data such that application vendors can develop applications on top of that?

Eric Rosow: I know a specific percentage, but I would say that we’re in the pioneering days. Lots of vendors say they normalize data. When you really get into the deep levels of what that means, it’s early days.

We often say pioneers take the arrows, but I think we’re confronted by this clinical data disorder (CDD). It manifests everywhere. We believe heavily in the voice of customers and the market.

We’ve talked with many clinicians who will tell you a 70-page Continuity of Care Document is probably 68 pages too long. Or, “If you give me eight CCDs on my patient, I won’t look at any of them.” One of the largest HIEs in the country just said, “Our biggest problem is dirty data.”

People are recognizing that while we’re getting all of this digital data, it makes the pipes much bigger and puts more water pressure. We think this is where the puck is going. This is what we’ve been building over the past many years. 

Sramana Mitra: How many customers do you have for this kind of stuff?

Eric Rosow: We have over 20 HIEs. We have a number of partner relationships with larger organizations as well. We’re evolving to a payer marketplace. We view the provider market as more of a channel partnership approach, and then as I mentioned, a growing presence in the Federal sector.

Sramana Mitra: As I’m listening to you, the thought that comes to my mind is that there is a very interesting trend in the SaaS market right now, which is PaaS. Many of the SaaS vendors are looking at providing access to their platforms to extend their scope of capabilities.

You should look into this trend. Given what you’re doing, you’d be very successful in selling your solution if there are applications that are being built on top of this kind of data that provide immediate value to the customers.

Eric Rosow: We completely agree. We are very fortunate to have a wonderful Chief Technology Officer. Part of what he brings to our team is that vision, knowledge, and experience of scaling a true PaaS. Everything that we’re doing today, we’re doing through Amazon Web Services and hosted on HIPAA-compliant environments.

So much of what’s done today is still done very manually. We’re very proud to have Optum Ventures. They led a Series A1 round earlier this year. They share our vision and recognize the need for this middle tier of data normalization.

Sramana Mitra: You bootstrapped the company to get it off the ground, and then recently raised funding. How long have you been around?

Eric Rosow: The company was originally founded by John D’Amore in 2013. I joined him in 2014 where we took a concept of an idea and built that to a company. We bootstrapped it for the first two and a half years entirely.

Then we raised just about $2.1 million through friends and family and a couple of investors that I’ve worked with in my prior company. That’s all we took. We’ve scaled the company to well over $5 million before we considered going to professional VCs.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Eric Rosow, CEO of Diameter Health
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