Ashley Basile, PH.D.
Chief Product Officer
We recently launched a new website, refreshed our branding, and introduced a new term – “Upcycling Data™”—and the questions have been rolling in! We thought we’d take a minute to answer your questions about what this all means.
Q: Does this signal a change in what Diameter Health offers to the market?
A: No, we will continue to offer the industry’s most comprehensive solution for making clinical data interoperable, usable, and actionable. But as needs grow for incorporating new data types and supporting new ways of leveraging data, so will our solution expand.
Q: Why did you adopt the term “Upcycling Data”?
A: The data interoperability landscape is an exciting space right now with a great deal of innovative technology being brought to market to solve big challenges and opportunities around data. But it’s also a very confusing landscape where companies describe different capabilities using the same language. We wanted a better way to describe the unique and differentiated value that’s delivered to our customers and partners. As the industry has matured, and the problems we solve have been recognized as important, many vendors say they do what we do. We needed a way to differentiate what we do, and what we do better than anyone else.
Q: Why did you change your logo?
A: Our President and COO, Mary Lantin, said it best: “Our new logo builds on our old logo but implies a shift and change. The contiguous circle shows bringing the data together in a targeted way, similar to the bullseye in our old logo, but it also shows the upward movement conveying upcycling, representing the added value we provide to our customers.”
Q: How is “upcycling data” different than “normalizing” data?
A: Normalizing means standardizing data to a specific code set. That’s certainly something that we do, and consistent with national standards. That means our customers don’t have to waste time and money doing this on their own. But upcycling data goes beyond just data normalization. It’s about taking the huge volumes of data from anywhere patients get care and aggregating and further enriching that data in near real-time in a fully automated fashion. And making it flexible to serve many purposes to accelerate our customer’s business outcomes.
Q: How is “upcycling data” different from data “optimization”?
A: Optimization means something is “fit for a purpose.” That certainly is a piece of what we do. For example, we can export relational data filtered by HEDIS measure value sets that supports identifying care gaps in a population. Or produce data in the FHIR format for delivery to health plan members for access on their smartphones. Or deliver a summarized, longitudinal data that can be easily displayed in a web browser for use in medical review or underwriting. But Upcycled Data can be flexible for many use cases, not just optimized for a single use case.
Q: I’ve heard the term “N.E.R.D.S” used to describe Diameter’s flagship data process … does this go away?
A: Certainly not. N.E.R.D.S is a handy way to describe the comprehensive data process executed by the Diameter Health Fusion engine, which transforms raw clinical data into a usable data asset. Fusion parses and ingests data into Fusion; semantically normalizes it to national standards; enriches it with metadata for streamlined analytics; reorganizes data so it can be found in the expected clinical section; and deduplicates and summarizes data producing a longitudinal record while eliminating redundancy. And we complete all these steps in sub-seconds and at scale, processing millions of C-CDAs and generating billions of FHIR resources on behalf of our customers.
And yes, we endearingly consider ourselves N.E.R.D.S in our deep commitment to basing all our work on clinical informatics, modern software componentry, and scalable enterprise data architectures!
Q: Why is Diameter Health the best at Upcycling Data?
A: This can be boiled down into three categories: Comprehensive Data Quality Improvement, Powerful Speed & Scale, and Dedicated Focus & Deep Expertise.
Diameter Health’s technology improves the quality and interoperability of clinical data unlike any other offering in the market today. With a unique and holistic process to ingest, parse, normalize, enrich, reorganize, deduplicate, and summarize, Diameter Health goes far beyond traditional terminology mapping and enrichment services. We have built a modern API-based architecture that is highly scalable – our customers are processing millions of source CCDs daily – and really fast…processing each CCD in sub-seconds. The result is a fully automated, flexible solution that accelerates the availability and use of better clinical data across all downstream applications.
And this is our sole focus. We understand just how challenging clinical data and the world of interoperability is that we have been dedicated to making data universally accessible and actionable across the healthcare industry since our founding in 2013. Our technology is built on a strong foundation in clinical knowledge and we continue to invest in a robust informatics organization with deep clinical data, industry standards, and use case expertise. We’ve processed data for over one-third of the entire U.S. population to date and that knowledge is reflected in our solution and accrues across our customer base.
Q: What is the impact of Upcycling Data?
A: At Diameter Health, we are motivated to accelerate the use of better clinical data to keep people healthy and make our healthcare system more efficient and less wasteful. Upcycling data from disparate clinical sources in real-time and at scale delivers measurable clinical value at both the population and patient level as well as significant operational efficiencies.
Together with our customers we have proven value. Our HIE customers are delivering 10s of 1000s of longitudinal records to inform clinical care every day. Partners are using our technology to ensure that clean, precise data drives their analytical tools. Payers are ensuring optimal outcomes and accuracy in risk adjustment, quality measurement, care management, and other processes that require clinical insight. Life and Reinsurers are accelerating the shift to digital, proactive underwriting. Each of these organizations benefit from a significant reduction in operational costs and faster time to value by eliminating manual processes for data mapping, cleansing, and integration.
The common thread across our multi-market customer footprint is that all of our customers recognize the potential of clinical data – to transform businesses, optimize workflows, reduce cost while improving health outcomes – and the need for a specialized, experienced partner to turn that potential into power. Diameter Health is here to bring you the power of Upcycled Data.
Have a question about how you can apply Upcycled Data in your organization? We can be reached at info@diameterhealth.com, or send us a note from our Get Started page.
Want more?
Read our CEO, Eric Rosow’s blog titled It’s time to turn data potential into data power.
