HIStalk Interviews Jason Brown, CEO, MRO

Jason Brown, MBA is CEO of MRO of Norristown, PA.

Tell me about yourself and the company.

I have been in the healthcare technology space for almost 20 years. I have been working at the intersection of providers, payers, rev cycle, value-based care, and payment integrity, with an eye toward solutions that help take cost out of the healthcare system, move data, drive interoperability, and support value-based care.

At MRO, we think of the business as driving clinical data exchange among providers, payers, patients, and other third-party requesters at scale and driving health care interoperability across the ecosystem.

Is the term “release of information” still valid?

The business started in a document management style release of information. That’s still a core part of what we do and will continue to be. As we look at it, we are expanding out from that platform and taking perhaps a wider view of the opportunity. That opportunity is, how you make clinical data available on time, every time, to the right, credentialed user? The minimum necessary information available in the purpose fit format. 

Digital and release of information is a component of that, but not necessarily the totality of that. It is our core DNA where the company started and is still a big part of what we do. We built off of that capability and solution set to do a number of other things, and we will continue to advance those capabilities.

How has the demand for data exchange changed as providers captured more data electronically?

That’s a big part of the thesis that the demand for clinical data, in addition to claims data or maybe in replacement of claims data, continues to grow at a fast clip. The healthcare system places the burden on hospitals and providers to manage that clinical data and make sure that it gets to the right user, even though it sits in a bunch of different formats all over the place. 

As we see demand growing and complexity of data growing, there’s a great opportunity to be that middleware in between, partnering with providers, payers, other third parties — it could be pharmaceutical companies or patients themselves as legal requesters — to make sure that the minimum necessary data can get to the right place in the right format. On time, every time.

Life sciences companies seem to be the highest-profile data consumers, to the point that companies and provider groups have made a business of selling them data. How is that market progressing?

It is in an early stage.The appetite and demand from the pharma companies, life science companies, probably outstrips the supply or the ability to satisfy that data today. But there’s a lot of strides in interoperability, commercial models, etc. that is increasingly spinning up opportunities to be able to meet that demand, to do that in a secure way, do that in a way that is beneficial to the providers to allow them to participate in some of the economics, and then to make sure that we are ultimately helping to use the data that we have available to create the right type of pharmaceutical solutions for patients.

It’s early innings for sure, but that market has a long runway in front of it in terms of opportunities as we are able to meet that demand from life sciences companies.

What about data related to valued-based care, quality management, and care management?

I would say that is more mature than the life sciences market, but probably moving slower than all of us would hope. Part of the gating issue or pacing issue on more value-based care adoption is having that clinical data exchange between providers and payers. As you start to see a lot of the push and pull there, it is most acute in situations where there is some sort of value-based care relationship, where the provider needs to share data with the payer and vice versa so that they can both be successful in those risk-based relationships. 

That’s an area that has picked up a lot of traction for us over the last couple of years, but that market still is mid-innings. We would love to see it grow a lot faster, and I think it’s great for the overall healthcare system as well. As we enable more high fidelity, low latency, longitudinal clinical data to be available, I think you’ll see a step-function increase in value-based care arrangements, because both parties will feel that they can be successful in those relationships.

Does provider data still need a lot of cleanup and transformation to be understandable by the outside world?

That is certainly still the case. Strides have been made for sure. How you normalize standardized data, and in some cases tokenize it, to make it usable on the other end is still a big part of the healthcare value chain. Our solution set and capabilities is all about data extraction, digitization, ingestion, normalization, and standardization, and then you draw insights and intelligence from that. To make it useful, so that you can get it to whomever is requesting it in a format that they can consume it and have that data in a way that can drive the downstream insights and actions that you want to be able to power.

How is the market for patient registries that have been created or endorsed by professional and specialty societies?

That continues to be a very active market. It picked up a lot of traction over last 10 or 15 years. We have seen the evolution from value-based care type measures and quality reporting to now getting into some of the things we talked about earlier, which drive bigger clinical quality opportunities and opportunities with life sciences and pharma. That market is active and continuing to advance and innovate because they are sitting on large corpus of clinical data and deep clinical insights around certain specialties. Now they are looking at things in addition to their legacy work in value-based care around more quality stuff and partnering with life sciences firms in real-world data and real-world evidence.

Do you see company opportunities from using AI?

We are certainly digging into it now, looking at ways to leverage it across our entire book of business. We are actively developing a couple of AI solutions to power and automate parts of our workflow today that allow us to do more faster around quality insights, etc. We have big efforts around that. 

The other side of that coin is that of the vendors a company works with, all of them are developing AI solutions. We are actively working to evaluate those and understand how to move those into our workflows and into how we do things, whether that’s Microsoft Copilot, solutions from our telephony vendors, and even to back office systems such as HR and Salesforce. They all have different AI capabilities. 

We think it’s going to touch every part of our organization, not just the stuff that we can deliver to our clients and solutions that we can build, but also how we work with our vendors and automate different parts of our company. We are excited about that and are actively pursuing various initiatives right now. We have a lot of experience in different aspects of creating, running, and selling businesses in healthcare.

Is the business environment improving overall?

I think that the market is getting better and starting to normalize. People are a little bit more bullish about where the rate environment is going to be. We are heading into an election, and in any election cycle, healthcare tends to be on the ballot in some shape, form, or fashion. We keep an eye on all those things from a macro perspective. 

For our business more specifically, the tailwinds continue to be quite strong, as the demand for clinical data continues to grow at a pretty exceptional rate. That’s driven by a whole host of things, not the least of which is demographic factors. Ten thousand people age into Medicare every day, and a third or more of those go into Medicare Advantage. That’s a big tailwind for our business. Value-based care is big tailwind for our business. Demand for clinical data from sophisticated requestors, like life sciences, continues to be a tailwind for our business.  

Macro environment notwithstanding, we like all the trend lines of the need for clinical data to make healthcare decisions, treat patients, and drive better insights. We think that this is a long-term trend that will go unabated for at least a couple of decades.

What impact do you expect to see from the Change Healthcare cyberattack in terms of financing, healthcare policy, and antitrust concerns?

I’ll start with the last one because that will probably be the biggest. We now see where Change, United, and Optum touch every part of the healthcare system. This situation exposed the fragility of some of that and showed how connected some of these pieces are. Greater thought needs so be given to those aspects.

If you’re a provider, you have to think about who has your data and who you are connecting with. How do you make sure, as a provider or payer, that they have the highest standards of security, probably beyond HITRUST? We at MRO pride ourselves that we have been delivering secure, compliant data for 20-plus years, and we understand the sensitivity of that. Heightening those standards will increase. Every provider and payer will take a closer look, not that they weren’t before.

I also think about diversification, making sure that you don’t have all your eggs in one basket. That will have implications in how both providers and payers think about deploying technology and vendors. 

What are the key parts of the company’s near-term strategy?

We are in the early innings of a digital transformation. We want to continue to deploy technology across every part of our business. That will be a big part of our strategy.  We need to continue our client centricity and make sure that we are widening and deepening our relationships with our clients. We operate in a multi -sided network and need to make sure that we continue to deliver value to all sides of that network to continue to drive network effects across our business model.