Management consulting firm Deloitte and Intermountain Healthcare have forged a five-year deal that will see the companies tap into nearly two trillion unique medical data elements collected over 40 years, with the goal of gaining treatment insights that can be shared with physicians, hospitals, manufacturers, vendors and payers across the country.
Under the terms of the deal, Deloitte and Intermountain will work together to tap the data Intermountain has accumulated – going back to the1970s. Because of the longitudinal nature of the clinical and financial data amassed from Intermountain's 22 hospitals and 200 clinics, it is particularly effective for medical studies and analyzing optimal treatments for many health conditions, the partners say.
To make the work of providing insights a success, Deloitte, with Intermountain's input, has built new technology. The insight products become available June 1 on a subscription basis. Deloitte and Intermountain will release a product schedule at HIMSS13.
As Intermountain CIO Mark Probst sees it, the deal "will help usher in a new wave of innovation throughout the nation's health system. The use of our technologies will allow clinicians and researchers to more quickly discover practices that improve quality and keep costs lower. Research studies that previously might have taken years to complete could be conducted in just a few weeks instead."
"Intermountain has had a legacy of health informatics," says Probst. "We just have a long legacy of that – a lot of skill."
Intermountain built on that legacy, forming in 2011 the Homer Warner Center, housed in a new building and equipped with infrastructure around medical informatics and analytics.
Yet, even as informaticists began to work at the center, Probst and his team were thinking about what might be next. They concluded, "We really need to be able to present this more cohesively – as a strength of Intermountain, and as something we think is important in transforming healthcare." Intermountain leaders were also eager to bring in more revenue to help support the nonprofit's care-giving mission. They recognized Intermountain's data as a strong asset, but they were adamant from day one they would not sell data, Probst says.
"We had what we thought was something of value," he said. The Intermountain team began looking for a partner and met and assessed several firms. Deloitte, Probst said, came up with the most exciting and appropriate approach. The concept of providing insight that would enable organizations across the healthcare sector – physicians, hospitals, manufacturers, vendors, payers and others to produce better outcomes, make better products, lower costs and innovate.
"We were very excited and interested in a partner like Intermountain," said Andrew Vaz, principal and chief innovation officer at Deloitte. "While we have the largest and leading professional services consulting practice in healthcare and life sciences, for us the mission has always been to more actively participate in the transformation of healthcare – to be part of the fabric of the solutions that are being developed – and not just be a consultant to the industry."