“… If it’s garbage in, it’s gonna be garbage out.” Boy, am I familiar with that truth. And it prevails across so many areas of healthcare, but maybe none more so than the data we generate and our ability to distill something useful and usable out of that data. 

On this episode of Creating a New Healthcare, I talk with Dr. Mitesh Rao, the Founder and CEO of OMNY Health. Dr. Rao is a Board-Certified Emergency Medicine Physician and Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at Stanford. He founded OMNY to revolutionize how healthcare organizations collaborate and advance science through the common language of data. Integrating real-world data from direct partnerships with IDNs, AMCs, specialty networks, and other providers across the US, OMNY Health’s proprietary platform provides the foundation for stakeholders across the healthcare ecosystem to compliantly and efficiently share data, as well as pursue broader data-driven partnerships. 

The core themes seem simple but are somehow still roadblocks:

• Healthcare data is critical for driving innovation, quality improvement, and better patient care, but the industry has historically struggled with accessing and using data effectively.
• Healthcare data is often siloed within individual provider organizations or systems, hindering collaboration between different healthcare stakeholders who could benefit from sharing and analyzing the data together. 
• Even when data can be accessed, it is often not in a clean, standardized, or usable format for research or it does not meet regulatory requirements.
• The available data does not adequately represent the full diversity of the patient population, limiting the ability to conduct inclusive research and develop equitable care solutions. 

Dr. Rao and his colleagues at OMNY are working to combat these challenges by scaling the  harmonization of healthcare data across providers, payers, and other stakeholders to create a platform built specifically for collaboration and innovation. It’s a noble goal and one that could prove critically useful in advancing equity, improving patient safety, and powering research on new care pathways and treatment approaches. But the roadblocks won’t disappear on their own, so there’s definitely more work to do.