Autonomy Radiates Health

An Interview with Fernando Lucini

The business heartbeat of Autonomy is strong and consistent. The company radiates financial health. Based on the company’s recent announcement about IDOL technology for health and medical applications, there is more growth ahead. Autonomy is one of the giants of search and content processing. The firm generates nearly $1 billion a year in revenue and has a market cap north of $6 billion. In a year that witnessed the agonizing death of Convera and the declining fortunes of dozens of other vendors, Autonomy is radiant. Now the company has tuned its IDOL technology which delivers meaning based computing to more than 20,000 licensees to better address health and medical information challenges. The demonstration that Fernando Lucini walked me through was impressive. A user can discern trends, locate specific information from virtually any source of digital information, and glean insights.

The business heartbeat of Autonomy is strong and consistent. The company radiates financial health. Based on the company’s recent announcement about IDOL technology for health and medical applications, there is more growth ahead. Autonomy is one of the giants of search and content processing. The firm generates nearly $1 billion a year in revenue and has a market cap north of $6 billion. In a year that witnessed the agonizing death of Convera and the declining fortunes of dozens of other vendors, Autonomy is radiant.

Now the company has tuned its IDOL technology which delivers meaning based computing to more than 20,000 licensees to better address health and medical information challenges. The demonstration that Fernando Lucini walked me through was impressive. A user can discern trends, locate specific information from virtually any source of digital information, and glean insights.

I spoke with Fernando Lucini, who joined Autonomy in 2000. He serves as the Chief Architect of the Autonomy group, Prior to joining Autonomy, Mr Lucini was Solutions Manager for LeadingSide Inc, responsible for determining solutions strategy across the enterprise. Mr Lucini holds an engineering degree with honors from the University of Kent and an MBA from Spain’s Instituto de Empresa business school.

In our one hour interview, Mr. Lucini explained Autonomy’s newest market initiative. The full text of the interview appears below.

Is it true that Autonomy is mounting a health and medical product and service initiative?

Yes, on November 15, 2010, we make the official announcement. Autonomy’s offering is Meaning Based Healthcare, a new Autonomy business designed to help healthcare delivery organizations improve the quality of care and lower costs.

Why healthcare?

Good question. Autonomy is ideally positioned to transform the healthcare market because of its unique ability to understand meaning within all forms of data—which will enable providers to make more accurate diagnoses and treatment plans, and help hospitals to keep pace with the ever-expanding web of privacy and regulatory compliance requirements.

Healthcare Delivery Organizations today confront a constantly growing volume of unstructured and structured healthcare information, increasingly complex industry regulations, and heightened patient expectations and empowerment. Also, healthcare providers worldwide face an increasing pressure to move to Electronic Health Records or EHR.

As you know, in the United States, the recently-passed American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) requires health care providers to implement both Electronic Health Records and meet increasingly demanding ‘meaningful use’ outcome measures.

Do you have healthcare customers up and running?

Yes, of course. Autonomy already counts many of the world’s leading healthcare organizations as customers today, including the American Medical Association, BlueCross BlueShield, Kaiser Permanente, Loma Linda University Medical Center, the National Health Service in the UK, and Sutter Health.

As the world’s leading provider of software for unstructured information, and the market leader in information governance technologies, Autonomy’s Meaning Based Healthcare platform is the ideal solution for the new era in healthcare.

How will Autonomy help healthcare professionals conquer the information-centric challenges facing healthcare professionals and institutions?

That’s a great question.Meaning Based Healthcare is a comprehensive approach that encompasses meaning based care and meaning based compliance. Today we are launching our first product, Autonomy Auminence, a powerful point-of-care analysis dashboard designed to help the provider make better diagnoses, which I’ll talk about in greater depth in a few minutes.

Auminence? That sounds like a play on the word “eminence”.

Yes eminence and omniscience.

And the second area we will pursue in the healthcare market is around information governance. Autonomy thrives in solving the information governance challenges of information-intensive, highly regulated industries and will apply this same proven technology and expertise to the healthcare market. Both our meaning based care and meaning based compliance approaches will help healthcare professionals ease the transition to electronic health records, and meet the “meaningful use” requirements set out in President Obama’s healthcare bill.

How will Autonomy address the unique information challenges of the healthcare market?

We will leverage our leadership in cloud computing – today used by the world’s 10 largest banks and now standing at over 17 Petabytes under management. Just as we have done in the financial services, legal, pharmaceutical, and retail industries, we will apply our cloud technology to help the healthcare industry gain control over their regulatory compliance, privacy, and security challenges.

