Joining Paul Gillen and Dave Vellante on SiliconANGLEs theCUBE this afternoon was Anthony Donofrio, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice-President with Truven Healthcare Analytics. He discussed how Truven’s Information as a Service (IaaS) and software suites were designed to service each of the core constituencies associated with the healthcare industry.

Truven delivers analytic databases and reference data to each of the three groups in the healthcare community. These groups are comprised of consumers, providers and payers. Truven has developed dedicated applications for each of these groups. Each vertical is grouped in suites meant to target each of these demographics.

On the care side, Truven’s product lines are built around management of care, allowing healthcare providers to observe not only the quality of care given but also determine best strategies for improving that care over time. One application, Micromedics, ties in aspects like pharmacology and drug interaction that allows a doctor to make a well-informed, evidence-based care decision for their patient.

Additionally, healthcare management is able to take advantage of programs like ActionOI which merges financial and operational data meant to help streamline the organization

Suites geared to the payer side allows those organizations observe and implement payment integrity solutions. Donofrio cited how, through the use of their analytics software, payers have been able to recover well over 10s of millions of dollars.

An important consideration when dealing with personal medical data focuses on privacy. As Donofrio notes, the depth and breadth of data is highly important to providing analytics. Truven’s longevity in the industry means they have been able to amass large pools of data which allow them to look at an individual patient longitudinally over long periods of time.

However, each data point has been de-identified allowing Truven to respect a patients privacy rights. An individual consumer would have access to their own personal information with the ability to view a list of actual claims incurred over the time they or their employer had utilized Truven’s applications.

See the full interview here:

The payer model is still steeped in secrecy when it comes to their compensation models. This lack of transparency makes it so individual payer organizations cannot compare with one another and it also disallows the consumer from making informed decisions when choosing a payer organization. However, Donofrio says that in time payers will realize the incentive in transparency as it will help to attract new consumers.

Gillin, in referencing an earlier discussion on theCUBE, mentioned the ‘world knowledge’ model brought up by Dr. Mostashari and asked if Truven would soon be sharing information with other companies like their own in pursuit of the greater good. Donofrio commented he felt as the industry continues to develop and as data moves forward this could be a distinct possibility.

Donofrio also addressed Truven’s adoption of Hadoop, stating they were moving in that direction very aggressively. He believes Hadoop will coexist with relational database management for some time, however, in much the same way relational databases coexisted with flat file data.

Donofrio goes on to say, “Where we are advancing and integrating clinical data, we are employing Hadoop. The distributed file approach by Hadoop allows us to pull piles of data and apply analytics in a much better way.”

The MIT Chief Development Officer Information Quality Symposium wraps up tomorrow after a brief morning session.