Healthcare data company OMNY Health announced partnerships with two healthcare artificial intelligence companies, Aris Global and Quant Health on Tuesday.
The partnerships are the first step that OMNY, which maintains a living data layer of over 70 million patients in the U.S., is taking into the AI space. Mitesh Rao, CEO and co-founder of OMNY, told Fierce Healthcare that a clean and comprehensive data source is what has long been missing from healthcare.
“So we do the hard work of creating, effectively, a clean transformed data layer across the country, and it serves as a foundation for research,” Rao said. “Now it's going to start to serve as a foundation for AI. So, this is the type of data that will be used to validate and train models to be able to equip these models and start to learn new aspects.”
Rao formerly led safety and quality at Stanford and innovation at Northwestern before founding OMNY. By the end of 2024, OMNY will represent data from 50 provider organizations nationally including hospital systems, nonprofits, community practices, pediatric hospitals and national cancer institutes that represent 78 million patients, or a third of Americans.
Whereas electronic medical record companies have hordes of patient data, it’s been intentionally set up in data silos, Rao explained. “In healthcare, there's no official data unless you're an incumbent like Epic or Microsoft,” he said.
Rao said AI companies are struggling to find large swaths of data on which to train their models, having to go to individual health systems to gather data to train the model, which is hard to scale. The healthcare industry has gotten so excited by artificial intelligence that it skipped the step of building what was going to fuel these algorithms, he noted.
OMNY said it has been approached by a multitude of AI companies in recent years and that it has never sought out a partnership on its own. Because of its rich data source, OMNY is ideal for an AI company to want to use its data.
“We never went after the industry. They just started coming at us because there's just this huge need for data and no one had really thought in advance to build the fuel for this space,” Rao explained.
When a provider organization partners with OMNY, the company provides the organization access to their own, individual living data layer with clean and usable data. Rao said healthcare organizations have used the data to do research, apply for grants and form their own AI partnerships.
Having OMNY as a layer between the healthcare organization’s data and the AI company is important, Rao said, because there are privacy and cybersecurity risks if the organization gives the AI company access to its patients’ raw source data.
OMNY has taken a highly selective approach to choosing AI companies to work with and has a vetting process for the companies that includes cybersecurity, privacy and an alignment on the mission of the organization.
Rao is excited about Aris Global’s model that predicts adverse events through its large language model and generative AI. Rao said this kind of algorithm will meaningfully change patient safety and save patients' lives by identifying risk of adverse events.
Quant Health is using AI to predict when clinical trials might succeed or fail. The technology allows researchers to simulate thousands of variations of their clinical trials to establish endpoint success, commercial viability, protocol feasibility and how therapy will perform across all clinical phases. Rao said at its founding, OMNY sought to power clinical research, so the partnership aligns with OMNY’s mission.
“People have realized, if you want AI to succeed, it needs to have something behind it,” Rao said.
OMNY is in talks with a dozen or so more AI companies who want to use its data. “We’re trying to adjudicate and make sure that these are use cases that are patient-centered, that are central to the mission of advancing healthcare,” he said.