As PBLN nears its Annual Boston CEO Summit, we have asked some of our participants to share some of their incoming thoughts as they prepare for the conference. Peter Emerson, CEO of Recombinant Data, shared his enlightening thoughts and insight regarding his company, Recombinant Data, and healthcare – a topic that will certainly be popular during the summit, during a brief chat we had with him:
PBLN: What is your company and your role?
PE: Recombinant Data focuses on the secondary use of electronic health data—basically healthcare business intelligence—across a wide range of areas from medical research to improving the quality and cost of clinical care. Health data has been very paper-based compared to other industries and the healthcare system has lacked many of the market incentives seen elsewhere. As a result, health systems are way behind in terms of analyzing data for performance and health outcome improvement. However, there’s been a big federal push for the adoption electronic medical records and sudden demand for better analytics because financial incentives are shifting under the health reform initiatives. That has created a perfect storm around the need for “clinical intelligence”—information systems that aggregate the disparate components of health data into a single data warehouse to answer the many questions facing health providers and medical researchers today. That’s what Recombinant does and where our name originated—“recombining” data to create new forms of information).
As CEO, I have ultimate responsibility for the business, but I also play an active role in customer engagements. As a Harvard Law grad with a background in HIPAA and related health privacy and research rules I’m able to help customers navigate the issues of multiple secondary data use across a health system or academic medical center—and especially multi-institution collaborations.
PBLN: What product or service does your business provide?
PE: Because electronic healthcare data is still evolving it tends to be locked in proprietary EMR systems and can be very “dirty”, with lots of manual entry, unstructured text, and inconsistencies across different platforms. This has led to frustration with some business intelligence technology solutions because as everyone knows, garbage in creates garbage out. Lots of vendors have built really nice analytic tools that would be quite helpful if the data was reliable, but usually it’s not and therefore the tools aren’t trustworthy. Recognizing this, we started at the other end of the problem, focusing first on data quality rather than data usage. We built our healthcare data warehouse product—our “Data Trust”—from the ground up to deal with data quality issues. That’s a key differentiator for our business.
In terms of data usage, we developed clinical intelligence software that allows users to run reports and interrogate the data for their needs. We started out by building a quality reporting system for Partners HealthCare called “Report Central” which we licensed out. We subsequently built a new dashboard platform called “Selectrus” that now serves as our core product on the healthcare provider space. Medical researchers face many of the same challenges around access to data, but with additional complications created by HIPAA and the need for data de-identification. Fortunately, the NIH has funded marquee institutions like Harvard Medical School and Children’s Hospital Boston to create a variety of open source platforms and tools that address these challenges. And, while having open source software is useful for many reasons, it’s more valuable if there’s a commercial vendor supporting the platforms—and that’s what we’ve done. We’ve become the “Red Hat” support arm for many key open source initiatives which has helped our business grow without the need for capital. Essentially the NIH funds the development of free software that we support, and it drives strong demand for data.
Lastly, we provide a variety of consulting services around data strategy, governance, and compliance. We have some of the leading experts from around the country who we plucked from institutions like the Mayo Clinic and UCSF.
PBLN: What metrics can you share to give a sense of the size of your company e.g. number of employees, revenue, etc.?
PE: In four years Recombinant has grown from a four person Boston-area boutique firm with $500K of revenue to a nationally known company with 80 full-time employees, over 50 customers, and $10M of revenue. We are 100% organically grown with no VC money or angel investors which means we’ve had to be profitable all along the way. This discipline has helped us stay focused on delivering real value to our customers, but it also limits the scope of our strategic plans because we are highly undercapitalized in relation to our competitors like Oracle and IBM.
PBLN: What do you think sets your company apart?
PE: Recombinant is recognized for its “black belt” expertise in the field of healthcare data warehousing—especially large-scale research systems. Our products and repeatable processes have been proven time and again at institutions across the United States, and the impact of a 100% referenceable client base has been substantial, but in the end people are attracted to us in large part due to our core values—particularly pragmatism. You don’t see a lot of companies who’s #1 core value is pragmatism, but in the field of healthcare data, it’s essential, and we measure ourselves (including our annual reviews) on our pragmatism. People like that about us.
PBLN: Are there ways that the success of your business contributes to addressing key challenges facing our society and economy?
PE: As I’m sure everyone knows, the costs of healthcare are having a major impact on the U.S. economy and our ability to be competitive in the global economy. To fix this type of complex problem you need data to analyze operations and measure improvements, and this is directly in line with Recombinant’s mission. However, there’s another area of focus that gets less attention, but is equally important for us, and that’s improving medical research. The NIH and other government agencies have put millions upon millions of dollars toward medical research, but the feeling is that very little of that money has translated into better health outcomes for patients. As a result, there’s a strong push now to improve the translation of research into better practice, and we are equally focused on that challenge.
PBLN: The country is rightly focused on the problem of high long-term unemployment. What kinds of jobs is your business likely to create either directly or indirectly?
PE: Healthcare is one of few fields with growing employment opportunities today, and health information in particular will be an area of continued need. We have been consistently recruiting for technical positions, project management roles, and other traditional software roles—but preferably with health data experience, because health data is different from financial services, etc. We’ve seen a lot of people trying to break into healthcare from other verticals, but it’s difficult for us as a small company to take risks on inexperienced professionals.
PBLN: There is a serious skills gap for some jobs that remain vacant. Is recruiting a challenge for your company? In what kinds of jobs?
PE: Recruiting people experienced in bioinformatics is challenging. The pool of qualified candidates is small, and we’re seeking the top talent in the field. But, we’ve also had difficulty filling main-stream technical positions like ETL developers who have heath data knowledge, and have hired a number of individuals on work visas because of the shortage of qualified U.S. candidates. Since building the bio-economy is one of the main opportunities for growth—in Massachusetts in particular—programs designed to promote these skill areas would fill a clear need.
PBLN: How do you see government action or any particular public policy helping or hindering the growth of your company or your ability to succeed?
PE: Health reform is an obvious issue for us since businesses shoulder so much of the healthcare cost burden. Massachusetts is ahead of most states in the area of reform, but on a national level the politicization and gridlock in D.C. is demoralizing. We see the misalignment of incentives in the industry, and witness situations where cost-lowering opportunities are avoided in order to maintain revenue. Another blocker for any small business is access to capital. We have grown organically and created 80 jobs along the way without any state or federal assistance, but it would accelerate our ability to create more jobs if more capital was available.
PBLN: Do you see a role for business leadership in helping to create a more sustainable economy and if so, what kinds of actions do you think would be effective?
PE: As we’ve seen from the pent up frustration surfaced by groups like Occupy Wall Street, business leaders must play a role and take responsibility across a variety of issues. We have to bring our voice to the front before others speak for us.
PBLN: What do you hope to get out of the PBLN Summit on November 10?
PE: I look forward to contributing to thoughtful discussions about improving healthcare and engaging in the critical dialogue around how the private sector can be a player in the social and economic issues facing us all.
Thanks, Peter!
If you want to hear more from Peter Emerson and other prominent healthcare executives and experts, make sure to check out the panel: Health Promotion and Cost Containment: Can Private Sector Innovation Lead to a Healthier Economy?, at the PBLN CEO Summit at UMass Boston on November 10th!
Want Executives like Peter Emerson to know what you think? We encourage you to weigh in on this and any other post on by commenting our blog.
