Clearsense is a smart data organization based in Jacksonville, Florida that is re-imagining and simplifying data analytics to help healthcare organizations realize measurable value from their data. They have developed a secure, cloud-based healthcare data ecosystem that rapidly consumes data from an array of sources to provide a real-time, SMARTView™ of any healthcare environment. Inception™, the company’s flagship product, is designed specifically for the clinical, financial and operational needs of healthcare providers. Inception efficiently detects patient health deterioration, tracks key performance indicators to drive costs, and leverages data to improve operational efficiencies.
Challenge
The story of Hortonworks customer Clearsense is different. Clearsense founders started the company with Hortonworks Data Platform at the center of its data architecture. Like many other Big Data start-ups, Clearsense built their data systems from scratch, architected with Hortonworks Connected Data Platforms at the core of its offering.
Doctors and nurses in the healthcare industry have spent decades practicing medicine with the problem of data scarcity and latency that Clearsense now solves. Before Apache Hadoop, Apache NiFi and related Apache projects matured in the open-source community, there was no viable, economic and secure platform that could combine all the multi-format data streaming from wearable devices, electronic medical records (EMRs), and hundreds of other new sources of data. Clinicians wanted to use machine learning and data science techniques to store and analyze that data, but the necessary technology didn’t exist.
Healthcare practitioners understood the medical challenges that could be solved with data, but they were not data architects. Data architects could build systems, but they lacked medical expertise on topics such as electronic medical records, signs of patient distress or hospital billing and reimbursement processes.
Solution
The Clearsense team is proud to be first in delivering SMART, real-time streaming data to its healthcare customers. Its Inception™ product makes data available for critical decisions in three areas:
- Clinical Decisions — pulling in all relevant patient information in real-time for early detection of patient deterioration to reduce catastrophic consequences and optimize outcomes
- Financial Decisions — tracking organizational KPIs related to financial goals
- Operational Decisions — identifying and eliminating variation in the care delivery processes, providing visibility into current performance to help identify opportunities for improvement
The Inception product is based in the cloud and architected on Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP). Both Clearsense and its Inception product also benefit from the rapid innovation and ecosystem friendliness that come from Hortonworks’ 100% open-source approach.
Inception customers have access to all data sources, ingested with Hortonworks Data Flow (HDF), stored in HDP, and delivered to the point of decision. This gives doctors and nurses a new level of mission-critical data and relevant insight they can incorporate into their clinical decisions.
Results
The cost efficiencies provided by Hortonworks platforms running in the cloud have contributed to an important social benefit within the company. Clearsense’s architectural choices allow it to offer healthcare predictive analytics to smaller, rural and underserved providers that wouldn’t be able to afford a major up-front investment with a proprietary vendor selling a software license.
There are more than 2,000 ‘rural’ hospitals, which are the 50-bed, the 75-bed, the 100-bed hospital systems out in rural America. Prior to the advent of Clearsense Inception and the Hortonworks suite of products those hospitals would not have been able to enjoy these advanced analytic technologies. Now, utilizing open-source software in a cloud environment with multi-tenancy and a subscription-based model, they can.