Barriers to Healthcare Analytics

According to the Copley Consulting Group, although business analytics can help healthcare providers and payers create actionable insights, there are oftentimes barriers to the use of analytics in healthcare.

These barriers include:

• The sheer volume of data
• Culture does not encourage sharing information
• Lack of understanding how to use analytics to improve the business
• Lack of management bandwidth due to competing priorities
• Lack of executive sponsorship
• Lack of skills internally in the line of business

But as the article states, even with these barriers healthcare organizations that fail to effectively use analytics will fall behind. The massive improvements to clinical and business processes outweigh the barriers of implementing analytics.

Your Very Own "Personal Healthcare Companion in the Near Future?

Imagine a personalized robot with a soothing voice that can diagnose a wide variety of healthcare issues and recommend the best possible care? Sounds like science fiction?  Well maybe not for long.

In case you missed it, the number one movie in America is Disney's "Big Hero 6".  This movie stars a lovable robot named Baymax described as a "healthcare providing robot nurse".  Amazingly, the concept for the movies healthcare robot came from actual research in robotics done at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU).

Personalized Diagnosis from a robot?

Carnegie Mellon had developed an inflatable robotic arm that inspired the design of Baymax.  This use of "soft robotics" (made of soft materials) offer advantages over metallic robots especially in terms of safety when operating near people in a healthcare environment.  For more information about CMU's research in soft robotics, click this link or watch the YouTube video.

How Lack of Metrics Sunk Healthcare.gov

It has been well documented that the initial launch of healthcare.gov was a disaster.  This great article in forbes.com diagnoses some of the main reasons why, focusing on their lack of strong project management.

Error Rate report for healthcare.gov established AFTER launch

The rules of project management broken are as follows:

1. Unrealistic requirements
2. Technical complexity
3. Integration responsibility
4. Fragmented authority
5. Loose metrics
6. Inadequate testing
7. Aggressive schedules
8. Administrative blindness

Usually, just one of these mistakes could spell disaster for a project.  But the 8 of them combined lead to utter failure.

But since this an analytics blog, lets focus on metrics: "The government said in a report released on Sunday that it has made “improvements in the site’s key operating metrics over the last several weeks,” which is a tacit admission that it didn’t initially have adequate ways of measuring progress."

Without establishing these proper metrics from the beginning, how would government officials know that the schedule was too aggressive?  Or that the requirements were unrealistic?  The answer:  they had no clue.

I believe that since these metrics were not established from the beginning of the project, this led to a snowball affect that ultimately led to one of the worst "go-live's" in the history of project management.  Lesson moving forward for healthcare, government, and any complex project:

1. define operating metrics in detail from the beginning.
2. determine how these metrics will be communicated to stakeholders.

Too little, too late, this report was released detailing the newly instituted metrics for healthcare.gov.  If these metrics were prioritized by the project team and instituted from early on in the project, we would be discussing the healthcare.gov launch in an entirely different way today.

IBM Watson to help with clinical trials recruitment

As a project manager who works in clinical research, I know how important patient recruitment is for successful clinical trials. IBM’s recent partnership with Mayo Clinic to leverage IBM Watson’s cognitive analytics abilities to match patients with the appropriate clinical trials is a potential game-changer in the research community where many trials fail due to lack of enrollment.

Clinical trials recruitment is an vital aspect of research. For you statistics nerds, you know that by having a higher "n" (population size), you will have a greater confidence level (better results). Well sometimes, clinical trials do not have the "n" that they would like for their study so need to recruit additional participants.

“Matching is such a hard and cumbersome process,” Sean Hogan, IBM vice president of healthcare told Fox News. For anyone who has worked in clinical trials recruitment, they will tell you that this is a very manual, data-driven process. I have worked first hands with principal investigator's and know that recruitment takes so many man hours that could be better served on actual research. And in worst case scenario's some research studies can fail due to not recruiting enough participants.

If IBM can leverage cognitive analytics to help automate this manual process, this will mean a higher population size for clinical trials and lead to better results. Definitely a good thing as research moves forward into the 21st century.

How the Apple/IBM partnership will impact mobile health IT

How does this partnership impact mobile health?

This summer, both the business and the tech world were buzzing as IBM and Apple announced that they were forming a partnership.  While this obviously means big changes on the enterprise front, how does this partnership (if at all) impact mobile healthcare IT?

1. Security:  EMR's and mobile health have long been plagued by concerns of lack of data security.  With HIPAA compliance and PHI (Patient Health Information) concerns at the forefront, this Apple/IBM partnership could potentially address issues of data security that have stood in the way of the expansion of mobile healthcare usage and development.  The deal calls for IBM to build a suite of platforms and apps that will transport healthcare data securely from the bedside to Apple devices.
2. Epic's "MyChart" App:  Apple has a partnership with Kaiser's EMR, Epic Systems.  This deal will bring data security and potentially increased usage of Epic's mobile application on Apple devices.
3. Apple's Healthkit:  Apple's iOS 8 to be released this fall will feature "Healthkit".  This will aggregate data brought in from fitness apps and activity trackers into one dashboard.  IBM has already been working on building healthcare applications for the iOS.



iOs8 Healthkit

4. Siri + Watson: The marriage of Siri and Watson used in a healthcare setting could potentially give physicians hands free computing and health data analysis as one of the prime applications of IBM's cognitive computing system.

In conclusion, this partnership definitely brings opportunity for dramatic change in the mobile Health IT space.  While we don't know exactly what will be released in terms of health care applications on the mobile devices, we do hope that IBM's increased security will alleviate security concerns of users and lead to increased adoption of mobile health.  

