The healthcare business of LexisNexis Risk Solutions announced a collaboration with Carrot Health, a provider of solutions powered by consumer and healthcare data. The collaboration enables Carrot Health to incorporate social determinants of health (SDoH) data from LexisNexis Risk Solutions into its SDoH data and analytics software platform to guide payer and provider decisions around member engagement and health management.
Through this collaboration, Carrot Health will integrate clinically-validated SDoH attributes from LexisNexis Risk Solutions into its existing Social Risk Grouper (SRG) taxonomy and other predictive models that leverage vast consumer and healthcare data. These insights will inform consumer-centric strategies to improve health outcomes, reduce costs and prevent readmissions.
Kurt Waltenbaugh
“Consumer attributes are among the most powerful factors influencing health outcomes, creating barriers and inequities that prevent populations from leading their healthiest lives. Carrot Health’s SRG harnesses this information to measure and monitor social determinants of health at the individual level, providing comprehensive insights our customers need to design strategies for identifying and closing gaps in care while providing a more personalized member experience,” said Kurt Waltenbaugh, CEO, Carrot Health. “We chose LexisNexis Risk Solutions after extensive evaluation and testing because their consumer data proved to be the most accurate and comprehensive in the market. We are excited about this addition to our platform as we continue to help payers improve member health.”
Carrot Health’s platform harnesses clinical, social, economic, behavioral, and environmental data to deliver insights for growth, health, and quality, providing health plans with a 360-degree view of their members. Carrot Health is delivering the healthcare industry’s first solution for consumer insights at scale, along with individual-level SDOH scoring and monitoring for every adult in the United States.
This scoring model helps predict the likelihood of an individual having an adverse health outcome due to their SDoH profile. The data from LexisNexis Risk solutions will augment Carrot Health predictive models, that already includes consumer data, ICD-10 Z-codes, publicly available health indicators, claims, survey responses, and other proprietary data ? providing unmatched accuracy to a scoring model.
Initially, the Agile methodology was invented to fasten development processes in the software field while maintaining product quality. Instead of using slower traditional methods, Agile helped speed up value delivery using short sprints and end-user feedback for improvements. The approach focused on interactions and individuals over tools and processes and collaboration with customers other than contract negotiation. Other target points were efficient software over exhaustive documentation and response to change rather than following plans.
Today, Agile has been adopted by many industries, other than the software development sector. Despite this, the healthcare sector has been slower in accepting the methodology. In other fields, Agile is used as an incremental and iterative methodology used in project management to assist teams in meeting the current workplace demands. It utilizes various frameworks like Kanban, SCRUM, etcetera. All these are, centered on continuous process improvement, transparency, flexibility, and quality. You can learn more about these Agile structures by reviewing the available online resources or other research materials.
How Agile Principles And The Healthcare Industry Relate
You can describe an agile organization as one that adapts faster and efficiently to rapid change, which is essential. Those that aren’t, however, find it hard to keep up with the ever-changing market conditions. The healthcare industry can benefit hugely by using continuous process improvement methodologies like Agile. For instance, they can give better patient care and cut costs. Additionally, Agile can boost innovations and enhance the technologies used in healthcare for both business and clinical processes.
It’s said that the healthcare sector mostly utilizes traditional methods that may negatively affect performance. It has also been mentioned that only a small percentage of healthcare leaders are aware of Agile. However, the small group that utilizes this methodology has reported that their teams achieve more with Agile than conventional methods. That being so, the industry continues to grow, and numerous regulatory and financial pressures surround it. Therefore, adopting Agile principles increases effective and efficient management of the existing services and resources.
Artificial intelligence is no longer a remote dream that exists only in sci-fi movies, it is a common solution that people use in their everyday lives. From more standardized artificial intelligence solutions like Apple’s Siri to driverless cars, the possibilities for artificial intelligence today are almost endless. Artificial intelligence is set to have a huge impact on every industry in existence, and healthcare is no exception. With a wide variety of innovations being made today, the future of healthcare can be predicted by looking at the healthcare applications of AI.
Clinical Decision Support Platforms
According to medical market research, AI, advanced analytics, and the increased volume of patient care data make the possibility of clinical decision support platforms a strong possibility in the near future. Artificial intelligence and analytics solutions are already being used to improve clinical and operational processes. Using artificial intelligence combined with EHRs allows for improving decision-making and increased productivity rates.
Intelligent Robotic Surgeons
Advancements in cloud computing, big data analytics, and AI have hugely increased the possibilities for the use of robotics in all walks of life. Robotics has been used in surgery before, but it is still far from reaching its full potential. There are many companies that are working at the moment to develop intelligent surgical robots. Although robots in the operating room working alone still seem like a distant future, the possibilities and building blocks are being formed today.
