OMNY Health debuts platform to fuel AI in healthtech

Data is everything in healthcare, but it's especially important when it comes to artificial intelligence: while every company wants to be an AI company, and most of them say they are, many lack the data necessary to have a full AI product.  

OMNY Health, a healthcare ecosystem that facilitates compliant cross-industry data sharing, wants to be the company that supplies the data that fuels AI in healthcare. 

Since its founding in 2018, the company has focused on research, whether it be in health economics outcomes or quality improvement research; it primarily works with life sciences companies and med device companies building some of the next generation of drugs for rare diseases, and doing research in oncology and inflammatory conditions.

Now OMNY is expanding beyond its core business for the first time, announcing the launch of a new platform on Tuesday which is designed to power AI-driven health technology companies.

"It wasn't until really recently that we started to realize the power of our data to power AI and innovation. So, that was the big shift for us and it was really the industry coming at us. It was that hunger, that need. We didn't go and explore it ourselves. The industry came to us because people realize that, without data, you can't do any of this," Mitesh Rao, CEO of OMNY Health, told VatorNews.

"This is a new vertical and it's very exciting because we don't know where AI is headed, all we know is that it has the power to rapidly transform the space. It's also a space where we need to be really thoughtful in how we approach it. Because, as opposed to other industries, healthcare data is something that requires the right protections. And it also requires a lot of work to make it useful. So, it just so happens that we were at the right place at the right time, but by following our core mission, we built a foundation on which AI can run."

The origins of OMNY

Rao spent most of his career as a health system executive and, during that time, a consistent problem he kept seeing was that all of the innovative work that was happening, whether it was research or advancements in analytics and insights or AI, all of it needed data, but that was one of the biggest bottlenecks is getting access to information.

"It's very difficult: the underlying systems, like electronic medical records, how that data gets cordoned off and siloed, the fact that when it comes out of those records systems, it's really difficult to use, and it's messy and incomplete. It's what leads to a lot of the redundancies and the slow processes that happen when we innovate in healthcare," he said.

"It was a consistent problem. I was leading safety and quality at Stanford and I kept having these life sciences companies and these analytics companies and AI companies coming in to partner on data. And every time we would do a data partnership, it was like reinventing the wheel, there was no way to do it at scale,""

This insight is is what led him to found OMNY. 

"I got frustrated, and finally I said, ‘we've got to build the pipes, we've got to build the rails, on which data flows because if you do that, then it happens at scale, and we can power everything.' We can actually start to bring the different parts of the healthcare ecosystem together and let them collaborate through a common language of data. Let them actually speak through data," said Rao. 

Having forged partnerships with specialty health networks, healthcare systems, academic medical centers, and integrated delivery networks span all fifty states and cover over 75 million patient lives, OMNY Health’s data ecosystem now reflects more than seven years of historical data encompassing more than 2 billion clinical notes from over 300,000 providers across over 200 specialties. 

Expanding to AI

Over the last year, many AI companies have been raising capital, and so many companies became AI companies because everyone realized that generative AI can do so much, Rao explained.

"Then, the reality set it, and all of those companies stepped back and said, 'Oh, wait, in order for generative AI to work, you need data.' They built the Ferrari, but it's not going anywhere without gasoline. And so how are we going to get to the end and be able to drive this?" he said.

"If you're not in an incumbent, if you're not Microsoft, or you're not the EMR system EPIC, where you have access to this data, how are you gonna get the data to be able to build? That was really the missing piece."

What OMNY realized was that, as it has been helping to power and create a national data language, it had also created a foundation on which AI can run in a safe, secure compliant way, which also protects patients and ensures privacy, including a congruent layer of data that can power the next generation of AI.  

Along with the launch of the new platform, OMNY also unveil its first two AI partners: QuantHealth, an AI-driven clinical trial design company, and drug development platform ArisGlobal.  

For QuantHealth, their model is being trained on OMNY's proprietary data in order to allow the company to enhance clinical trial timelines, mitigate trial risks, and identify populations of patients that are likely to respond to treatments.

"We're really excited to bring our national data layer behind them. so that they can start to do that work. Because the trial space is complicated: a lot of trials fail, a lot of trials take a long amount of time, we miss out on all these opportunities," said Rao.

"If Quant can change that paradigm for life sciences companies and for patients all over the country, and then we can bring the data behind it, that's a partnership that we're really proud of."

ArisGlobal, meanwhile, is focused on signal detection, meaning how to understand if something bad is going to happen and being proactive, rather than being reactive, meaning waiting for it to happen and the filing a report, and then when enough reports come together realizing that something needs to be fixed. 

Now, the company is using large language models to look for signals that bad things are happening or starting to happen, and then proactively go after them before they actually happen, with the goal of being able to predict so that you can catch problems before the patient gets harmed or experiences adverse events. 

"We've been very selective but these are our first two partnerships, one focused on pharmacovigilance and the other in signal detection. Those two use cases are core to our mission, and many more are coming forward," said Rao.

"OMNY is stepping forward to create that foundational data layer, the rails on which AI will run, and the data that will power the next generation. What we're building in healthcare, whether it's natural language processing, whether it's large language models and generative AI, none of that works without data. So, think of this as the fuel behind that innovation, and doing it now at a national scale and that's really going to power a lot of where healthcare heads in the coming years."

Going forward, Rao wants OMNY to continue to grow into is being the rails for AI, being the layer of data that powers it.

"What I'm positioning OMNY to be, is that source, that foundational layer of data for these AI companies to build on it. We already have, there's another half dozen companies now that are in various stages of joining me the platform to be powered by OMNY, I want us to be that intel inside, the pipes, the rails, the fuel for these AI companies to build the next generation of analytics and healthcare. That's where we're positioning ourselves," he said.