Disruptive Innovation in Healthcare

Bob Kocher, former Special Assistant to President Obama for Healthcare and Economic Policy once asked me:

"You are in healthcare?  Are you going to fix it?"

This is a great article on CIO.com that touches on the main points on why it is broken and what will be needed to one day fix it.

In the article it states that the problem can be boiled down to two issues:

1. Innovation has been sustaining as opposed to disruptive while the process remains largely centralized.
2. Hospitals offer the value of solving any problem for any patient, he says, but the overhead of that complexity leads to tremendous costs.

This reminds me of the debate when the large car manufacturers were bleeding money:  should the government subsidize them and get them back on their feet?  Or should the government let these automotive powerhouses die out and let nature take its course.

In the case of healthcare, disruption on this scale is necessary.  Although it will be painful for everyone at first, it is the only way to solve this massive problem long term.  No amount of band aids can fix the current healthcare system as is.  

Google Ventures largest investment in a medical tech startup

Google Ventures just invested $130M in Flatiron Health, a start-up that organizes real-time oncology data to help cancer patients and doctors.  Their flagship product, OncoAnalytics or OncologyCloud provides "World-class analytics and business intelligence for cancer care providers."

OncologyCloud by Flatiron Health

Flatiron Health, which launched in 2012 and is currently in beta, collects information by connecting cancer treatment center around the world on its cloud-based technology platform, with the goal of allowing researchers, physicians, and patients to learn from aggregated data collected from millions of cases. It hopes that this will allow doctors to provide better care and enable patients to make data-driven decisions.

Data driven decisions to better enable patients and lead to better outcomes?  Yes, please.

Cognitive Analytics: Top 10 Digital Tech Trend

Deloitte Consulting LLP recently released its "5th Annual Tech Trends Report".  In this report it lists its top 10 overall trends, keying on 5 disruptors (opportunities for technology executives to create sustainable positive changes in IT capabilities, business operations and business models) and 5 enablers (technologies in which many organizations have already invested, but new developments and opportunities have inspired new business applications, thereby warranting a fresh look).

Cognitive Analytics is listed as one of the Disruptors.  By definition Cognitive Analytics is a computing platform that combines artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, natural language processing (NLP) and   massively parallel computing to drive rich insights that can aid real time decision making.  The video below shows Rajeev Ronanki, a principal at Deloitte, explaining how cognitive analytics is used in a business situation by a national healthcare plan to use big data to gain real insights.

New Entrants are Disruptive (in a good way)

Key points of how these new entrants are disrupting the Healthcare Industry per research by PwC:  

• Two dozen of 2013’s Fortune 50 companies are healthcare new entrants. Of those, seven are retailers; eight are technology and telecommunications companies. Venture capital is also pouring into health startups.
• Consumers are willing to abandon traditional care venues for more affordable and convenient alternatives, signaling threats to traditional healthcare organization revenues, according to an HRI consumer survey.
• New entrants will propel the democratization and decentralization of healthcare, allowing consumers to access care anywhere.
• Consumer interest in price and quality transparency has sown a new market being hotly contested by new entrants and traditional healthcare organizations alike.
• New players are reshaping and expanding the $267 billion US fitness and wellness industry, which presents rapid paths to market, abundant sources of data and opportunities to build new market segments.

IBM Watson goes to Africa

IBM Watson is perhaps the smartest computer on the planet.  It won Jeopardy and defeated the smartest humans on the planet.  But the big question so far has been.....

So what?

IBM Brings Watson to Africa

IBM is now attempting to parlay Watson to solve the greatest business and social challenges affecting the world.  "Project Lucy" will leverage Watson to use Big Data and "develop commercially viable solutions to Africa’s grand challenges in healthcare, education, water and sanitation, human mobility and agriculture."

WOW.

If anyone is going to pull it off, it would be great to bet on the company who introduced to the world computers and printers as well as producing a few Nobel Prize winners.  If you are interested, read more about Project Lucy here.

Customer experience is slipping in healthcare

According to a recent study done by PwC, customer service in the hospital healthcare industry is down.  This is an alarming trend in an industry with an increasingly empowered consumer.

Consumers are now used to Googling services and goods before purchase:  this may mean looking at reviews of a toy before purchasing on Amazon or looking at Yelp reviews before going to the newest trendy restaurant.  Healthcare will be next.

Consumers are now beginning to search for scores and reviews when making healthcare decisions.  Although there is no trusted source for reviews for this industry currently, this is prompting healthcare providers to increase patient satisfaction (which is a good thing).  In the end, a more competitive environment should lead to better patient outcomes, hopefully reversing this trend in customer service in the healthcare industry.

Happy Healthy New Year: Day 1 of Obamacare

Happy New Year, everyone!

January 1st, 2014 is the day that the ACA (Obamacare) officially begins.  Here are a few things that go into affect today:

• Am I covered? Consumers will find out if they are enrolled in the plans they initially signed up for through the ACA website.    
• Expanded Medicaid:  25 of the 50 states will expand their Medicaid program at this time.  The rest of the states can decide to expand their program at any time.  
• Final Consumer Protections Kick In: Insurers will no longer be allowed to discriminate against customers with pre-existing conditions.
• Individual Mandates begin to Kick In:  Consumers must register for some sort of health insurance in the first 3 months of 2014 or pay a fine when filing their tax return.

More information about key dates to watch for in 2014 can be found at this link.