Carta Healthcare specializes in AI-powered clinical data abstraction solutions, leveraging hybrid intelligence with expert human abstractors to convert complex health data into standardized, actionable datasets for healthcare providers and life sciences organizations. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Carta Healthcare’s VP of Business Development, Greg Miller, to gain a deeper understanding of the company.
Greg Miller’s Background
Could you tell me more about your background? Miller said:
“I’ve been working in the healthcare IT industry for 40 years. I started my career at Tufts New England Medical Center in Boston, where I was a management engineer in IT. We had internally developed the first clinical and financial decision support system in healthcare and soon after we had developed it, we started getting commercial interest from other hospitals.”
“About six months after that, we spun out of Tufts New England Medical Center (NEMC) and became a wholly owned, for-profit subsidiary called Transition Systems (or TSI as most people knew it). We built that company from zero in revenue to about $500 million (in today’s SaaS revenue model) over a 14 or 15-year period. In the early 90’s we did an LBO and bought ourselves from NEMC and subsequently went public in 1996. In 1999, we were acquired by Eclipsys, and two years later, Eclipsys was acquired by Allscripts.”
“I am grateful for my TSI experience, not only for the commercial success, but for the knowledge I gained about how to build and scale a software company, while also building tremendous customer and teammate relationships. I’m delighted that many of those relationships are still in place today.”
“After TSI, I went on to work in multiple leading Healthcare IT companies, serving mostly in roles leading strategy, marketing and sales; domestically and internationally.”
“One other adventure that was a thrilling experience, was when I led sales and marketing at Medicity, where our team grew the company revenue about tenfold from 2008 to 2011. Medicity was acquired by Aetna in 2011 for 10 times the revenue, which at the time was unheard of in the post-financial crisis era. Another example of a fun adventure was when I was with Health Catalyst. When I joined that company in 2013, the company had a handful of very successful customers, but was still small. By the time Health Catalyst went public in 2019, we had established the company as the industry leader in the healthcare analytics market segment with approximately $185 million in revenue.”
“So, that’s really my background – taking something small and innovative, and scaling it to be a leader in a category.”
Formation Of The Company
How did the idea for the company come together? Miller shared:
“Carta Healthcare evolved from a project at Stanford Children’s Hospital. Our founder, Matt Hollingsworth, was a computer science undergrad at Stanford who was working on his MBA at Stanford Business School. He got involved with a project at the hospital in which they were trying to understand supply utilization in the operating room. They needed data to support this project, but it took them 18 months just to get the data.”
“Matt drew upon his computer science and AI background to write an algorithm that automatically abstracted the data they needed for this OR project, and it worked beautifully.”
“The principal investigator on that project took note of what Matt had done and said, “You know, we could apply this to lots of other problems, like clinical data abstraction for registries.” So the initial project started in 2016 at Stanford Children’s Hospital and it was cardiovascular in nature.”
“One year later, the American College of Cardiology (ACC) got excited about what we were doing and made an initial investment into what became Carta Healthcare. The investment from the ACC is actually what launched Carta Healthcare as a formal company. Today, the ACC is still an investor and still has a board seat with us.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Miller reflected:
“At Carta Healthcare specifically, I love watching the eyes of potential customers bug out when we demonstrate our AI-powered clinical data abstraction platform because they see how easy it is to use and how accurate and precise the answers are, which they know ultimately translates into higher-quality data and saving them a ton money and time. It’s really very fun!”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Miller explained:
“What really drives us at Carta Healthcare is getting meaningful insights into the hands of those who can affect change and improve healthcare as fast as possible. The first step in that journey is unlocking the power of the clinical data that is trapped in EHRs and many other clinical systems. Making it more difficult is that 70 to 80 percent of clinical data is in unstructured notes. While hospitals and health systems have done a pretty good job with the structured data (20-30 percent of the data), they’ve had far less success with unstructured data.”
“Essentially, what we do is apply artificial intelligence to the problem of abstracting data from clinical systems, while maintaining a human expert in the loop to validate AI-generated data and analyze it to drive improvement.”
“Let’s take clinical registries as an example. Clinical registries are specific disease or procedure databases outlining what happened to patients of a certain type. Abstracting clinical data for a registry has historically required a human to sift through the EHR and other data sources to extract relevant information that answers questions in the registry system. Manual clinical data abstraction takes a long time and costs a lot of money and doesn’t always produce the highest quality data. Our Hybrid Intelligence approach, combined with a human-in-the-loop dramatically reduces the time it takes to abstract clinical data, while improving data quality substantially and saving up to 50 percent or more on abstraction costs.”
