Healthcare mergers and acquisitions performed solidly in 2020, despite the downturn in the U.S. economy and healthcare in general. Organizations responded to new challenges by partnering with each other to build core business strengths, address gaps in care delivery the pandemic exposed, and enhance their resources to navigate current and future crises. Realizing the potential of emerging healthcare partnerships requires an open and scalable analytics infrastructure plus a cultural and contractual openness to allow innovation to flourish. Organizations that have adopted an open analytics platform have the data operating advantage to form partnerships, efficiently and smoothly bring best-of-breed solutions to market, and enable the innovative potential of collaborations.

1. Innovative Healthcare Partnerships:
Making the Most of Merging Resources
and Capabilities

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Innovative Healthcare Partnerships
According to a January 2021 report from
consulting firm Kaufman Hall, COVID-19
and the overall 2020 U.S. economic
downturn didn’t substantially slow healthcare
mergers and acquisitions (M&A).
The pandemic, and its associated impact,
appears to be a driver behind the active
healthcare M&A market, suggesting that
health system leaders, investors, and digital
health companies will continue to seek
partnerships for the foreseeable future.

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Innovative Healthcare Partnerships
The Kaufman Hall research suggests one way
health systems are responding to COVID-19 is
partnering with other organizations to build core
business strengths, address gaps in care delivery
the pandemic exposed, and enhance their
resources to navigate current and future crises.
For example, health systems will need
capabilities to expand digital access, deliver
data-driven care, address care equity and
disparities in outcomes, and offer a broader
range of care options to their communities.

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Innovative Healthcare Partnerships
Realizing the potential of emerging healthcare
partnerships means organizations must
operate in an open environment that facilitates
data exchange, enables best of breed point
solutions, and, as the ultimate aim, drives
data-driven improvement in healthcare.
Optimizing partnerships requires an open
and scalable analytics infrastructure, plus
a cultural and contractual mindset for
innovation to flourish.

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Making the Most of Emerging
Healthcare Partnerships
Partnering organizations often lock
themselves into closed workflow
frameworks (i.e., transactional tools)
and/or restrictive contractual relationships.
This approach can impede data exchange
and, as a result, an organization’s
innovative potential.

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Making the Most of Emerging
Healthcare Partnerships
Open analytics platforms, such as the Health
Catalyst Data Operating System (DOS™), are
an open alternative to closed frameworks.
Open platforms, like DOS, combine data from
many proprietary source systems.
As such, analytics platforms are inherently
open and ensure agility and flexibility in all
kinds of healthcare environments providing
the optimal open framework to bring best-of-
breed point solutions to market.

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Making the Most of Emerging
Healthcare Partnerships
Organizations that match a consolidating
analytics architecture with a cultural mindset
of agility and flexibility will realize the most
transformative benefits of new partnerships
and adapt to COVID-19-era uncertainty as
well as imminent challenges.

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Enabling Best-of-Breed Solutions
Organizations historically purchased
best-of-breed solutions from different
vendors to meet specific needs.
In the 1990s, best-of-breed architecture
characterized healthcare as non-
integrated systems that performed
well in only a specialized area and
were challenging to maintain.

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Enabling Best-of-Breed Solutions
To reduce maintenance needs and enable
the electronic capture of care delivery
activities, healthcare leaders then adopted
monolithic single-vendor EHRs.
These workflow systems soon proved to be
inflexible in supporting analytic use cases
and enabling best-of-breed point solutions.
However, in the 2010s, the emergence
of market-leading open-analytic platforms
supported a resurgence of these best-of-
breed applications—an environment that
allows new partnerships and more
innovation to occur.

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Enabling Best-of-Breed Solutions
The inherent flexibility of the open, integrated
data infrastructure of an analytics platform
allows integration and scaling at the
application layer.
Conversely, closed, or siloed, transactional
systems don’t integrate or scale.
Compared to the disparate transactional and
workflow tools that defined the EHR era,
integrating on top of an analytics platform
is a more scalable way to scale and integrate
best-of-breed solutions.

