PHILADELPHIA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Haystack Informatics, a behavioral analytics company that helps healthcare organizations safeguard and optimize their operations, announced today it has closed an additional funding round to expand software solution offerings.
The financing round was led by Rittenhouse Ventures with participation from DreamIt Ventures and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Jayson Tischler, Principal at Rittenhouse Ventures, notes, “One of the biggest challenges in healthcare is transforming the vast amount of data captured by electronic health records systems (EHRs) into valuable actions. Health systems and their staff are struggling to balance the demands of data management with the efforts necessary to improve operational efficiency and patient satisfaction. Haystack has already created a best-in-class software platform for health systems to manage patient privacy, using behavioral patterns from EHR records; now, the company has leveraged that same data and behavioral analytics to maximize EHR utilization and to streamline staff workflows and patient pathways.”
Co-founders Dr. Bimal Desai and Adrian Talapan developed their original privacy solution to allow health systems to monitor employee behavior and meet privacy monitoring requirements. After deploying their privacy solution across numerous health systems and observing billions of interactions between providers and patients, they realized that their deep knowledge of employee behavior could be further applied to other challenges. Working with a team of data scientists that came out of Harvard University, they developed a novel approach to understanding employee activity in a healthcare setting, or “Haystack Intelligence.”
“Our privacy solution offered a new approach to patient privacy by understanding employee behavior patterns and patient interactions in the context of care delivery. This approach drastically improved how health systems monitor patients’ records,” says co-founder and Chief Health Informatics officer at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Dr. Bimal Desai. “After ingesting billions of EMR data points, we’ve realized our extensive knowledge of behavior and interactions can be applied beyond privacy.”
Through extensive discussions with executives at leading health systems, the company has identified four new applications for their Haystack Intelligence approach: EHR Workflow Optimization, Operational Improvements, Service Cost Management and Patient Experience. The company has already received significant interest from health systems to use their Haystack Intelligence solutions to guide operational or behavioral changes, as well as measure the benefits of such changes.
“At its core, Haystack Intelligence uses data to provide a mirror of the patient experience and employee interactions,” explains Adrian Talapan, co-founder and CEO. “This objective view of data provides a compass to guide health systems towards areas of variability in behavior and performance across locations, service lines, or even providers. Significant variability results in wasteful health spend, an estimated nearly trillion-dollar problem in the US. By revealing patterns of variability, our intelligence allows health systems to discover the behaviors that most impact the bottom line, while identifying the behaviors that promote a better experience for both patients and providers.”
Haystack Informatics is currently piloting its new solutions with health centers in the Philadelphia area. In addition to working directly with health systems, the company is also partnering with healthcare consultants to guide recommendations and monitor progress. The company plans to explore similar partnership opportunities with consulting organizations and software providers interested in integrating the Haystack Intelligence software in their own offerings.
“Bimal and I set out to revolutionize patient privacy when we created Haystack, and in the process, we’ve developed extensive knowledge of user behavior and interactions. We are excited to apply that understanding to new areas, as we work to safeguard and optimize healthcare. We look forward to working with health systems and partners to achieve that mission,” said Talapan.
About us:
Haystack Informatics, spun out from Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, is a digital health company that helps leading health systems monitor patient privacy and improve operational efficiency. Using activity log data from electronic health records (EHR) systems, our technology makes sense of the interactions that exist between health system employees and patients, identifying anomalous activity patterns, and guiding towards the most impactful areas for EHR and staff optimization.
