Pop Analyzer

The Health Catalyst Pop Analyzer™ application is a visually-oriented application that allows users to define populations quickly, without using sophisticated or customized SQL coding. Through rapid ad-hoc analysis capabilities, Pop Analyzer enables organizations to reduce analyst workload and increase analytics productivity. Analysts can leverage Pop Analyzer’s reusable elements such as value sets and populations to improve data governance and consistency.

Organizations can also use Pop Analyzer to author reusable population definitions that can be used for analytics initiatives in other applications, including feasibility analysis for research opportunities.

Pop Analyzer enables users to dynamically build patient populations on the fly.

The problem

Healthcare organizations constantly struggle to decrease the time-to-value for their analytics investments. And existing analytics staff are overwhelmed by high volumes of custom analytics requests, requiring organizations to consider hiring additional expensive analytics to scale capacity.

Our approach

Pop Analyzer enables organizations to do more with their existing analytics resources, while expanding the benefits of their analytics investments to a broader range of stakeholders. This application not only helps relieve the pressure on overburdened analysts with too many report requests, it also helps healthcare organizations realize the potential value of their analytics investments.

Pop Analyzer provides an elegant interface that helps clinicians, analysts, and other stakeholders collaborate to quickly build populations of interest. This simplified process decreases population definition time by 50% or more—guaranteed. Analysts can immediately export these populations for use in improvement applications, reporting, and research.

Benefits and features

• Dramatically reduce analytics development time. Replace lower-level reporting work with a collaborative process, using a visual population-building interface.
• Unleash the analytic use of data throughout your organization. Democratize and govern access to your data assets throughout your organization and reduce stakeholder dependence on expensive, hard-to-find SQL experts.
• Improve stakeholder buy-in and trust throughout the analytics process. Pop Analyzer's elegant drag-and-drop interface enables non-technical analysts and stakeholders to build and modify populations, exposing transparent definitions to all stakeholders.
• Speed up analysis and accuracy. The Pop Analyzer library includes access to 400 nationally recognized populations, as well as national quality improvement and regulatory code sets to build accurate populations faster.
• Reduce costs. Grow analytics team capabilities without increasing headcount

Synergies achieved through the combination of Pop Analyzer and Health Catalyst include:

• Maintain and govern organization-wide population definitions for key populations. Reusable population and value sets are built across clients using shared data marts—and published and reused across the Health Catalyst Data Operating System (DOS™).
• Easy, self-service, downloadable analytics at the patient level. Pop Analyzer gives you iterative data access to rapidly tailor your analytics to fit your needs. With no SQL or other database experience, you can identify and download a curated list of patients in seconds.
• Improve patient engagement, outcomes, and satisfaction. Pop Analyzer integrated into Twistle Patient Engagement provides one solution to easily identify patients and engage them efficiently and effectively.

Use cases

• An application developer reuses the population definitions found in one Health Catalyst application in an emerging solution, simplifying installation and maintenance tasks.
• A quality improvement leadership team needs to define and identify high-risk cohorts that need targeted intervention in the coming year—potential opioid abusers and patients with severe persistent mental illness. The team works together to define these populations based on multiple regulatory and operational criteria.
• A clinical analyst needs to fulfill a request for high-level patient counts for an emerging program under consideration by a clinical department. Using predefined content, she quickly shares a preliminary result and then refines the result in collaboration with a clinician from the clinical program.

For integration with other Health Catalyst applications:

• A care management coordinator needs to reach out to a specific sub-population of high-risk patients to alert them to take particular action. He defines and sends the appropriate population definition to the Care Flow application for follow-up.
• A clinician needs to reach out to a population of patients that are overdue for their annual mammogram. She quickly creates and exports the applicable population using Pop Analyzer, then imports the population to Twistle Patient Engagement so she can quickly and effectively reach out to the group without needing to individually call them.