Enabling intelligent health processes
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Focus on: Operational Analytics |
This year at HIMSS, the industry-leading event for healthcare professionals, Microsoft will bring healthcare partners from around the world to demonstrate innovative solutions currently empowering the digital transformation of the health industry. This blog post is the third in a series about how Microsoft provides the intelligent services and trusted platform for partner solutions, and focuses on solutions that optimize clinical and operational effectiveness. Join Microsoft and its partners at HIMSS18.
Imagine if organizations used big data to enable more intelligent health operations
By 2020, it’s estimated that the average person will create an entire gigabyte of health data every day.[1] A healthcare industry that leverages this growing availability of big data is full of promise, carrying with it the potential for more intelligent operational processes and better patient outcomes.
In this data-rich world, it’s possible for patient care to soar to new heights. Advanced analytics will soon be used to identify segments of the population that should be targeted with services and information such as support for diabetes management or smoking cessation, and tailored messages will be delivered to patients automatically across multiple communication channels. These communication channels will also provide patients with chronic conditions better access to follow-up care options, making it easier for them to avoid unnecessary hospital visits and trips to the ER. Organizations will be able to listen across these channels, too. For example, they will leverage social data to stay ahead of a wide range of emerging health trends such as crises, disease outbreaks, or procedures that are growing in popularity, and plan resources accordingly so that staff is always prepared to provide adequate patient care.
In the near future, hospitals will be more automated, ensuring routine care tasks are completed more efficiently. This increase in efficiency will help reduce waste, while lowering the cost of care. Once these systems have been further automated, organizations will be able to leverage patient feedback and information on their past performance to continuously improve processes such as discharges, transfers, and referrals. Digital systems will also serve to ensure patients receive uninterrupted care, even in times of a care team transition, and will enable care teams to focus more time on providing care, and less on administrative tasks.
Not long ago, this might have seemed far-fetched. Today, however, Microsoft is committed to creating this reality.
Microsoft’s vision for optimizing clinical and operational effectiveness
Microsoft is at the forefront of developing technologies that not only improve patient outcomes, but enable healthcare organizations to optimize clinical and operational effectiveness. For example, our machine learning and advanced analytics take digital patient information and find patterns that enable doctors to treat patients in a data-driven way, making best guesses and gut instincts, which can lead to waste and inefficiency, a thing of the past.
When combined with our IoT offerings, these analytics capabilities help organizations improve chronic condition management and patient-facing processes. They enable staff to be more productive, and make it easier to efficiently manage referrals and exchange patient information between organizations. Our technology also enables organizations to leverage incoming intelligence from various data sources to understand and predict health trends in their communities. No more do organizations need to rely on reactionary measures to outbreaks and issues. Rather, these offerings give them the intelligence they need to see into the future and take a more proactive approach to conducting outreach and promoting relevant wellness services and educational information.
As we continue to pursue our vision of more intelligent health processes, our partners play a pivotal role in combining these technologies into solutions specifically suited for healthcare organizations.
Partners help make this vision a reality
Microsoft’s partners are already leveraging offerings such as the Microsoft Artificial Intelligence platform, Dynamics 365, Office 365, and Cortana to develop solutions that enable organizations to optimize their clinical and operational effectiveness. One such partner is PointRight, which has been delivering leading business intelligence and predictive analytics solutions to the healthcare industry since 1995 in an effort to improve quality and outcomes in post-acute care.
PointRight believes it takes much more than just data or technology to manage the challenges faced by healthcare organizations today. Their PointRight® SNF ScoreCard® and Network Performance Management solution, built on Microsoft Cloud technology, provides actionable intelligence that enables healthcare teams to develop, monitor, and manage high-performing post-acute provider networks that deliver high quality care to the post-acute member population, while reducing the total cost of post-acute care. This data-driven solution reports on skilled nursing facilities by cohort, thereby driving measurable improvements in clinical and quality outcomes for LTPAC populations, and avoiding costly readmission penalties.
PointRight clients, such as Lourdes Health System Health Network in New Jersey, use PointRight as part of their Skilled Nursing Facility (SNF) initiative to build a high-performing, preferred provider network. As a result, they have realized a 13% reduction in post-acute care costs.
Another partner making it possible for healthcare providers and payers to optimize for clinical, operational, and financial effectiveness is KenSci, which is on a mission to equip healthcare organizations to fight death with data science. As the world’s first vertically integrated machine learning platform for healthcare, KenSci is engineered to ingest, transform, and integrate healthcare data across clinical, claims, and patient-generated sources, enabling organizations to be more proactive, coordinated, accountable, and fast.
KenSci’s Clinical Analytics solution, built on Microsoft Cloud technology, enables risk prediction across care, cost, and operations. Leveraging the solution gives providers the ability to identify which patients are at the highest risk of getting sick, predict how sick they will get and how much it will cost to treat them, and understand how to optimize care to provide better outcomes. The solution maps patient cohorts that are potential “cost centers” for health systems, enabling them to manage their care provision better by intervening early and lowering their overall costs. KenSci’s solution also provides staffing insights that help prevent staff fatigue and keep internal operations flowing seamlessly at any time of day, helping healthcare providers align with the quadruple aim. Most recently, the solution proved its worth at Seattle-based Evergreen Health, which began leveraging predictive analytics to improve nursing care and reduce emergency department overcrowding across their health systems.
Proskriptive is another partner building on Microsoft’s intelligent cloud technology to deliver quality and performance improvement as well as value-based contracting solutions for hospitals, accountable care organizations, and medical groups. Proskriptive’s Intelligence Suite provides healthcare organizations with automated, real-time insights about vulnerable patients and interventions that will lead to better care outcomes.
Proskriptive’s technology dramatically improves their customers’ abilities to identify vulnerable patients, whether admitted to the hospital or not, to help deploy interventions that prevent adverse situations from occurring. The solution automates access to actionable patient insights from a central location, enabling hospitals to better manage quality improvement programs as well as multiple value-based contracts.
Customers including St. Francis Medical Center and the Independent Physicians of Idaho look to Proskriptive to ensure their care resources have a precise understanding of their patients’ needs as well as what interventions should be applied to provide efficient, effective care.
Learn more about how Microsoft enables more intelligent healthcare processes
Microsoft provides intelligent services and a trusted platform for solutions that are changing the healthcare industry. To learn more about how Microsoft and partners such as PointRight, KenSci, and Proskriptive are enabling healthcare organizations to optimize clinical and operational effectiveness in the face of increasing cost pressures, visit our both at HIMSS 2018.
