As our industry shifts from a volume-based business to a value-based business, few mechanisms have the promise of becoming practical tools for healthcare organizations – facing the combined challenges of meeting increasing patient demands, unpredictable technological advances and, sometimes predictable, government regulatory oversight – than the effective execution of data analytics.
While the field of analytics is no longer shrouded in thick layers of mystique, it is by no means a well-defined area of practice either. Most are overwhelmed by the possibilities, few see an unobscured path forward. What is clear is that smarter, more informed decisions relative to leveraging the exponentially expanding sphere of information generated within healthcare can equate to improved patient outcomes at lower costs.
Companies striving to lead the pack cannot shy away from challenges or the unknown as the future of our industry guarantees really only two things: challenges and the unknown. To develop the best practices of tomorrow, our industry needs its vendors to resist complacency and aggressively seek out new analytic opportunities.
It is clear that Predixion Software is a company actively seeking opportunities both to lead and to learn. Instead of finding a safe spot in the market, it is committing to ventures that many organizations would find little in terms of comfort or familiarity. For example, Microsoft and Predixion announced in April their partnership to bring predictive analytics at the point of care in Asia Pacific. Just last week, the company released Predixion Insight 4.5 and dove into the Internet of Things (IOT). These moves do not describe a timid mindset, but rather an ambitious attitude that more vendors in our industry ought to employ.
Nish Hartman, Director of Healthcare, at Predixion spoke with me about both of these recent ventures as well as the path the company has decided to take in terms of cultivating its knowledge of analytics.
(Editor’s note: To hear audio excerpts of this interview, click on the media player buttons that run throughout this article.)
Free: You have an interesting background in terms of how you came to work with Predixion. Can you please describe that process?
Hartman: Years ago, I worked at Apple, Sun Microsystems, Oracle and then Microsoft. It was while I was at Microsoft that I worked with one of the larger integrated-delivery networks systems in the United States with Carolinas HealthCare System. They were working on ways to reduce their readmissions. At that point, they were serving up data around readmissions that created a risk stratification, but the data was being served up after the patient left the hospital which can often be a case of “too little, too late.” At the time, I knew about Predixion and how they expedite data analytics, especially analytics that clinical teams can use at the point of care. So, I decided to make introductions to Carolinas HealthCare System and Predixion with the hope of facilitating real change for the patients within the system.
Shortly thereafter, Carolinas HealthCare System implemented a readmissions solution with Predixion that allowed us to look at data as a patient is admitted into the hospital and ask: How do you risk stratify that patient for their risk for hospital readmission? Also, once you know a patient is at a high risk for readmission, what does the clinical team do about it? What kind of interventions are offered up to that patient to keep them from being readmitted back into the hospital within the next 30 days, and then moving forward?