Who is Untangle Health™?
Untangle Health™ is a strategy and revenue acceleration firm that partners with technology and healthcare organizations to drive growth and redesign systems with intent. We specialize in strategic revenue generation and market expansion in healthcare technology and help our clients differentiate themselves in a competitive landscape. What makes Untangle Health™ different? We roll up our sleeves and drive revenue, we do not just pull strategy and market research from the clouds.
Part of our winning strategy is that we are never singularly focused on revenue. We understand product development and core ecosystem architecture at such a deep level that major enterprises (payer, provider, and life science) also look to us for guidance in rising above the bill-and-chill transformation and modernization efforts led by high-ticket consultancies that provide limited or non-existent ROI. Untangle Health™ is synonymous with mastery of healthcare data infrastructure, specifically related to our Healthcare Data Value Chain™. We know which players can execute and where marketing outpaces the product.
We work exclusively in healthcare, a highly dynamic and complex industry, where technical opportunity thrives, but bureaucracy limits. Few organizations in our industry can address both the business and technical barriers to entry and revenue growth, but our team of Untanglers stands out.
We are technology-oriented operators, strategists, and business developers who identify and attack market opportunities. Our engagements have a clear return on investment from day one.
Through our decades of experience, we have observed:
- Business-driven organizations striving for growth, but needing support to balance quantity with quality outcomes.
- Technical organizations excelling in innovation but requiring help to commercialize their creative solutions with partners who need them.
- Clinical organizations that have great potential impact, but will benefit from assistance in executing and managing complex technology ecosystems.
Healthcare is hard, but we’re here to help.
We have a tremendous sample size of customers/partners and wake up every morning eager to untangle the next initiative that drives meaningful progress. We are not just strategists and technologists, but also customers of the healthcare system as patients, parents, and children. We want the healthcare system to work for everyone, including families and our communities.
What We Are Seeing Today, And Angling For Tomorrow
| Themes and Challenges | Today | Tomorrow |
|---|---|---|
| More data does not translate to better outcomes (yet) | Smart devices, interoperability, remote patient monitoring, eventing… We are doing a great job generating more data and our public cloud partners love it. Everyone implementing the same large language model (LLM) is not the answer. | Tomorrow’s focus is quality. We need a fully developed health data strategy. We need to supplement, complement, augment, and derive value from data. We cannot simply add more noise. |
| The bar remains low for patient experiences and communication. | With part of the industry mindset shifting to value-based care (VBC), both payers and providers are scrambling to identify and close care gaps. They are working hard but often in parallel and not together. The resultant experience is jumbled for patients and providers. | Tomorrow we will see more empowerment of clinicians, simplifying how they provide their patients access to benefits often already covered by health plans. |
| Manual & paper processes continue to plague healthcare and reimbursement operations. | Prior auth, referrals, faxes, and written prescriptions: while some manual and paper processes are soon going digital, healthcare still lives in a batched, scheduled, manual world. | We need a fluid healthcare data value chain with free-flowing information, low latency, and simple connections. For systems to work well together, the systems will need to work well, first. |
| Manual & paper processes continue to plague healthcare and reimbursement operations. | Acquisitions continue as organizations hope for synergy but miss both organizational change management for their teams and aligned architecture for their data infrastructure. | Organizations will realize it is okay not to build everything from scratch and will start to thoughtfully refactor and re-architect core workflows and systems with patients and desired outcomes as the foci, not solely worrying about whether the project looks good when displayed on their website. |
| Organizations are buying the wrong stuff. | Leaders continue to receive bills of goods that don’t meet their needs. Vaporware and other products are deployed in production but don’t improve workflow or performance. | Organizations will realize it is okay not to build everything from scratch and will start to thoughtfully refactor and re-architect core workflows and systems with patients and desired outcomes as the foci, not solely worrying about whether the project looks good when displayed on their website. |
What Should You Be Thinking About Right Now?
Cyber Security – Getting your house in order
Get your house in order before you plan for the future. Cyber security is an imperative. The industry, from major players to small contributors, is highly vulnerable. The eventual cost of not doing enough now is far greater than the cost of getting your house in order.
Systems of Record – Formerly the whole castle, now just a stanchion
EHRs and Claims Adjudication systems were, for the longest time, the entire castle for providers and payers respectively. Now they’re each just one stanchion of their respective castles. When it comes to modern technology infrastructure for healthcare’s biggest players, the power and influence are moving away from over-reliance on any one technology vendor.
