---
title: "The ambulatory intelligence gap"
description: "Health systems face an ambulatory intelligence gap: access, provider capacity, referral retention, panel management, and financial performance are interconnected, while information remains scattered across disconnected systems. Health Catalyst’s Ambulatory Intelligence combines AI with nearly two decades of healthcare improvement expertise, deploying directly in a customer’s Databricks workspace so sensitive data stays within the health system’s environment. It uses a medallion-based semantic layer, Unity Catalog for governance, Lakebase for low-latency serving, and Genie alongside dashboards to help leaders investigate why metrics change. The solution ships with prebuilt metrics across Access Optimization, Revenue Intelligence, Panel Management, and Referral Insights, plus cross-domain scorecards and configurable terminology and workflows. Reported outcomes from supported improvement work include increased revenue and encounters at Thibodaux Regional, 55,000 closed care gaps at INTEGRIS Health, and higher outpatient visits with fewer cancellations without reschedules at WakeMed; future plans include models based on prior outcomes and agentic capabilities."
---

# The ambulatory intelligence gap

[Databricks](https://yomu.fyi/company/databricks) · Morgan Wilkie, Bryan Smith, Holly Burke, Mary Ellen · Jul 10, 2026

**Type:** Announcement

## Summary

Health systems face an ambulatory intelligence gap: access, provider capacity, referral retention, panel management, and financial performance are interconnected, while information remains scattered across disconnected systems. Health Catalyst’s Ambulatory Intelligence combines AI with nearly two decades of healthcare improvement expertise, deploying directly in a customer’s Databricks workspace so sensitive data stays within the health system’s environment. It uses a medallion-based semantic layer, Unity Catalog for governance, Lakebase for low-latency serving, and Genie alongside dashboards to help leaders investigate why metrics change. The solution ships with prebuilt metrics across Access Optimization, Revenue Intelligence, Panel Management, and Referral Insights, plus cross-domain scorecards and configurable terminology and workflows. Reported outcomes from supported improvement work include increased revenue and encounters at Thibodaux Regional, 55,000 closed care gaps at INTEGRIS Health, and higher outpatient visits with fewer cancellations without reschedules at WakeMed; future plans include models based on prior outcomes and agentic capabilities.

## Context

Ambulatory leaders must address worsening appointment access, referral leakage, provider-capacity constraints, panel management, and financial performance as interconnected problems. The post identifies a gap between available data and coordinated action because information is scattered across multiple systems, dashboards may be stale, and metrics can have several possible operational causes.

## Approach / What changed

Health Catalyst packages AI, healthcare improvement expertise, and domain models in Ambulatory Intelligence, deployed inside the customer’s Databricks workspace. The solution uses a medallion-based semantic layer, Unity Catalog for governance, Lakebase for operational serving, and Genie alongside dashboards. It provides prebuilt metrics and cross-domain scorecards, while allowing customers to adapt terminology and workflows.

## Takeaways

- A new routine appointment takes an average of 31 days, up 19% since 2022, while MGMA’s 2025 study found that 38% of referrals never close the loop.
- Unity Catalog governs access, lineage, and audit trails in the customer workspace; Lakebase serves a subset of gold-model data for low-latency operational queries.
- Reported supported-work outcomes include $1.2 million in added annual revenue at Thibodaux Regional, 55,000 closed care gaps at INTEGRIS Health, and a 7.1% reduction in cancellations without reschedules at WakeMed.

**Tags:** [Data Analytics](https://yomu.fyi/topic/data-analytics), [Databricks](https://yomu.fyi/topic/databricks), [Lakebase](https://yomu.fyi/topic/lakebase), [Unity Catalog](https://yomu.fyi/topic/unity-catalog)

- Source: [Databricks](https://www.databricks.com/blog/ambulatory-intelligence-gap)
- Source URL: https://www.databricks.com/blog/ambulatory-intelligence-gap
- Ingested by Yomu: 2026-08-30T16:55:17.282Z

[Read original post](https://www.databricks.com/blog/ambulatory-intelligence-gap)