Companies Plan to Create Model for System-wide Outcomes Improvement

Allina Health and Health Catalyst have signed a definitive agreement valued at over $100 million to combine technologies, clinical content, and front-line personnel in an unprecedented effort to improve the quality and lower the cost of care for Allina’s patients and to serve as a model for outcomes improvement nationwide.

The 10-year agreement marks the culmination of a relationship that began in 2008, when Allina Health became Health Catalyst’s first customer.

“This agreement with Health Catalyst is unique in the industry and will accelerate outcomes improvement for those served through Allina Health as well as create a roadmap for broader outcomes transformation both here and across the country,” said Penny Wheeler, MD, president and chief executive officer of Allina Health. “We have made significant progress with care outcomes improvement over the last six years, and we now believe we can take our efforts to the next level by leveraging the experience and know-how of both organizations and our shared history of innovation and transformation.”

Allina Health is a $3.7 billion not-for-profit organization whose more than 90 clinics, 12 hospitals, and related healthcare services provide care for nearly 1 million people across Minnesota and western Wisconsin.

The agreement between Allina Health and Health Catalyst includes two major elements:

First, Allina Health will outsource its data warehousing, analytics, and performance improvement technology, content, and personnel to Health Catalyst to further accelerate the health system’s significant advances in improving care. The Allina employees currently working in these areas will become onsite Health Catalyst team members in phases beginning this month.

Second, Allina will gain access to Health Catalyst’s full technology, content, and deployment expertise to accelerate outcomes improvement at Allina. The partnership’s governing committee will annually identify a prioritized list of improvement projects, each designed to provide measurable care improvement and financial value to Allina, and as success is realized, the partnership will share in the economic benefits of that success.

In the process, Allina Health will become a “living laboratory” and national showcase for front-line outcomes improvement, featuring the latest developments in analytics-enabled healthcare improvement from Health Catalyst’s portfolio of analytics solutions.

“As payment models continue to transition away from fee-for-service, it becomes increasingly vital for health systems to deeply understand their data in order to pinpoint inefficiencies and then reduce those inefficiencies,” said Duncan Gallagher, chief financial officer of Allina Health. “This partnership is designed to accomplish that goal in a measurable, scalable, repeatable manner.”

Each year, the committee governing the partnership will agree to a prioritized list of data-driven improvement projects with specific, measurable outcomes goals for each project. Economic rewards will be based on the attainment of these goals. “We expect that this process of using analytics to prioritize projects, in combination with risk-sharing economics, will encourage far more focus and alignment than is found in traditional health system-vendor relationships,” said Gallagher.

Dan Burton, chief executive officer of Health Catalyst, said, “Allina Health was one of the first healthcare organizations in the nation to recognize the need for a data-driven culture and infrastructure to enable outcomes improvement. They recognized that transformational quality improvement requires more than great software – you also need content-based best practices to ensure the interventions you select are actionable and relevant; and you need people who know how to make the interventions work.”

Burton continued, “This long-term relationship brings all of those elements together, including a stellar team of data architects, process improvement experts and clinicians who we are excited to welcome to the Health Catalyst family. This is a unique opportunity to join forces with one of the nation’s most advanced health systems to create a quality improvement process and infrastructure that we believe serves as a prototype to guide other health systems in developing their own data-driven cultures of proactive healthcare transformation.”