Carolinas HealthCare System: Consumer Analytics

In 2014, Dr. Michael Dulin, chief clinical officer for analytics and outcomes research and head of the Dickson Advanced Analytics (DA2) group at Carolinas HealthCare System (CHS), successfully unified all analytics talent and resources into one group over a three year period. Rapid increases in computing power and decreases in data storage costs had enabled DA2's data architects to build predictive models incorporating complex clinical, financial, demographic, and claims data that would have been impossible to create only a few years before. However, in 2014, both Apple and Google announced features in their new mobile operating systems that collected and displayed output from various health-wearables (like heart-rate monitors or step-counters), as well as electronic medical record (EMR) data. Their expertise in analytics, access to demographic and location data, as well as large consumer bases, led Dulin to consider which players consumers would trust to integrate their healthcare data in the future and what role DA2 could play.