Need for Data-Driven Growth in Indian Healthcare
Healthcare in India faces the dual challenge of substantial disease burden and high out-of-pocket expenditure, coupled with increasing costs of healthcare delivery. The new-age menace of lifestyle diseases and the scarcity of professionals and infrastructure, when added to the scenario, makes it indispensable for players in this industry to revamp their strategy and design a more agile, technology-enabled growth path.
Data-driven healthcare management requires a paradigm shift within the sector, and FORMCEPT is poised to be a front-runner in enabling this in India, as well as other countries across the globe. Data is a strategic asset for healthcare service providers and FORMCEPT is working on a number of outcome-based solutions targeted towards efficient healthcare delivery and strategic growth.
Healthcare Industry – Key Players
The above image shows the different players in healthcare domain who create one or more touch-points with the patient. At each stage in the healthcare delivery process, the patient undergoes a series of transactions which create data, such as:
- Demographic characteristics of the patient (age, gender, location, etc.)
- Socio-economic characteristics of the patient (income, education, occupation, insurance, etc.)
- Clinical characteristics of the patient (genetic tendencies, lifestyle, medical history, etc.)
Data-driven healthcare practices require that authentic data is collected from various patient touch-points such as hospitals, ambulance services, pharmacies, labs and imaging centers, insurance providers, and other non-traditional data sources. This data then needs to be analyzed to come up with innovative healthcare plans to make the patient’s experience smoother and to foster strategic growth for healthcare service providers.
The Challenge – Ensuring Data Continuum and Data Relevance
Since healthcare data needs to be sourced from various internal and external locations, the quality of this data remains a question mark. Besides, a lot of this data is unstructured – except for reports and administrative records, much of the data is not even organized. Medical records themselves come in multiple formats such as text, numbers, images, videos and non-digital data. If, at any point in the healthcare delivery process, there is a break in data collection and integration, the data continuum is permanently lost.
Secondly, data relevance is a big challenge that healthcare analytics providers all over the world are grappling with. Let’s say a patient falls sick and gets treated at Hospital A, and a few years later undergoes a surgery at Hospital B. Now, Hospital B only has limited access to the medical experience of the patient prior to the surgery. Even if the records are produced, lack of updation and missing gaps causing data irrelevance can lead to poor clinical decisions and unfavourable patient experience.
As the image (above) shows, traditional analytics collects data at opening and closing touch-points, while FORMCEPT’s unified analysis product MECBOT taps into data at each intermediary touch-point to ensure data continuum and data relevance.
Future Healthcare Powered by FORMCEPT’s Advanced Analytics
FORMCEPT’s flagship product, MECBOT, a Unified Analysis Application, is equipped to handle the intricacies of healthcare analytics and deliver actionable insights in minimum possible time. For example, for patients who are admitted into the hospital, MECBOT can track parameters such as duration of admission, emergency / regular admissions, and processes and records at departments like surgery, diagnostics, and pharmacy. Insights on these can help the hospital design more effective patient-engagement strategy. To take the analysis a step further, the hospital can conduct cause-effect analysis on patient re-admissions so as to design preventive plans for reducing re-admission.
The global trend in the healthcare domain is shifting towards coming up with healthcare plans that optimize the productive capacity of the organization to the fullest, while enabling quality care for patients, instead of the conventional ad-hoc patient management system. Although this is still nascent in India, FORMCEPT is already developing and testing its data-driven solutions for helping hospitals, clinics and diagnostic labs come up with optimum healthcare plans for its patients, by conducting advanced performance analysis on data of different plans.
The key insights that FORMCEPT offers through descriptive, prescriptive and preventive analysis on data such as Electronic Health Records (EHR), Electronic Medical Records (EMR), health plan data and administrative records, include:
Measure of Customer Satisfaction – rating calculation for each health plan
Patients typically share feedback on their experience with the healthcare service provider in the form of textual comments. FORMCEPT breaks down this feedback into its key components or fields, prioritizes a handful of fields for rating calculation or star calculation, and presents a comprehensive rating for each plan along with overall rating analysis to the healthcare service provider.
Each plan is comprehensively rated by patients for overall satisfaction and also satisfaction across specific aspects such as health implications, time spent, cost incurred, ease of implementation, and so on – this is critical to patient-centric care delivery by vendors (hospitals, clinics, diagnostic labs, etc.).
Health Outcomes – annual performance analysis of each health plan
Each plan is compared annually against its business potential such as contribution to topline, margin earned, patient count per plan, applicability across multiple patient categories, and so on.
Comparative analysis between parent and child processes
The above image shows the typical ‘parent-child’ processes that come into play in the implementation of a healthcare plan that spans across a healthcare service provider and a drug supplier organization – both managed by the same parent organization in a single plan framework. Under each of these two organizations, examples of some common parameters (‘child’ processes) are shown, on which FORMCEPT can offer analysis and insights through MECBOT.
Predictive analysis on the health plans
Predictive modeling and analysis is a critical component of analysis on health plans. Health outcomes of patients, intelligent resource allocation, mitigating emergency triggers, ushering in proactive growth, and designing data-driven revenue multipliers are all derived from robust predictive analytics that empower healthcare businesses boost their RoI.
Free flow search (i.e. search based on business queries in Natural Language)
Traditional query models are restrictive and do not support human query forms. When people enter a query string, it is usually in simple English language and combines multiple parameters in one query. With FORMCEPT’s free flow query-enabled solutions and powerful Natural Language Processing tools, queries such as – “Diabetes Care plans of company Humana having rating greater than 3” – can return relevant results in less than a second.
Other Applications
FORMCEPT is also in a unique position to deliver actionable insights to insurance providers and other players in health financing, who can design optimum policies and models by analysing parameters such as total cost incurred, cost differential across plans, expenditure across health conditions, location-tagged medical and clinical expenditure, and out-of-pocket (OOP) expenses incurred by patient and / or his family members.
At the end of the day, trust, transparency, and accuracy are critical factors in healthcare domain, and FORMCEPT can help healthcare providers achieve the same through data-driven insights. In fact, patients and their families all over the world are becoming increasingly more conscious about their rights, and it has become imperative for players to adopt data-driven solutions and smart technology. To know more about what we do and how we can help your business grow, please visit www.formcept.com or write to us at contactus@formcept.com.
