Opilio: Healthcare Data Liberation

Today I’m excited to bring you a deep dive on a company newly emerged from stealth – Opilio. I’ll walk you through the founder Sean Shahkarami vision for how data ought to be handled within care delivery organizations of all sizes, and what problems they’re aiming to solve.

Let’s dive in!

This is a sponsored post, so if you want to chat with Sean directly or learn how Opilio is a value-add for your organization, they’ve given me the go-ahead to share their Calendly here.

If you’re interested in me writing a sponsored deep dive, feel free to get in touch.

Opilio: Executive Summary

Use of data in healthcare is rapidly growing and evolving.

Emergence of AI and LLMs, development of infrastructure, and policy changes all are making care delivery organizations think harder about how to optimize use of internal datasets.

Opilio works with care delivery organizations (physician practices, enablement platforms) to leverage data for commercial or strategic uses (HIPAA-compliant, of course).

They build custom software products to unlock data-centric revenue streams for healthcare organizations. And Opilio wants provider organizations to maintain control of their own IP.

Similar to how enablement firms unlock value-based care for physician practices, Opilio is the oil refinery looking to fine-tune data: data to inform investment decisions, develop marketing strategies, or drive predictive analytics.

• Opilio’s public pitch deck
• Opilio’s website

Opilio’s North Star Thesis

Data is your most valuable asset – especially in healthcare. Each time you choose to go with a big logo or cheaper alternative – not only are you most likely getting a cookie-cutter, “one-size fits all” solution; you are devaluing your entire organization by sharing your data externally. Meanwhile, your data is making that other company exponentially more valuable.

We’ve found that outside of the one-time customization / implementation cost our price point is basically the same as competitors and we typically can prove ROI within a year, and many times sooner. It’s worth it to have a solution that is fit to your company’s unique nuances, keeps your data private, and builds your internal IP and value that you may potentially monetize in the future.

The Great Healthcare Data Unlock

We’ve talked about the healthcare Spice on this newsletter, and now we’re going to chat about oil.

You’ve probably heard at one point or another that data is the new oil – meaning that it’s not useful in its unrefined state. But once it’s given a purpose, and put through that refinery, it becomes something that can drive meaningful change.

In 2023, we’re witnessing the great Data Unlock within healthcare, and we’re still incredibly early. AI has burst onto the scene all while development of infrastructure and systems of intelligence are happening across healthcare. Biotech firms, enablement players, healthcare SaaS companies, managed care players, and even health systems are frantically trying to find ways to leverage their data for commercial purposes without losing control of that asset themselves. The onset of large-language models has transformed data into a valuable commodity that nobody in healthcare can ignore.

Everyone wants an edge. Life sciences crave data for better drug discovery or research. Value-based care players and health insurers want it for risk stratification to drive more savings and ultimately their bottom lines. Even the mom and pop physician practice can leverage data for more informed decisions on the optimal location to open a clinic, more efficient patient scheduling and clinician staffing, or more effective go-to-market strategy.

Meanwhile, public health officials, health tech firms, and policymakers are all contributing to healthcare datasets increasingly accessible via API. Recent policy & technological improvements have made it easier than ever to generate longitudinal patient records – aggregating data from a bunch of different healthcare sources for one patient to understand the full patient journey.

Privacy and regulatory issues aside, better, more refined data, like the longitudinal patient record described above, in theory means better patient care. Ability to stratify patient risk. To make better strategic decisions. To improve patient experience or employee retention through more efficient processes. Of course, all to fuel top and bottom line profitability.

This is all easier said than done. But slowly, firms are emerging to tackle the healthcare data revolution head-on and help care delivery organizations – everything from the mom and pop physician practice, to the ACO with a million members – leverage their data for useful purposes.

And I’d like to introduce you to one of these companies: Opilio.

How Opilio Unlocks Data for Provider Organizations

From the beginning of his career, Opilio’s founder Sean Shahkarami chose to immerse himself in data analysis, SQL, and Microsoft Access, running late night queries and praying to the data gods that his laptop wouldn’t crash overnight.

Flash forward to the present, and while his own career and experiences grew, data capabilities and technological advancements around him grew tenfold. What might have taken Sean weeks or even months to achieve in a static environment could now be accomplished within minutes in an integrated, live, and dynamic environment. But, as he (and probably most of us) noticed, most advancements didn’t extend to healthcare. Despite technological leaps, many of his former clients and projects, which included larger physician groups and hospitals, continued to grapple with the same issues from a decade ago. As we all know, healthcare is notorious for moving at a snail’s pace.

• Operational inefficiencies like revenue leakage, underpayments, decreasing reimbursement trends, escalating costs, disproportional staffing to actual demand, and various operational inefficiencies remained prevalent throughout the provider organizations he worked with. The same problems, like a repeating pattern.

But the only problem with that repeating pattern in healthcare was that continually manifested in different ways. Every project required attention to detail, nuance, and presented its own unique set of facts and circumstances. Healthcare organizations need flexible teams that can respond to a wide array of challenges.

And so that’s what Sean set out to build with Opilio.

Opilio’s Secret Sauce: Embracing healthcare’s nuance

Sean launched Opilio in 2023 alongside a leadership team with deep experienced in working with provider organizations of all shapes and sizes. Opilio’s goal is to simplify the data challenges these organizations face, and allow them to find ways to leverage data in meaningful ways to drive the organization forward. When getting details from Sean, what struck me about Opilio was that the firm’s secret sauce also presents oddly paradoxical challenges from a marketing perspective. Opilio is the handyman of healthcare data solutions. It has provided a number of services for clients across a wide breadth of use cases. But it’s hard to niche or segment down in marketing language and target clients when you say you can do everything.

So now I’m tasked with doing it!

Kidding.

Some of Opilio’s bread and butter work involves addressing core needs for evolving healthcare organizations. Examples include:

• Creating go-to-market strategy and lead generation, sales sentiment analysis;
• Developing predictive analytics and predictive risk scoring for risk-bearing organizations;
• Creating dynamic staffing models for providers based on predictive volume demand; and
• Building custom AI solutions that involve text generation, chat assistants, and that serve other customer or patient support functions.

Along with the above and given Opilio’s natural emerging market segmentation, Sean & team are also building out a nice little business in helping physicians build personal brands as thought leaders, helping them think through strategic marketing decisions and developing social funnels for personal brand growth – a market that is sure to grow as the physician and clinician influencer market waxes.

People buy from those that they’ve grown to know, trust and like. To that end, Opilio partners with individual clinicians to kindle that trust and transform it into practice growth.

What’s next for Opilio

From identifying inefficiency in a provider’s revenue cycle management flow, to helping a chiropractor with his marketing, patient acquisition, and lead generation, Opilio’s defining characteristic is that the team wants to get into the nitty gritty day-to-day realities that care delivery organizations face, understand the problems they’re facing, and solve them with accretive ROI to the firm. Opilio’s secret sauce lies in its desire to embrace the nuance of healthcare, create lasting value, and empower providers without taking advantage of them.

I’ll be interested to see where Opilio finds success as it scales. It’s positioned to capture the rising, long-tail provider tide of the data oil rush.