The healthcare industry has been accumulating data for decades. Claims records, pharmacy fills, lab reports, visit notes, social determinant reporting — the volume of information available about any given patient has never been greater. And yet the gap between having that data and acting on it in the moment remains one of the industry’s most persistent challenges.
Two kinds of data
Dave Crocker, Honest Health’s Chief Information Officer, draws a distinction that clarifies the problem.
“There are two very different things we’re talking about when we talk about data in healthcare,” he says.
“There’s data-driven insight — dashboards, scorecards, performance reports. These are important. They tell you how you’re doing. But they look backward. And then there’s data-driven action — in the moment, or as close to the moment as you can get, what is happening with this patient right now? That’s where the opportunity to change an outcome actually lives.”
The distinction matters because healthcare has invested heavily in the first — and very little in the second.
Health systems have sophisticated reporting environments. They often lack the ability to surface a single, actionable alert to the right person at the right time.
At its core, the challenge isn’t access to data — it’s translating it into meaningful action. Jason Howard, President of Honest Health, puts it plainly: “You can be data rich and information poor. That’s what we’re trying to fix.”
The fragmentation problem
Part of the challenge is structural. American healthcare evolved organically — hospitals, clinics, labs, pharmacies, specialists — each maintaining their own records, each running on separate systems. The result is a patient whose full story is distributed across institutions that often can’t see each other.
Mary Zuckerman, Vice President and General Manager of our Michigan market, describes the practical consequence: “We have an abundance of data. Do we have an abundance of insights? That’s always the challenge. And insights in a way that makes sense to a provider — that’s the other challenge. There’s a lot of data, and it’s complicated, and the biggest risk is that we give physicians data they feel they can’t impact.”
That last point is critical. Data presented without context, without a clear action attached, without the right framing for the provider receiving it — that data doesn’t just fail to help. It adds to the cognitive burden of an already overwhelmed clinical team.
What the full picture enables
Adam Silverman, MD, Market Chief Medical Officer for New York, describes what becomes possible when the data picture expands beyond the traditional clinical record.
“What’s exciting about the data we now have is that it goes beyond the medical record. We’re getting pharmacy data, social determinants of health, care from multiple sites, and more. We can see that someone lost their job—and that’s why they couldn’t afford their prescription — instead of labeling them as ‘noncompliant.’”
He describes a case that’s all too common. A patient — let’s call him Mr. Jones — had filled his blood pressure medication on schedule every month for a year. Then one refill didn’t come. Without real-time visibility into refill behavior, the care team wouldn’t have known until something went wrong — often a hospital stay. But this time, the gap was flagged, a care manager called, and within minutes, the root cause surfaced: job loss and a temporary financial setback — something solvable before it escalated.
“If we find out a patient is not taking their medicine before that complication develops, we saved a hospitalization. If we saved a hospitalization, maybe we saved a life. That to me is the power of the data.”
The role of AI
Crocker is clear about one thing: “This isn’t about technology for technology’s sake. It’s about creating moments — opportunities for a human to step in and change an outcome. AI just helps us find those moments sooner and at scale.”
Honest Health’s Chief Physician Executive Scott Sears, MD, puts it in more human terms. “You have billions of nerve signals in your body at any moment, but you’re only aware of the ones that matter. Your brain filters out the rest so you’re not overwhelmed. AI works the same way — it surfaces what needs attention and filters out the noise. But it still takes a clinician to decide what to do next.”
So the physician’s role doesn’t diminish — it gets sharper and more impactful. Less time spent searching, more time spent making decisions that matter.
What changes when the data is right
When data-driven action works as it should, the outcomes are measurable.
Fewer unnecessary hospitalizations. Earlier identification of patients trending toward higher acuity. Primary care physicians armed with the information they need to influence the referral decisions and care pathways that account for the majority of system cost, even though primary care represents only 5 to 7 percent of medical spend directly.
Crocker summarizes the goal simply: “Our number one job is to take care of people. Everything technology does plays a supporting role in that — and its job is to make that support as effective as possible.”
Being data-rich was never the destination.
It was always the precondition.
The real work is turning that data into moments where the right person knows the right thing at the right time — and can act on it.