Evolution Of The Company’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Miller noted:
“We are data abstraction experts; it’s in our DNA. We have more than 200 clinical data abstractors on staff. We understand the registry problem deeply and better than most. While we have always delivered technology-powered abstraction services for hospitals, the technology was primarily used by the Carta Healthcare abstraction team. It really wasn’t designed as a customer facing solution. The platform was also developed using what I jokingly refer to as “old school AI,” meaning NLP and Machine Learning.”
“As Large Language Models (LLMs) became commercially available – and viable – for a vendor to adopt such as us, we experienced a revolutionary advancement in our approach. As we worked with customers to refine and enhance the platform, we started getting asked from our hospital customers “can we use this application internally?” That led us to further develop our AI-powered platform so abstractors at customer sites could use the platform directly, versus just the Carta Healthcare abstraction team. This was a game-changing moment for the company.”
“In addition to the advancement of our AI platform for clinical data abstraction for registries, in November 2024, we acquired Realyze Intelligence from UPMC Enterprises, which launched us into the clinical trials space. Essentially, we now use our platform for matching patients to clinical trials and provide real-world analytics.”
“If you think about what we do through a broad enterprise clinical data management lens, healthcare organizations have tons of source data, the majority of which is in unstructured formats. They have some downstream use case – it could be a registry, or for clinical research, but there are many, many downstream use cases for which abstracted data is essential, once the data is unlocked.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Miller cited:
“A significant milestone was getting started because we were the first and only company applying AI to the challenge of clinical data abstraction. There are other companies providing outsourced abstraction services, but we were the first back in 2016 and 2017 to apply this technology to the challenge of clinical data abstraction.”
“Today we work with organizations ranging from standalone community hospitals to large academic medical centers as well as large national multi-entity, multi-state health systems. Every one of our customers represents an important milestone in the evolution of the company.”
“Significant milestones were when we applied LLMs to the abstraction challenge as well as when we acquired Realyze Intelligence.”
“And while this isn’t a milestone, we’re very proud that Carta Healthcare has never lost a customer. It’s a huge badge of honor, and it means we’re delivering value every single day.”
Customer Success Stories
When asking Miller about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“As one example, In 2021, a large health system partnered with Carta Healthcare to address a pressing challenge in its Cardiovascular service line. A dedicated team of nine was grappling with data abstraction for multiple registries, but a significant backlog of cases had accumulated. The pandemic and mandatory work-from-home policies further complicated team management. Additionally, registry abstraction processes were fragmented across the organization, adding to the complexity.”
“Amid these challenges, the Chair of Cardiology attended the ACC conference and learned about Carta Healthcare. Recognizing its potential to alleviate the team’s struggles, he shared his findings with the Executive Director of Cardiovascular Services upon his return. Together, they saw an opportunity to streamline operations and tackle the backlog.”
“After engaging with Carta Healthcare and conducting an ROI analysis, the health system confirmed that Carta’s solutions would deliver higher-quality data abstraction more efficiently and cost-effectively. The results speak for themselves. The partnership has been transformative: the health system now leverages Carta Healthcare for additional registries without adding staff. In fact, they’ve reduced their abstraction team from nine to three, thanks to resource reassignment and natural attrition. This collaboration has resulted in a 50 percent reduction in abstraction costs, the complete elimination of their backlog, and an exceptional 98-99 percent inter-rater reliability (IRR).”
“As the Executive Director of Cardiovascular Services said, ‘I don’t even think about Carta—it just works!’”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Miller affirmed:
“We have two types of competitors: those that just offer professional services/manual outsourcing of abstraction work, and a few tech-only startups that seemingly pop every week. I believe that the outsource-only companies are a dying breed, as hospitals are looking toward technology enablement in the abstraction process to reduce costs and improve data abstraction workflow and processes, while at the same time, reducing costs and saving time.”
“On the flip side, whether it is abstracting data for clinical registries, matching patients to clinical trials or any other downstream use case, a vendor has to have deep clinical subject matter expertise and understand clinical workflow. Layer on top of that the need for extensive knowledge about how hospitals operate on a day-to-day basis in a clinical context. Without that, any vendor that is trying to throw technology-only at the problem of abstraction won’t be successful.”
“So, what really sets Carta Healthcare apart is a combination of our deep clinical/hospital operations domain expertise combined with state-of-the-art AI technology.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the future company goals? Miller concluded:
“Our goal is to expand the concept of what Carta Healthcare is all about within the broader category of enterprise clinical data management. While we’ll always be experts in specific areas of clinical data management, like registries or matching patients to a clinical trial, there are so many other downstream use cases that our customers are asking us for.”
“As mentioned above, what drives us is getting clinical data into the hands of those that can affect change as fast as possible, to improve healthcare. Everything we do at Carta Healthcare aligns with that mission. To that end, we are pragmatists, hungry to deploy our AI platform, combined with expert human abstractors, to solve real-world challenges in hospitals and health systems everywhere.”
