Across the broad spectrum of American business, customer data is recognized as a valuable asset that potentially could drive revenue-boosting decisions.
From a mom-and-pop restaurant trying to understand which menu items are the most popular and most profitable, to Fortune 500 companies making similar calculations on an enterprise level, the trick is managing and manipulating the data to maximum advantage.
The larger the database, the larger the headache.
And few industries have the massive amount of data — and such a mixed record of handling that information effectively — as health care.
Enter Populi, the Farmington-based firm offering healthcare data analytics as a subscription service. The man behind Populi is Bill Moschella, a serial entrepreneur and innovator in the artificial intelligence space.
Healthcare entities — from hospitals to doctors to insurers — are still finding their way after a traumatic conversion from paper to digital records. As Moschella explains the situation, the next phase of the battle involves siloed information and systems that don’t talk to each other.
But perhaps the most limiting factor is they’re only looking at their own data.
Think about a hospital trying to decide whether it should use its limited capital to open a women’s health center in City A, or an outpatient surgical center in City B. By mining its own data, it might have a sense of how either decision might impact its existing patient base.
But what about the prospect of capturing new business?
That’s where Populi’s data access and analytical abilities make the difference, Moschella explains. Populi captures a host of data streams and manages more than 180 billion transactions a year.
Populi monitors 8.5 million medical practitioners and 1 million healthcare organizations. The company tracks referrals, procedures, costs, outcomes and verifies it all against payer claims data. Location records are geotagged for integration with mapping tools.
The result is that Populi can provide a 360-degree look at the market and, using artificial intelligence technology, can project procedure trends and highlight geographic opportunities to serve new markets.
All of that data better positions the hospital to make the winning choice.
Populi can use the data to model and predict patient usage and advise marketing strategy and delivery.
Another service differentiator, Moschella said, is Populi’s ability to deliver the data in a format that pairs with the systems healthcare organizations already use, like Salesforce and Tableau.
Populi also provides help building applications.
It’s a powerful mix that works on a scalable subscription service model and comes with customer service, he said.
While declining to discuss Populi’s client base, Moschella said reception has been strong.
This is Moschella’s seventh startup. He’s perhaps best known for Evariant, a healthcare consumer and physician engagement firm that was acquired by Healthgrades (now Mercury Healthcare).
In addition to serving as CEO of Populi, he’s executive chairman of Stemify, an online learning platform that tests students’ math skills, uses artificial intelligence to identify knowledge gaps and creates an individualized curriculum using a cache of videos and tutorials.
And he’s managing director of Masheen, a family-owned and run investor in startup technology firms.