Viewics, Inc., offers business intelligence solutions to give labs accurate metrics and actionable information
Dhiren Bhatia CEO,
Viewics, Inc.
Professional
I have been the CEO of Viewics, Inc., since 2009. Prior to that, I spent a year in IT Strategy at Sutter Health. Before that, I led delivery for some of the key Software-as-a-Service solutions at Hewlett-Packard.
Education
Bachelor of Engineering – Mumbai, India Master of Engineering – Texas A&M University MBA – University of California, Berkeley
Personal
“I am an active participant in analytics and technology groups in the Silicon Valley. I am also an avid golfer and play in a local soccer league. ”
If you were explaining Viewics, Inc., to someone who was not familiar with the company, how would you characterize its primary areas of expertise? Fundamentally, Viewics puts timely and actionable information in the hands of those that need it. We take all the raw data from client systems and turn it into insights which enable them to grow their business and decrease costs. The primary strength of our business intelligence platform is aggregating data across the key laboratory data sources into the proprietary Viewics Laboratory Data Model. Our technology automates data extraction from sources such as the LIS, reimbursement, payroll/ time, and CRM, to provide a consistent and accurate representation of the lab’s data metrics. We have an intuitive user interface that presents the data to consumers within the laboratory, as well as to external constituents such as payors, physicians, patients, and regulatory bodies.
What market or markets does Viewics primarily serve? What are the major categories of solutions it offers to its customers? Our primary market is the laboratory industry. The platform lends itself to various applications such as operational, clinical, and financial analytics within the laboratory which includes payor reporting, regulatory reporting, and sharing data with physicians and patients.
Your website includes a video about Viewics Health Insighter. Why do you characterize this product as “a smarter healthcare analytics solution”? How does it change the paradigm for healthcare information management? The extent of data analysis available today is restricted to a handful of canned reports in transactional systems such as the LIS. This approach of analyzing data within each system as a silo doesn’t present the entire picture and it cannot serve as a basis for information-based decision making. Our solution for automating data extraction and data cleansing across all systems provides a consistent data set as opposed to the one-off attempts employed today. Our “soup-to-nuts” approach from data extraction to data delivery, combined with the focused applications we’ve built, removes the technology hurdle for our customers and allows them to focus on their business.
Is the “Software-as-a-Service” model the wave of the future for clinical labs? How does Viewics offer flexibility to labs of different sizes—for instance, to smaller labs? Software-as-a-Service has arrived, and it is definitely here to stay. Our SaaS solution enables customers to get up and running within weeks without having to build out expensive IT infrastructure or add resources to manage and deploy the solution. This model allows customers to leverage their resources and focus on their business instead of growing their IT teams for every application they need to use.
Smaller labs have the same challenges as larger ones in needing to access reliable data to manage their business. Viewics’ scalable infrastructure allows smaller labs to access solutions that previously only larger organizations could afford to deploy at a reasonable cost. For example, smaller labs can start with a small number of users on the same powerful infrastructure and grow their usage over time.
Viewics recently announced the release of Viewics Pulse, a laboratory data analytics platform, and the Payor Analytics Solution offering that is built on it. How are these suited to serve the data requirements of today’s laboratories? Seventy percent of medical decisions are driven by laboratory data. We believe that timely access to this data is critical to the healthcare system in general. Internal access is an obvious requirement; however, there are several external consumers of lab data, such as payors, physicians, patients, and regulatory bodies. Viewics Pulse enables our customers to securely share appropriate data metrics with external as well as internal constituents.
What role do declining reimbursements and the shift toward outcomes-based and bundled payments play in the increasing importance of solutions such as those Viewics offers? The goal for the shift to outcomes-based medicine and pay-for-performance is to increase operational efficiencies and demonstrate improved patient health outcomes. Here are some examples of how our customers use our solutions: to track and manage patient and population health data; to identify outliers and areas of improvement in internal operations; to manage their outreach activities; and to benchmark performance against accepted industry standards.
What are some directions that the company may be taking in the near future in any or all of its core areas of expertise? The Viewics team is continuing to expand our current business intelligence solutions across our clinical, financial, operational, and anatomic pathology modules to provide the highest ROI for our customers. We are expanding our ability to extract data from other data sources, such as laboratory instruments and EMRs. Another area of focus is delivering analytics directly to patients, payors, and providers via web and mobile-based delivery platforms. We are also expanding our predictive analytics capabilities with a focus on the key performance indicators within laboratories.
