Explorys

Explorys developed a cloud-based platform designed to help healthcare organizations aggregate, analyze, and manage vast amounts of clinical data. The company's business model was centered on providing this platform as a service (SaaS) to a clientele that included major U.S. healthcare systems, such as Trinity Health and Adventist Health System. By leveraging big data frameworks like Hadoop, Explorys offered solutions for clinical integration, at-risk population management, cost of care measurement, and pay-for-performance, enabling healthcare providers to identify patterns in diseases, treatments, and outcomes. This allowed for a more proactive approach to patient care, moving beyond reactive treatments to preventative outreach and better management of chronic conditions.

The company's core product, the Enterprise Performance Management suite, provided tools for ad-hoc data exploration, tracking quality metrics, and managing patient registries. A key feature was its ability to handle a massive, de-identified patient dataset, which at its peak represented over 50 million lives and 315 billion longitudinal data points. This extensive data repository allowed for robust research applications and predictive analytics. A significant milestone for Explorys was its acquisition by IBM in April 2015, at which point it became a foundational component of the newly formed IBM Watson Health division. The acquisition aimed to combine Explorys' data platform with IBM's cognitive computing capabilities. Following the acquisition, Explorys' product evolution slowed, and the business eventually declined, becoming a casualty of the broader challenges faced by the Watson Health division, which imploded in 2018.