St. Joseph Health has moved the technology development arm of a company it invested in from Colorado to Irvine.
The Irvine-based hospital operator is integrating Datu Health’s software engineering and development work with that of several healthcare technology startups it’s invested in. The move comes shortly after St. Joseph said it invested $10 million in Datu, which is working on software to connect clinical records, personalized healthcare data, and consumers’ health-related preferences.
Datu closed its office in Boulder around the time of the investment and eliminated 42 jobs.
Four people are remaining in Boulder, and Parham will commute between St. Louis and Irvine.
The 42 workers the company laid off have been offered job interviews, and “we hope some will” relocate to Orange County, Andy Parham, Datu’s chief executive, said in an interview last week.
St. Joseph Health consolidated the development for cost savings, said Bill Russell, its chief information officer, regarding its decision to mix development efforts of Datu, Newport Beach-based Hart Inc., and two startups whose names it said it will announce later.
“We gain some benefits of economies of scale.”
“Rather than have multiple development teams, they will share a development team,” he said, later noting that he expects to have little trouble competing for talent with the likes of Silicon Valley.
“Southern California has better traffic and lifestyle,” he said.
Datu, Hart and the others will remain separate companies, even with the accelerator model for software development.
“Our intent is not to buy these companies—we want to support them,” Russell said.
He did say, however, that the companies’ software products are capable of working with each other and could be sold as a suite or individually.
Datu’s products include Digital Encounter and Persuasion Engine—the platform that will be accelerated with the new St. Joseph Health investment.
Persuasion Engine “harnesses a growing flood of data—clinical, patient reported and more,” in order to help patients manage their health behaviors.
St. Joseph’s philosophy aligns with Datu’s, according to Parham.
“St. Joseph is one of the more progressive health systems [when it comes to] population health management and value-based care, which has grown much faster in Southern California,” he said.
Population health management is intended to treat a group of patients—St. Joseph Hoag Health customers, for example—by tailoring healthcare delivery to the group’s specific needs. It’s one of the pet projects of St. Joseph Health Chief Executive Deborah Proctor, who’s nearing retirement after almost 11 years of heading the hospital system.
New App
St. Joseph Health’s other software company investments also have been making moves.
Hart teamed up with St. Joseph Hoag Health, an alliance between St. Joseph Health and Newport Beach-based Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian, in September to introduce a mobile app designed to safely and securely manage patients’ health and wellness online or with a smartphone.
Hart said the app enables users to manage their health by allowing them access to medical records, lab results, post-visit instructions, pill reminders and more.
Datu once was a unit of BickGroup, a St. Louis-based technology company. It launched as an independent company in 2013, the same year St. Joseph invested an undisclosed amount of money in it.
