Founded in San Francisco, California, Biome Analytics is a cutting-edge leader in the digital healthcare space. The company delivers a new generation of clinical performance applications that bring hospitals and doctors together around a trusted data source, clinically relevant benchmarks, and actionable insight. The company was established with the guiding principles that ‘Every clinician wants to deliver the best possible care’. Secondly, it also believes that ‘When the clinicians have trusted, actionable insights, they will self-optimize.’
Stuart Jacobson, the CEO of Biome Analytics, founded the company believing that doctors and hospitals would self-optimize in delivering high-performance cardiovascular care: that is, excellent clinical care quality at the lowest possible cost, if a common fact base for performance management existed. “We specialize because cardiovascular care is unique, there are instances when variation makes sense, and generalized tools and analytics have failed to engage and align clinicians,” says Stuart.
Biome delivers the ability for hospitals and doctors to finally and seamlessly align around how to deliver high-performance cardiovascular care at the lowest possible cost, eliminating expensive guesswork around what specific actions will move the cost needle, and providing clinicians the tool they need to show exactly when care variation is necessary
Story behind Inception
Over five years ago, a team of data scientists, engineers, and clinical experts came together. They all had a common goal of providing doctors and hospitals with the granular insights necessary for improving care and lowering costs for the over 27 million Americans with heart and vascular disease.
Cardiovascular disease affects more than 11% of the US population and is the leading cause of death for both men and women. Hospitals and doctors treating these patients face unprecedented challenges driven by increasing volume, disruptive new procedures, greater competition, and the transition to “value-based” care. Successfully confronting and succeeding over these challenges requires providing clinical and administrative teams access to trusted data and clinically and financially relevant insights. But, because cardiovascular care is highly nuanced, one-size-fits-all analytic solutions lack the precision required to engage clinicians, and are unable to show users how exactly to improve. Internal analytics teams are stretched thin, lacking deep expertise in the Cardiovascular and cost accounting domains, and struggle to stay current with changing standards of care/best practice guidelines/reimbursement models. In an effort to help providers and administrators solve these issues, Biome Analytics was formed.
Why Biome?
- Intelligent Variation
Biome has process and procedure-specific performance models that seamlessly integrate hospital cost accounting and clinical data. Its algorithm-based performance assessment engine detects high-value clinical and financial opportunities for clients. Additionally, Biome delivers a community-driven performance library, containing clinical as well as financial benchmarks, models, and performance improvement strategies.
- Cardiovascular Focus and Expertise
Biome’s applications enable hospitals to reduce cardiovascular length of stay, decrease bleeding-event rates and increase contribution margin, simultaneously. Clients rely on Biome’s experience to rapidly assess the impact of evolving therapies, identify vendor opportunities, and quicken time to value. Some recent client successes include:
- $2 million cost savings opportunities identified within 60 days
- Average TAVR LOS reduced by 3 days
- Net-new 164 bed opening availability
- $1.7 million in cost misallocation identified
- Observed vs. Expected Mortality Decreased by 35.7%
- A Delivery Model Built for Speed and Quality
While analytic applications largely focus on IT departments as the primary user, Biome focuses on delivering analytic capabilities to the physicians and administrators, without requiring users to become data scientists. Additionally, Biome manages the full engagement: from requesting and collecting data, to creating the models, to delivering the insights. Users are able to ask questions and get answers in record time. Finally, with access to a library of over 200+ cardiovascular-specific analytics, clients can explore a myriad of improvement opportunities in seconds, instead of waiting weeks for internal teams to create a new analytic.
Biome’s Unique Solution
Biome offers an end-to-end solution for cardiovascular performance management: over 200 cardiovascular-specific analytics that drive the insight into actionable root-cause performance improvement opportunities. Analytic access is provided to users via Tableau visualizations, and the Biome engagement team highlights high-value opportunities, in addition to delivering insights into performance change management progress. Biome approaches engagements with the philosophy that analytics should augment the work of cardiovascular teams, not replace physicians’ decision-making autonomy. Biome provides the analytics that allow physicians to understand cost impacts of decisions, as well as the case studies and change management methodologies for affecting performance improvement at client facilities. Additionally, Biome delivers performance benchmarking so that cardiovascular teams can measure progress both internally and against other cardiovascular centers.
Advice to Digital Health Entrepreneurs
Today, as healthcare decision-making becomes much more nuanced and complex, Biome advises budding entrepreneurs in this field to stay focused and have an unwavering vision. The company believes that healthcare is a ‘team sport’—that is, each participant in the industry, whether an entrepreneur, clinician, administrator, or patient, relies on the others to achieve success. Collaboration and communication are crucial to a successful team: these capabilities bind the team with motivation and positivity.
Looking Forward
Biome’s distinctiveness is a breakthrough value-add for cardiovascular teams, providing noticeable clinical and financial impact, and clients appreciate the company’s flawless, responsive service and analytic solutions. While asking about the recognition Biome has received so far, Stuart expressed, “Our clients provide our greatest award—when we see the success that they achieve as a result of our solution, we are motivated to develop even more models to improve cardiovascular performance.”
Biome Analytics is focused on developing solution modules in cardiovascular-related clinical areas such as stroke, vascular, and neuro and is planning to roll these out to all clients this year.