Can you give me a bird’s-eye view of the new Auminence product and service?

Think of Autonomy Auminence as a powerful point-of-care analysis dashboard, designed to help the provider make better quality, data-driven, evidence-based, diagnosis decisions. Auminence allows a healthcare professional to combine his or her personal knowledge with the wealth of knowledge that exists on the patient and their symptoms, clinical features, and related diseases – contained in the vast volumes of “human-friendly” information that make up healthcare data.

Is this a search and results list approach?

No. Auminence provides a checklist of diagnoses for the clinician to consider – indicating diagnoses that have the strongest statistical significance – and also presents to the provider the all-important “unknown-unknowns” that are ever-present at the point-of-care. These diagnoses may not be obvious, but by connecting together important pieces of Electronic Medical Record data, lead conclusively to a strong candidate for the correct diagnosis.

As you like to say, Autonomy’s Auminence goes “beyond search.”

Auminence delivers actionable intelligence or incisive intelligence. That’s what users want and need, based on my research. Healthcare is notorious for many different and sometimes home-grown systems. How does the Auminence system tap into disparate content?

You are correct. Autonomy’s core technology, IDOL, has over 400 connectors and supports over 1,000 data types. Autonomy healthcare OEM partners today include GE Healthcare, Siemens, and Genentech, to name a few.

What about third-party data that some teaching hospitals rely upon? Can you make that available to a user?

Yes. Auminence is based upon our unique Bayesian inference technology, which can uniquely understand any information a provider interacts with, on dozens and dozens of disparate systems. If a client has third-party data, Auminence can process and use those data and information. Absolutely no problem: one access point.

How is this Auminence delivered? Are you providing an on-premises approach or using the hosted solutions you off your Wall Street and eDiscovery customers?

Auminence can be delivered on-premise or as a hosted solution. It is also available on mobile platforms.

What's the availability of this service? How long does it take to deploy?

Our cloud offering gives customers immediate availability to the service. On-premise is also very quick to adopt as it requires very little in the way of computing or configuration and as we’ve already mentioned, It can be used by doctors and clinicians at the point of care with patients, on such devices as iPhones, iPads and Android devices, amongst other mobile platforms.

I think of IDOL as performing both retrieval and analytical functions. What is the mix of number crunching and findability in the system?

Auminence is powered by IDOL, so all the heavy lifting is done quietly in the background to present the user with the answers to critical questions both explicitly expressed and even more importantly implicit in the data.

What is the upside of a healthcare customer embracing IDOL?

Healthcare customers will benefit from Autonomy technology for the same reasons HDOs will – they will receive better quality care at lower costs. We also know that Auminence will eliminate the time consuming and expensive manual gathering of necessary information. Our system delivers what the healthcare professional needs quickly. Auminence can save time and money.

Isn't there a risk to a potential customer because Autonomy does not have the footprint in the medical market that it has in video search, fraud detection, and social / collaborative functions?

Autonomy has over ten years’ experience providing groundbreaking technology to healthcare and related organizations worldwide. We have a proven track record in every other market we’ve entered. More importantly, only Autonomy can uniquely understand concepts and patterns in all forms of information, which is especially applicable to the inherently unstructured nature of healthcare data.

If a person wants more information about this service, what do you recommend as a next step?

Visit the Meaning Based Healthcare website at www.autonomyhealth.com.

ArnoldIT Comment

Autonomy’s new product and service follows the firm’s path of bold, clever uses of its meaning-based computing technology. In a way similar to Autonomy’s acquisition of Zantaz and Interwoven, this push into the healthcare sector creates significant new opportunities for growth. The healthcare sector in the US has a need to find ways to make better use of the information available. Traditional methods, which are often dependent on time-consuming and inefficient processes, can get a turbo boost from services like Autonomy’s Auminence.

What’s interesting about the new Autonomy service is that it can be delivered as an on premises solution which may be appropriate for certain situations and from the cloud which is likely to play an increasingly large role in next-generation computing solutions. The support for mobile devices is directly in step with the caregivers’ need for immediate, real-time access to information.

I expect Google and Microsoft as well as dozens of other vendors of search, content processing, data fusion, and analytics technology to follow in Autonomy’s footsteps. But once again, Autonomy has made a timely move and has an opportunity to extend its IDOL technology for meaning based computing into a market sector hungry for innovations that reduce costs and time. What’s different about the Autonomy healthcare initiative is that lives are at stake.

Smart move. Perhaps that’s one reason why Autonomy has 20,000 customers and nearly a billion in revenue?

Stephen E. Arnold
November 15, 2010