Healthcare is highly regulated when it comes to data security and privacy, and rightly so. Patient data is ultra-sensitive and any changes made to records could literally cost someone their life. Regulations from HIPAA to U.S. Food and Drug Administration 21 CFR Part 11, stipulate the need to exercise best practices in IT to keep electronic patient data safe, which is why legacy healthcare technology vendors like Cerner and Epic are so focused on guarding against unauthorized access and cyber attacks.
As more and more providers transform to outcome-based healthcare models, however, the ability to minimize risk of data exposure is getting harder to do. That’s because, in order to increase efficiencies and optimize patient care, organizations are increasingly introducing cloud-based, or SaaS, applications into their processes. They leverage these applications to analyze data and get insights related to patient journeys, treatment pathways, the cost of care delivery and even the efficacy of various medical devices.
The compliance challenge
While this is essential to do, it also complicates regulatory compliance since it requires moving or copying data from your infrastructure into other applications. Every time a new application is introduced, healthcare organizations essentially need to get that vendor to sign a BAA (Business Associate Agreement) to accept responsibility for the safety of patients’ health information and maintain appropriate safeguards. Yet even with an agreement in place, organizations are still at risk. HIPAA and other compliance measures require audit trails, which are more difficult to maintain with SaaS applications.
In addition, because users need SaaS data for analytic and other purposes, they’re likely to download, make their own copies and store it in their own folders and systems. This data sprawl increases potential access points and vulnerabilities.
All of which begs the question, how can organizations help protect sensitive data while still leveraging that data in a way that works to improve outcomes? The answer lies in data ownership.
By Natalie Tkachenko, healthcare software solutions consultant, NIX United.
Natalie Tkachenko
The increasing number of online pharmacy retailers emphasize growing consumer inquiry for address delivery. More and more polls show that the cost of such delivery is the greatest concern for both consumers and suppliers.
Such trends have resulted in an expansion of mobile apps usage for prescription drugs. The chronic conditions patients like diabetes, heart, kidney or liver diseases, or HIV infections rely on pharmacy services that provide continuous prescriptions renewals and deliver to patients’ homes.
Market Overview of Pharmacy Delivery Apps
In 2023, we expect the pharmacy delivery market to reach 6.4% CAGR for the forecast period up to 1,694.7 billion dollars. Besides the growth of chronic diseases patients that require ongoing medicine supply, there are such major factors as technological progress and new products release.
Especially since the beginning of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic boosted medicine delivery needs to reach an unprecedented level. Implementing such an opportunity into your online drugs retailer may force the business growth. Furthermore, the pharmacy delivery applications must provide the right information about the medicine and accurately distinguish drugs.
In 2021, online pharmacy retailers are a great solution to make medicine available to patients while maintaining social distance.
Advantages of Pharmacy Delivery Services
There is a study that shows that patients with chronic diseases that order medicine from online retailers show better adherence than those who buy them in local pharmacies. One of the reasons for such behavior may lay in that fewer patients with low economic status may order from online retailers. and have their medication delivered.
Also, the process of treatment is made much easier by pre-sorted medicine delivered to the door. Added instruction on how to properly take medicine by hours or days facilitates the process of treatment.
Among the benefits of pharmacy delivery apps is the possibility to set the convenient time of delivery. It may come in handy for patients that despite disease have a busy lifestyle.
That also could be a plus for elder people for whom it is hard to wait in a line at a drugstore. A courier may deliver medicine when the nursemaid will be available to accept it.
Advanced technologies make sure that you receive the precise drugs and dosages. Thus, the risk of adverse effects and hospitalization can be lowered. Whereas wrong medication puts dying from wrong treatment in 8th place among causes of death in the U.S. According to the study, the error rate for delivering medicines to pharmacies was about 1 for every 50 prescriptions written (or 1.72%), the error rate for delivering medicines was less than 1 for every 1000 prescriptions (or only 0.075%).
By Amit Garg, vice president of analytics, Gramener.
Amit Garg
The advent of the pandemic and more recent vaccination efforts means there’s never been a time where more people’s Personal Identifiable Information (PII) and Personal Health Information (PHI) in health records and medical documentation are in circulation. It’s vital to protect patients’ PII and PHI, which can include information on their age, race, or medical history, especially given that cyberthreats and fraudulent activity related to the Covid-19 vaccine are increasing.
With so much patient and clinical trial data being stored and shared at any given time, it’s becoming increasingly challenging for pharmaceutical companies to efficiently ensure that patient information is protected. Experts say that medical data is up to 50 times more valuable than credit card data.
Here’s where artificial intelligence comes into play: AI and machine learning (ML) solutions can not only automatically identify what information is classed as PII in a given record, but it can also then automatically redact or anonymize that data to make sure that no adversary can identify the patients.
Joining the dots with AI
AI algorithms use advanced methods such as entity detection, entity extraction, and entity-relationship management to handle patients’ PII and PHI from a given document. This involves identifying and categorizing key information in the text using Named Entity Recognition (NER), a form of Natural Language Processing (NLP).
