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Hal Andrews, Data Advantage CEO

In October, Data Advantage Corporation of Louisville announced its acquisition of Planning 2.0, a Nashville-based provider of healthcare market and planning products and services to the hospital and pharmaceutical industries.

Hal Andrews, CEO of Data Advantage, said, “We are very excited about working with Planning 2.0. This fills a hole in our product suite and will allow us to cross-market and come up with new products that people will find useful.”

Andrews continued, “We believe there is a significant opportunity to create a competitive advantage within the hospital, payer and pharmaceutical markets. By combining Planning 2.0’s Market Platform with Data Advantage’s actionable benchmarking data, we can take advantage of this opportunity sooner and on a larger scale.

Combining demographic trends with quality and reimbursement indicators can help clients make better decisions about physician recruiting, service line expansions and marketing dollars.”

Data Advantage is a privately-held healthcare information company established in 1992. It specializes in providing the healthcare and business communities with a cost-effective source for reliable and timely information products. The company serves more than 1,000 clients, ranging from the largest publicly traded healthcare companies to hospitals with only 15 beds.

Andrews said, “Historically, Data Advantage has had two core services: using public data sets to benchmark performance and clinical resource management. We provide a cost-effective source for reliable and timely information products from sources such as Medicare Inpatient Acute Care and Medicare Cost Reports, UB92 Files, Long Term Care and Rehab Data, Providers of Services File, Zip Code Files, and public use State Data.”

The acquisition of Planning 2.0 will enhance Data Advantage’s growing hospital market data business by strengthening its capability to offer a wider continuum of demographics, physiographic and geo-spatial analysis for its clients.

Planning 2.0, a leading provider of next-generation mapping and reporting for the healthcare industry, was founded in 2005 by veteran healthcare information executives J. Kenneth Pitts and Tod Featherling. They wanted to relate the next generation of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) analysis to the healthcare industry, based on the concept that the mapping and related reporting tools used by the industry had remained rudimentary, leaving a market gap open for affordable, world-class market analyses.

Pitts, co-founder and president, and Fetherling, co-founder and consultant, had worked together at The Keckley Group and America’s Health Network, and teamed up with ESRI, the worldwide leader in GIS, to provide healthcare business professionals a completely new look into the “where, what and when” in their markets. Using this system, they can show companies in this complex and competitive field an accurate analysis of their business position.

Based on their core businesses, the principles felt Data Advantage and Planning 2.0 were a good fit. Data Advantage’s products provide a glimpse into the competitive arena by benchmarking quality and financial data. Planning 2.0’s services provide high-level demographic info as well as detailed patient traffic patterns and shifts, allowing providers to rank themselves against peers and identify growth opportunities.

Pitts said, “Acquisition by Data Advantage allows us to build out products that apply computer (intelligence) to healthcare marketing by using leading mapping and sophisticated technological capacity. Data Advantage offers tons of very useful data sets and the assets to expand our products to the next level.”

He added, “Data Advantage’s lead in financial and quality data complements the market and psychographic data that we provide.”

Pitts pointed out that Planning 2.0 offers a unique product that visually displays information by mapping out data, such as the location of the most highly insured populations, where certain types of physicians such as cardiac or orthopedic practices are located, and which areas are most profitable locations.

Pitts, who comes from a background as a healthcare clinician, said that new technology can turn data into market analysis and make that data indispensable—and palatable--by showing what might be happening in the marketplace. “If market forces are allowed to operate naturally, the data we provide can help make better decisions,” he added.

Sound data is especially important as both government and private payers are increasingly linking reimbursement to core quality measures, evidenced by the voluntary pilot P4P program launched by CMS this year.

Pitts pointed out that with a presidential election on the horizon, healthcare market data will be a hot topic among candidates, payers, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies — and voters. “Having the right information at the right time is the key for our clients, who need to understand immediately where they stand with their consumers.”

Andrews said that for the time being, the two companies will remain separate brands.



January 2008

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