Carta Healthcare: Unlocking the Value in Health Data
The healthcare market is vast and is comprised of a number of players — patients, providers, payers, government, startups, associations, labs, pharmacies and other entities. A perennial challenge is getting all these parties to communicate and collaborate. Like every other sector of the economy, Healthcare has made great strides in adopting tools that provide automation and intelligence. But the efficacy of such solutions is limited by the lack of a comprehensive, reliable and easy to access data set that accurately represents patient care. The reality is healthcare data is split across a number of systems and extracting longitudinal data is extremely challenging, error prone and labor intensive. Solving this problem is key to advancing the largest sector of our economy.
“Carta lets you disrupt in a positive way the relationship with healthcare data” — Customer
Clinical Registries
One approach to creating a unified and actionable data set is the use of clinical registries. CMS has incentivized the use of registries under MACRA. Registries provide a system wide and real world view of clinical practice, patient outcomes, safety and effectiveness. They create a means to collect and normalize data across various systems (EHR, lab, pharmacy, population, clinics etc) and finally create one organized data set that can be relied upon for automation and intelligence.
There are hundreds of registries today that span diseases, conditions and treatment options. Hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, nursing homes and any location where care is provided typically are responsible for entering data into registries. Hospitals, insurance companies, associations, government, researchers, the pharma industry and anyone who wants to better understand how healthcare is consumed are the consumers of this data.
The challenge though is that registry creation, management and use is mostly manual today. Specialized nurses (abstractors) with clinical and technical knowledge are responsible for manually identifying, extracting and organizing data into registries. The manual process is slow, prone to errors, extremely expensive and leads to burnout. The process also often has to be repeated for each registry and registries have to be continually updated as care is provided to patients. These limitations have prevented registries from addressing the data challenges in healthcare.
“We have over 300 registries. For every registry, we hire full time employees to enter data. It is very expensive and costs millions of dollars for just one hospital.” — customer
If the registry creation and management can be automated, then access to healthcare data is made much easier and more efficient. This creates a tremendous opportunity to make healthcare workflows intelligent and improve care across the industry.
“If you solve registry problem, you solve access to healthcare data problem” — Customer
Carta Healthcare
This is precisely the problem that Carta solves by using AI and NLP to automate data abstraction and normalize the data collected. This results in high quality actionable healthcare data. The Carta platform does this through a data abstraction assistant that can look at any number of data sources and extract the relevant fields and creates a unified view of care. The platform also provides the relevant pipes so that the data can be easily accessed and acted upon.
One of the first use cases being addressed is registry creation and management. The Carta platform can complete and update the vast majority of registries automatically. Furthermore, new registries can be created to track rare diseases and procedures much more easily.
“Now have full automation of cardiac registries. No needed a lot of tailoring for each registry. Now can unify methodology of curating the data.” — customer
The registry use case is just the beginning. With a comprehensive and clear view of all healthcare data, a number of healthcare workflows can be improved upon. Carta’s customers use the platform to predict supply needs, track ICU mortality, improve scheduling and optimize OR operations. Most of these applications and models were built in days as opposed to months.
“Now can just build on top of that data. The goal is to be able to build, test and deploy models quickly without worrying about the data underneath.” — Customer
One of the unique features of Carta is to establish a clear and simple process for data sharing. Finally, organized and collated registry data can be easily be provided to researchers, startups, associations, pharma companies to further fuel innovation. Carta is the pipe for all data sharing and the goal is to rapidly decrease the bench to bedside timeline in the industry.
Carta Team
One the most exciting parts about Carta is the strength of the team. Matt, Anna and the rest of the leadership have spent years understanding the nuances of healthcare delivery and have built an incredible platform to unlock the value in healthcare data. Carta is a great example of how automation and intelligence can unlock the value of data in an industry. This theme of making data actionable is a core thesis at Storm and one that we continue to invest in across sectors. We are thrilled to partner with Carta on their journey. You can find out more about the company on their website and linkedin.