Useful libraries for teams using NER include Stanford NER, spaCy’s EntityRecognizer, CliNER (a domain-specific NER tool that has been trained on clinical texts), or BioBERT (a domain-specific language representation model pre-trained on large-scale biomedical corpora).
NER works to safeguard PII in the context of healthcare by identifying different elements of a single patient’s PII across multiple health records. In one document the name and age may be present, and in another, age and race may be present but not the name, while in another religion and race, and so on.
Any hacker with access to each document and each data point would be able to join the dots to match all PII to the single person. To prevent this, an intelligent entity detection and extraction solution can identify this information across the documents and redact and anonymize the correct data to prevent reidentification of the patient.
If the solution is not able to de-identify (or redact) the information completely, it will score the subjects based on the probability of re-identification. The publication would then know the risk in advance and take the appropriate action, i.e., to assume the risk and publish or to not publish until specific confidence is reached.
In late March 2020, ATI Physical Therapy (ATI), one of the nation’s largest providers of physical therapy (PT) services, launched its telehealth platform CONNECT. As an essential health care provider during the pandemic, the new virtual platform gave patients a viable option to safely continue with their treatments.
Taking into account all healthcare providers, telehealth adoption increased 154% during the last week of March 2020 compared to the same period in 2019.1 Telehealth continues to prove itself beneficial beyond its originally intended uses and is expected to continue as a prominent means of care beyond the pandemic for the industry.
CONNECT was launched under the presumption that virtual PT sessions would be most effective for non-operative patients; patients with lower pain and disability levels; and patients further along in their recovery journey. However, after treating patients through more than 43,000 virtual visits in the year since CONNECT’s launch, ATI has learned telehealth benefits a significantly larger population of patients with a broader range of conditions and pain levels than it first anticipated. For a technology that experienced slow adoption throughout healthcare prior to the pandemic, telehealth is now widely embraced by providers in every corner of the industry.
Mirette Mikhail
“Patients with any diagnosis and of any age can benefit from telehealth,” said Mirette Mikhail, PT, DPT, CEIS, MTC, CertDN, clinic director at ATI Physical Therapy’s Downers Grove, Illinois clinic. “I’ve virtually treated an extremely wide range of patients this year – from young patients recovering from a sports injury to people with aches from uncomfortable work-from-home set-ups to a Medicare patient who recovered from total shoulder surgery. Telehealth is for everyone.”
By Susan Yeazel, Donna Hazen and Michelle Auchter, consultants, Point B.
It’s a familiar story among healthcare payers: Their companies spend significant time and money to roll out new digital capabilities for their employees, only to have the effort fall short or even fail altogether. The reason? People simply don’t engage, adopt or use the new tools and systems as expected.
While this problem didn’t begin with COVID, the pandemic has intensified the need to solve it. With remote work likely to be part of the new normal and employees relying more than ever on their companies’ digital infrastructure, existing gaps and new needs have surfaced. The challenge is especially complex in healthcare. As digitalization increasingly shapes the healthcare ecosystem, payers are looking to integrate new digital communication tools that support their ability to play a central role across the many different parties and layers of systems they serve—including customers, providers and partners.
There’s often an assumption that employees will naturally adopt new tools and technology simply because “they’re better.” But it takes more than the promise of a ”new and improved” tool to get people on board. We help companies take proven steps to improve digital adoption in ways that boost administrative efficiency, reduce costs, retain valuable talent, and improve the customer experience, which in turn leads to business growth. As an example, a company recently launched a digital program that employees rated 4.67 on a scale of 5 as being mission critical. That same program delivered a 263 percent increase in employee behaviors considered key to success. These numbers reflect high employee understanding and buy-in—both key to successful digital adoption.
Think, plan and invest in the employee experience
Think about the level of effort your organization puts into ensuring that externally-facing digital tools or web features are a success with your customers. How do you think, plan and invest to ensure that success?
While customer experience (CX) typically steals the spotlight, employee experience (EX) is nearly always the unsung hero to ensuring that companies succeed in engaging customers and driving growth. Companies that plan and invest in digital advances with this inside-out mindset are at a competitive advantage. We find they have a few key success factors in common:
Inspired and organized leadership: This is the #1 predictor of a successful digital adoption. Leaders need to be out in front – seen, heard and enthusiastically championing the value of the digital transformation.
Thoughtful preparation: Successful companies spend time upfront to really think through how they’d like to see this change unfold. What will success look like?
Active engagement: Inspiration and open, two-way communication are essential to engage heads, hearts and hands. Leadership can do much to support teams with the tools, capabilities and campaigns to make the digital journey as fun and rewarding as possible.
Make it clear: strategy, alignment and leadership
Before employees will invest in the “how” of digital adoption, they need to understand the “why.” Leadership must share a clear vision, articulate the drivers for change, explain the rationale for timing, and illustrate the alignment to corporate strategy.
