Our Story

The founding of IlluMine Research began with a very frustrating set of questions. Questions that could not be, but often were, 'answered' with canned and relatively uninformative data summaries. Visually appealing reports and dashboards in lieu of rigorous evidence-based quantitative and qualitative practices. Overly assertive guesses and inconsistent interpretations of visualizations. Ultimately these replaced the sense of humility required to understand that 'truths' in the clinical setting, the operations setting, or the population health management setting are rarely simple. And that recognition of not knowing is the first most important step in creating positive changes at any level.

It is not unusual for intuition to supercede evidence in healthcare. In fact it's commonplace. It's not that intuition is bad. It's actually important! But alone it is often poorly informed. And when poorly informed intuition is used to make decisions, the results can present very costly burdens of risk both to patients and institutions.

As in patient health, prevention is a far better solution. And there are SO MANY problems that can be prevented, increasing the quality of healthcare in your organization. But the classic exercise of looking for 'root cause' post-mortem won't fix the problems you face now. All you can do is find out how something failed. Note that the vast majority of operational problems are rarely, if at all, the result of a single event. Comparable to patient medical problems, they each have time-bound histories, multiple contributing factors, and sometime multiple effects. What they need is a voice, to first be understood, then to be solved.

With this in mind, we began in 2015 by addressing a problem with summary data reports, which can be non-informative, cherry picked, or simply misleading. We started by creating custom applications that employed statistical and machine learning methods to inform and become embedded as a partner within the decisioning process:

If these questions are important to you, you'll bet they are important to us. And with the additional tools of AI, we have created a new generation of applications that can deliver value to you, even better. This is what we live and breathe. Patient, operational, and population health are our key foci. We want to partner with you to make your vision in healthcare a reality. We know it drives you if you're reading this - so let's take that journey together.