Qualities of courage: The ambition of Predixion

Page 2 of 2

Free: Recently, Predixion and Microsoft announced their partnership in bringing predictive analytics at the point of care in Asia-Pacific. This partnership could yield enormous benefits not only for healthcare in the Pacific Rim, but also here in the United States as well. Can you provide a little more detail about this partnership and the outcomes that the two companies expect to achieve?

 Hartman: Microsoft and Predixion will be co-selling a readmission solution, our managing length of stay solution, and Microsoft consulting services will actually be providing the local implementation of these solutions along side of Predixion as well.

It is a great partnership because it speaks to each company’s strengths. The fact that Microsoft consulting services has a strong analytics practice there in Asia Pacific and that they will be providing local implementation of our use cases is tremendous. Microsoft also has a great culture for taking analytics and looking at how those analytics can be incorporated into the workflow, which, matches Predixion’s mission to provide insights at the decision point where they are most actionable.

In the Asia Pacific area, there tends to be a strong emphasis on process orientation. They have really embraced Six Sigma and process quality. This whole idea of embedding predictive analytics into the workflow is something that I think will be a great synergy for healthcare organizations in Asia Pacific. 

In short, we plan to address those questions that case managers, nurses and physicians ask themselves when they are looking at a patient who is at high risk for readmissions. “How do I prioritize my work so that I focus in on those patients are at the very highest risk? What types of interventions are appropriate to offer to that patient?”

Free: What lessons do you believe will be learned in this joint venture that can be brought back to the United States healthcare community? 

Hartman: I know there is a great focus on managing risk and managing resources,  on improving patient outcomes and I think that is consistent in the United States as well as in Asia-Pacific.

I think that a lot of the same challenges and priorities that you would see here in the U.S. are also going to be found in Asia-Pacific as well. I know that there is a lot of demand on resources that you have in the Asia-Pacific area, and making resources available like hospital beds, like radiology resources, like labs, etc. for the number of patients who are coming into hospitals. And so, looking at ways to appropriately assess lengths of stay and managing those resources the patients journey continues through their stay in the hospital is going to be, I think, a top priority for them, and so our use case around managing length of stay will address a lot of those concerns and, again, to be able to take the data that comes from this use case and implement it right into their processes.

We are very excited about moving forward with this project because we appreciate how much more we have to learn in order to meet the needs of our provider partners here in the United States and abroad. These sort of opportunities to truly test our solutions in new ways do not come along very often and we are eager to step up to the challenge. 

Free: Last week, Predixion announced the release of Predixion Insight 4.5 which is meant to tackle what many consider to be a nebulous arena, the Internet of Things (IOT). Can you please tell us how you see Predixion’s role in engaging and interacting with the Internet of Things?

Hartman: I’m glad you asked about that because the Internet of Things is one of the other areas that we are really focused on this year. Many companies are still trying to think about how to approach the Internet of Things and they seem hesitant because it is so new to healthcare, or anywhere else for that matter. We see it as a tremendous opportunity to make real differences in healthcare.

 [The challenge is:] How do you take data from devices and incorporate that into the decision making around analytics, and analytics being not only, you know, retrospective decision making, but present decision making and then predicting decision making as well? What we are doing and, in fact, what we’ve been told by some of our partners, like Accenture, we are the only ones who are doing is that, we are taking our machine-learning semantic model (MLSM) and we are actually embedding that onto those devices so that we can expedite the data feed from those devices back into these compelling use cases.

What that means in terms of healthcare is that if you have a woman who is going through an ultrasound examination with her physician, right at that point of care, we can provide real-time risk scores. Or if you as a care team member is looking at a patient that is wearing a device, you can get real-time alerts. 

That kind of real-time isight is now something we are incorporating into medical devices, as well as into other devices outside of healthcare. So we can  predict failures, or abnormalities and trigger real-time actions. These are the types of opportunities that surrond the Internet of Things.

The possibilities are really endless which is what makes my job so exciting and so rewarding. Predixion is making every effort to learn and to share as much of its knowledge as possible because, at the end of the day, we’re here to make the world safer, smarter and healthier through predictive analytics.