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Enabling Best-of-Breed Solutions
The EHR forces organizations to knit together
siloed workflow solutions, locking them into
those capabilities—whether they develop or
acquire the new applications.
With flexibility at the application layer, the open
platform allows organizations to customize
their analytics capabilities by picking the
solutions that best serve their needs.

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The Fundamental Components of an
Open Analytics Platform
An open analytics platform must have the
following fundamental components to
deliver the required agility and flexibility to
bring innovative solutions to market:
 Flexibility
 Single source of truth
 A robust interoperability layer

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The Fundamental Components of an
Open Analytics Platform
Flexibility allows selection of best of
breed at applications layer and enables
best-of-breed decision making and ability
to stay current with new technology.

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The Fundamental Components of an
Open Analytics Platform
A single source data truth enables a data-
driven approach to decision making, making it
accessible from disparate sources.

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The Fundamental Components of an
Open Analytics Platform
A robust interoperability layer, positioned
between the data platform and applications
layers, fuels an efficient data extraction and
export, bringing application layer efficiency
to the market.

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Open Systems Equal Best of Breed
Organizations that have adopted an open
analytics platform have the data operating
advantage to form partnerships, efficiently
bring best-of-breed solutions to market and
realize the innovative potential of collaborations.
Furthermore, an open framework avoids
potential regulatory risks relative to the
lack of data exchange, and most importantly,
enables data-driven care and improved
access for patients.

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For more information:
“This book is a fantastic piece of work”
– Robert Lindeman MD, FAAP, Chief Physician Quality Officer

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More about this topic
Link to original article for a more in-depth discussion.
Innovative Healthcare Partnerships: Making the Most of Merging Resources and Capabilities
A Healthcare Mergers Framework: How to Accelerate the Benefits
Health Catalyst Editors
Critical Healthcare M&A Strategies: A Data-driven Approach
Tim Zoph, Client Executive and Strategist at Impact Advisors; Dale Sanders, Strategic Advisor
The Key to Healthcare Mergers and Acquisitions Success: Don’t Rip and Replace Your IT
Health Catalyst Editors
Agnostic Analytics Solutions vs. EHRs: Six Reasons EHRs Can’t Deliver True Healthcare Interoperability
Mark McCourt, Senior VP, Sales; Mike Noke, MBA, Senior Regional Account Executive;
Neil Andersen, Senior Account Executive; Ryan Smith, MBA, Senior VP and Executive Advisor
Interoperability in Healthcare: Making the Most of FHIR
Brian Eliason, MIS, SVP, DOS Operations; Kevin Sigafoes, Director, Product Strategy

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Joined Health Catalyst in August, 2014 as a Senior Vice President. Prior to joining
Health Catalyst, he was a Co-Founder and the Managing Director of CHV Capital, a
venture capital affiliate of Indiana University Health. In addition to Health Catalyst, Kyle
led CHV/ Indiana University Health’s investments in a range of healthcare IT and
medical device companies, including MedVentive (acquired by McKesson), MindFrame
(acquired by Covidien), Perfect Serve, NICO, NeoChord, Par8o, and Celleration. Prior
to CHV Capital, he served in a number of leadership positions across government,
academia, and in entrepreneurial companies, including as a Special Advisor to the
President of Indiana University & Executive Director for Advancing Indiana, Investment Director &
Innovation Fellow at Rose-Hulman Ventures and the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Senior Vice
President of Thomas P. Miller and Associates, Vice President of the Indiana Technology Partnership,
and Economic Development Manager for the City of Indianapolis, Mayor Stephen Goldsmith.
Other Clinical Quality Improvement Resources
Click to read additional information at www.healthcatalyst.com
Kyle Salyers

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Other Clinical Quality Improvement Resources
Click to read additional information at www.healthcatalyst.com
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