One of the buzzwords in the healthcare IT industry these days is SaaS — software-as-a-service technology, in which a vendor offers a product to a client over the Internet and hosts it on their own servers. It is a growing field in healthcare—the market has been growing at approximately 11 percent every year since 2011 and is expected to hit $5.4 billion by 2017, according to a Formtek study.
Dan Blake, the CTO at Chicago-based Valence Health, circled back to the healthcare IT industry after years in the financial and logistics IT markets. After working at the St. Louis-based McDonnell-Douglas' health systems division, he moved on to work for companies and the transportation and logistics industries before taking a position at insurance giant Aon. He worked as contract CTO and served as the chief development officer at Airstrip, a mobile healthcare technology company, before taking a position as CTO of Valence a year and a half ago.
His experience outside the industry taught him that many other industries have already sorted through the interoperability and efficiency problems healthcare is currently facing.
"I got to see in other industries how a lot of technology can work and should work," Mr. Blake said. "For all the technology problems in healthcare, a solution exists for them in other industries. It's not like we have to invent anything new here. We just need to figure out how to adapt it to healthcare."
As Valence Health's CTO, he oversees the development of Vision , a software-as-a-service population health management solution that unifies a hospitals and physican practice's EMR, practice management systems and other key data elelments to identify gaps in care and performace against critical quality metrics.
Note: Answers have been edited for length and clarity.
Question: What changes have you seen in the development of the SaaS market and what are some of its obstacles?
Dan Blake: As the need for more diverse and real-time data integration grows, the infrastructure that you need to pull all this heterogeneous data together becomes more and more complicated. Other than the absolute largest healthcare organizations, it is difficult to put the expertise and technology required together. I think one of the key things that's driving the SaaS market is a shared desire to leverage high-investment infrastructure at multiple points further along the healthcare continuum. Deploying a large number of SaaS solutions in itself can create some of the obstacles to its growth. Unless you're able to get a broad breadth of solutions from a single provider…it becomes somewhat difficult to serve as the integrator for various solutions. At Valence Health, we've been trying to lower the friction of [connecting several softwares]. We understand that all of our customers are going to be stuck in that particular boat. [When there is an issue] a typical software provider will say, 'Hey, that's not our problem, you need to deal with the other company.' Some of it is a lack of understanding of what the other company's software does, and some of it is an unwillingness to apply resources to the problem.
Q: What has been your biggest challenge in the market?
DB: There is so much noise out there in the marketplace. This is the the natural evolution of technology. But given all the clatter, it is very difficult for customers to understand how individual products fit into the broader landscape, what their capabilities are and how that applies to solving their individual problems. I think that there's a bit of lack of understanding out there too, particular in the SaaS marketplace. Things like: how do you set up your security architecture to make sure that your enterprise is no longer hosting that data? How do you set that up so that you as an organization are protected but still able to leverage the technology?
Q: How does real-time information change how software is developed?
DB: From my standpoint, having worked in the ambulatory industry and the inpatient industry, we're very much starting to utilize the technology from the inpatient industry. [We use] a lot of mechanisms similar too how alarming and alerting works within a hospital. As an industry we are now starting to drive those out in the ambulatory space. Traditionally, ambulatory technologies have been about [analyzing data] 60 to 90 days after the fact.Now we're using a lot of pieces of the technology to decrease the time to get relevant information to the providers. In short we making sure that many of the things hospitals use inside their four walls to connect all their own systems are being extended beyond the hospital in order to connect with community providers too
Q: What do you think of the upcoming standards for interoperability?
DB: I think they're great. I think it's one of the biggest problems facing the industry right now. No vendor should be able to hold a customer's data hostage. Things like [fees to access data] enter into this equation. Vendors are holding this data hostage, and that doesn't serve anyone except the vendor.
Q: How can the industry solve the problem of exchanging data?
DB: When we're all out having beers in this industry, we talk about that a lot. I think there are some things that the government or the industry needs to do. That's not to say that I think there should be some big government database in the sky,…but I think the government or industry need to dictate a set of standards that all vendors need to comply with. One very important part is also the legal context that surrounds data exchange and inlcudes privacy issues and medical liability concerns. It comes up in the inpatient context a lot. When a doctor inputs a note into a patient chart, who owns that note? We as a community, as a healthcare system, have to figure out how to deal with [this].
Q: What would you say is the brightest moment or most promising movement in the health IT industry right now?
DB: In my mind, it's a combination of two things. First it's the focus that’s being placed on bringing data together from a myriad of different sources to form the most complete view of the patient possible. Second, it’s the clinical focus on individual patients and populations. I think those two things have been converging over the last couple of years and are continuing to converge. The most important thing to [physicians] is to have the most data possible about that patient, both everything's that happening to them at present and has happened in the past. From a larger perspective, having that view for a set of patients which you are managing becomes equally compelling.