In 2012, Chris Bradley and Raj Amin set out to get to the bottom of one of healthcare IT'stop problems: interoperability.
Four years later, their solution Mana Health is successfully using its ManaCloud platform to unify and integrate patient data from EMRs. Based in the heart of New York City, the company has deployed its technology to help more than 240 hospitals and 22 million patients. In addition to serving as co-founder and CEO of Mana Health, Mr. Bradley has spoken about healthcare interoperability at the White House and at TEDxNYU 2012. He's received various awards for his work in the field, including the NYU Presidential Service Award.
Here, Mr. Bradley spoke with Becker's Hospital Review about Mana Health's offerings, the future of health IT and his background growing up in Hawaii.
Question: What is your background and why did you co-found Mana Health?
Chris Bradley: My background is in neuroscience and cell biology, and my graduate degree is in computer science. I was raised in a family of physicians, so my passion has always been to help people in some way and contribute something to the world in the process. Still, I wondered, 'Should I do medicine like my parents? If not, what else could I do in that realm to help?' This was around the time medical records were being digitized, so I'd hear about what [my parents] did and didn't like about EMRs at the dinner table.
When I first met Raj [Amin], my cofounder, I was doing work in decision support. I wanted to help physicians diagnose more efficiently. I started realizing that in creating algorithms, I ran into the interoperability problem right away, and I didn't have any resources to improve the algorithms. If I was having that problem, everyone else probably was, too. We thought, 'Why don't we solve it?' That's what Mana Health is really about — creating a data layer that allows you to run algorithms without worrying about interoperability.
Q: Where does the name 'Mana Health' come from?
CB: I grew up in Hawaii, and there are multiple definitions of mana. Biblically, it's spelled 'manna' and literally means 'food from heaven.' In Hawaiian, it means 'healing energy from the earth.' What I really liked about it is that it sums up what we're trying to do. We're trying to create a flow of positive healing to get things from the right person at the right time in the right way. We want to give life and healing through that information.
Q: What does Mana Health specialize in and what are its offerings?
CB: In a nutshell, the core product is ManaCloud, a cloud-based data platform. It extracts data from sources, aggregates it and unifies it around the patient. You're not only getting the data out, but you're mapping it to one model so you can compare apples to apples.
We also solve the electronic master patient index (EPMI) problem by linking more than one record to the same patient. To us, as important as it is to get all the information in one place, it's just as important to make sure the right people have access to it.
The last step is that the ManaCloud allows for application programming interface (API) testing with patient records.
If you think of technology as a body, we're starting to see a lot of investment in the brain — such as artificial intelligence — and how that can be brought to healthcare. But if you're going to have a brain, you need a nervous system. Mana Health is trying to create that nervous system.
Q: What sets Mana Health apart from competitors?
CB: The industry is focusing on tackling what technology is getting out. Many EMR companies are working on getting data out in a nicer format. But that's just the first step — you also have to combine it with nonclinical data. We sit between those two circles in the Venn diagram and do it all. We want to enable the brain and the advanced applications, but it's also key not have to toggle between different platforms.
Q: Why is interoperability important, and why isn't it currently sufficient?
CB: Right now, no one's communicating effectively. We're starting to see it improving, but it's not currently sufficient. No one's solved this nervous system problem yet.
Q: Where do you see the health IT industry heading through the rest of 2016? How about five years from now?
CB: I'm really excited by the speed at which things are happening. When we first started doing this, no one was talking about interoperability. It's a unique time in history where, as a nation, we're realizing that a lack of interoperability and a lack of value-based care aren't working.
In 2016 and beyond, we're going to see major moves in this area. In fact, we've already started to see major moves — a computer was able to beat the world champion in [the complex board game] Go, and this ushered in a new era in AI. This excitement for the general tech world is combined with a need for it in healthcare. In five years, we're going to see decisions made regarding core infrastructure, and we'll start seeing the fruits of the groundwork we're setting up right now.