The Advisory Board Company Acquires 360Fresh

The Advisory Board Company announced this afternoon that it has acquired clinical analytics vendor 360Fresh of Palo Alto, CA.

360Fresh offers two products. Pulse360 uses text and data mining to extract information from existing systems such as EMRs to answer clinical and quality questions. Track360 is a clinician care coordination and workflow tool that streamlines provider handoffs, provides alerts, and improves patient communications. Both systems are targeted for use by academic medical centers, independent community hospitals, and large-scale ambulatory providers.

We spoke to CEO Paul Roscoe of The Advisory Board Company’s Crimson group ahead of the announcement. He says Crimson provides its members with analytics solutions for retrospective data review, while the additional of 360Fresh’s technology will create the next generation of analytics capable of capturing real-time information for hospitalized patients, including both discrete and free-text EMR data, and then using predictive analytics to identify opportunities to improve outcomes.

”360Fresh’s technology uses data mining techniques to gain access to the data that exists and in many cases is locked up in the electronic medical record,” he told us. “It performs text analytics and NLP processing, and then adds to that very advanced mathematical and predictive modeling capability that allows you to analyze structured and unstructured clinical data – progress notes, admission records, text results, billing information – and glean from that the salient clues to a patient’s behavior and clinical trajectory to create a comprehensive view of their risk factors for certain negative outcomes.”

Roscoe says Crimson members will be able to use existing rich data sets to identify areas of opportunity, including in accountable care-type models that require the ability to manage population health and chronic diseases. He refers to the new capabilities as “dynamic clinical intelligence,” which he contrasts to clinical decision support in that instead of running fixed rules to identify possible ordering errors, predicts future events such as the likelihood of a post-surgical patient being transferred out of the ICU within eight hours.

J. Sairamesh (Ramesh), PhD, 360Fresh CEO, president, and founder, led business solutions for IBM over 14 years, working on technologies that included Early Warning Systems and Watson. Roscoe says 360Fresh is working with several large medical centers that have not yet been publicly identified. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.