Platforms Optimizing ROI – Consolidation is inevitable
When powerful companies lose some of their influence, enterprise healthcare organizations want to avoid working with many individual point vendors. New kinds of platforms will stay winning as long as they continue evolving to optimize return on investment and/or efficiencies measured by cost savings.
Data Quality – Readiness for the AI Wave
Most enterprise healthcare organizations have a data quality problem. If you have major holes in your data infrastructure (integration, quality, storage, analytics, etc.), you are not ready for AI. Truly leveraging AI comes after a solid data strategy utilizing the Healthcare Data Value Chain.
Consumer Dynamics – Allowing Legacy Inefficiency to Persist
Most enterprise-grade organizations admit behind closed doors that interoperability and data foundations are a struggle area even just comparing themselves within healthcare. Take a wider look out at consumer-driven industries and you might feel like the average healthcare org or company is still using a rock hammer.
Untangle Health’s Healthcare Data Value Chain™
The Healthcare Data Value Chain™ is the systematic and operational heart of each company that circulates data and Untangle Health’s™ trademarked system for creating strong healthcare ecosystems. Even with some overlap of requirements and tools, the specific needs of each organization are unique. As organizations implement our systematic approach and begin to architect their systems with intent they will see waste reduction, tech debt elimination, vendor consolidation, data quality improvements, reduction in cloud costs, and overall more alignment of architecture to business objectives.
Organizations get excited to implement the latest and greatest, but with finite resources, high cloud costs, and the lack of a clear plan it frequently results in wasted effort, time, and money. Untangle Health™ brings context and intentional decision-making to build an infrastructure that addresses the organizational, “why.”
Utilizing the Healthcare Data Value Chain™ model, we build backward from your why to align your business units, technical infrastructure, and messaging so that it serves your patients and members. For partners or vendors contributing to the process, the question becomes, “How are you helping your customers achieve their goals?”
The internal organizational conversation must happen first. Aligning the “why” and determining the problems an organization should address is how we can architect a data strategy that makes sense and is appropriate to meet a company’s needs. This is why we call the Healthcare Data Value Chain™ the heart.
The chain works from the light blue arrow pointing to “Get Data” and then flows clockwise. Once connections are secured and systems are resilient, as a secure infrastructure is imperative, your organization can begin looking outwards and answer questions like:
- Which data does your organization need from the market?
- How do you compile and transform that data to make it useful?
- Where and how do you store data?
- How are you analyzing data and what insights can you derive?
- How are you translating and deploying those insights into action, either within your organization or pushed back into the market, enabling providers, payers, pharmaceutical and medical device, and other HCIT partners to subsequently serve patients and members?
How We See the Landscape and Our Role
Below, we highlight how we work to problem solve with our various partners.
HEALTHCARE TECHNOLOGY COMPANIES
For digital health companies contributing to the Healthcare Data Value Chain™, we untangle the payer, provider, life science, and medical device markets, showing how to apply their solutions within the context of the ecosystem these buyers are working toward. We help our clients better fit in AND better stand out, as we seek to execute market expansion for overall revenue and best client fits.
PAYERS AND PROVIDERS
For payers and providers, we help untangle technology ecosystems and architecture to align behind patient needs, identify and fill digital health gaps, eliminate redundancies, and help address other business needs which enable them to take care of more patients.
PHARMACEUTICAL, LIFE SCIENCE, AND MEDICAL DEVICE COMPANIES
For pharmaceutical, life science, and medical device companies, we typically focus on their clinical healthcare data and interoperability-related efforts, making digital health selections, and providing product strategy for digital applications and remote patient monitoring workflows which assist with getting patients connected to clinicians or generating data into a care-centric ecosystem.
The Future We Want For Healthcare
Untangle Health™ is helping build a seamlessly connected, efficient, and robust healthcare ecosystem. Our understanding of current and opportunistic player positioning, prioritized roadmaps, market perspectives, and product mixes, helps our partner organizations solve the unmet needs of their customers. Our mastery of the Healthcare Data Value Chain™, the heart of all commercial players, enables us to develop focused strategies that improve patient outcomes, member and consumer experiences, and the industry as a whole.
Are you a digital health platform or infrastructure company with a respectable market presence and an intense desire to expand your footprint and impact? Let us untangle the obstacles blocking your revenue growth, select the optimal focus areas that will grow your market share, and deliver the compelling and resonant positioning that demonstrates the value you bring to the healthcare ecosystem. We will not just pontificate strategy – we will figure out the right nuanced approach and then roll our sleeves up with you to drive growth and lasting impact. Let’s untangle healthcare together.
