Healthcare's Ambulatory Intelligence Gap

Ambulatory care, the engine of growth for most health systems, is stalling. Disconnected data across access, referral, capacity, and financial systems creates an operational bottleneck, hindering outpatient expansion. This is the Ambulatory Intelligence Gap.

New patient appointment wait times have ballooned to an average of 31 days, a 19 percent increase since 2022. Meanwhile, referral leakage costs the U.S. an estimated $150 billion annually, with 38 percent of referrals failing to close the loop. These aren't isolated problems; they are deeply interconnected facets of ambulatory performance.

Robbie Hughes, Chief Product Officer at Health Catalyst, observes, "It isn't because they don't care. The information they need to improve is scattered across five or six disconnected systems, and by the time it's pulled together, it's already out of date." Traditional tools like EHR reports or stale dashboards fall short, failing to provide a unified, current view for operational and financial leaders.

Bridging Data and Action

The challenge lies not in data scarcity but in aligning its meaning. A long wait time, for example, could stem from insufficient provider capacity, referral bottlenecks, or poor scheduling. Understanding the 'why' behind these metrics, and where interventions yield the greatest impact, is crucial.

Recent AI advancements can analyze complex operational relationships, but AI alone lacks healthcare-specific context. Health Catalyst's Ambulatory Intelligence solution merges advanced AI with nearly two decades of healthcare improvement expertise. This embeds operational best practices and proven methodologies directly into the platform.

Crucially, sensitive patient data remains within the health system's environment. Health Catalyst deploys its AI solution directly into the customer's Databricks workspace. This ensures robust data governance and addresses growing concerns about data privacy and control, a significant shift in how healthcare providers engage with external AI tools.

Brian Eliason, who leads strategic vendor partnerships at Health Catalyst, notes, "Customers have shifted and want to control their own data. But they've also told us they want to continue the relationship with Health Catalyst, with them owning it."

Built for the Customer's Environment

The solution leverages Databricks components for governance, performance, and usability. Unity Catalog provides centralized governance for the entire data footprint, including access controls and audit trails. Lakebase ensures low-latency data serving for daily operational dashboards, while Genie offers natural-language querying for immediate follow-up on metric shifts.

This architecture enables same-week visibility. The solution comes with dozens of prebuilt metrics across Access Optimization, Revenue Intelligence, Panel Management, and Referral Insights. Cross-domain scorecards link these insights, helping leaders prioritize high-value opportunities and understand interdependencies.

Health systems retain the ability to adapt the solution, tailoring terminology and workflows to their specific markets. This approach has driven significant results: Thibodaux Regional saw a $1.2 million increase in annual revenue, INTEGRIS Health achieved a $2.2 million increase in annual revenue and closed 55,000 care gaps, and WakeMed supported a $25.4 million increase in annual revenue.

Ambulatory Intelligence is the first in a portfolio of solutions built on this data foundation, promising to compound insights as costing and clinical quality tools connect. Future capabilities, leveraging frameworks like Databricks Agent Bricks, aim to support the full path from insight to outcome, drawing on Health Catalyst's extensive improvement data to guide interventions.

The system seeks to move beyond simply identifying problems to actively supporting the full path to outcome delivery, a significant step in applying AI in healthcare operations.