While health data is certainly not yet achieved commodity status, our ability to unlock clinical data across a patient’s care continuum are becoming a reality. Healthcare stakeholders are actively evaluating and will continue to form partnerships and establish new companies to create the nascent platforms that will make data easier to access and use, as well as unleash its potential power to transform how we identify and care for patients. The focus in the near term will be on providers and payers working together, and patients being empowered to decide who and where to share their data. All of this will be fueled by new technologies and new and emerging regulation. Here’s our take on what can be expected for providers, payers, and patients and what technologies may be leveraged:

Providers and payers.

Providers and payers will invest and extend in new data platforms as they continue their transitions to value-based care and look to increase real-time data exchange and analytics to reduce costs and improve outcomes. For example:

• Intermountain Healthcare recently formed a new comprehensive health platform company focused on elevating value-based care capabilities with providers, payers, healthcare systems, and accountable care organizations. Castell will help organizations transition to value-based systems of care, while keeping care more affordable and accessible.
• Revamping existing data platforms will be a necessity. Health systems and their physicians have patient and administrative data coming from myriad sources — and at a high velocity. The data coming in from so many disparate sources need to be integrated, managed, and analyzed. Building the right tools and a unified data platform strategy will occupy many organizations in 2022 and beyond.

Patients.

Consumer empowerment is affecting many ways in which healthcare entities do business. Consumers are in the driver’s seat and new data platforms can help provide easier access to their care and data as well as more involvement. Bringing value to patients translates into retention and return on investment. For example:

• Intermountain Healthcare partnered with Notable Health to expand the My Health+ digital platform for patients. Its goal is to reimagine the manual, repetitive administrative aspects of patient intake and post-visit follow-up into a fully automated, intuitive digital experience.
• Walgreens is establishing a an internal, tech-enabled healthcare startup with the goal of creating a new patient platform that blends physical and digital tools. They, in turn, will help individual patients to find care, get care and manage care. What’s unique about this effort is that the startup wouldn’t fully build the platform itself; rather, it will be done through a series of partnerships to create a “company within a company.”

Technologies.

2022 will see organizations continuing to turn to the cloud and innovative technologies to make the most of their patient data. We will see opportunities in:

• Transitioning from legacy to the cloud. Legacy systems are still alive and in use. In 2022, Organizations will continue to move from legacy data platforms to modernized data platforms across private and public cloud infrastructure. Managing that migration will be key to minimizing disruption and leveraging existing data investments. Cloud-based platforms also will be needed as organizations continue to transition to doing business through application programming interfaces (APIs) and infrastructure driven by HL7’s FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperable Resources) standard.
• Dashboards on board. As the increase of externally sourced data becomes viable, organizations will need to leverage data visualization and dashboard tools to manage mountains of patient data, and highlight what is important in the data, what needs to be reviewed, what has changed. They will create the ability for end users (clinicians, care teams, patients) to spot trends and opportunities at both the patient and population level and monitor progress. The result: differentiation among organizations to fuel the most advanced players to improve outcomes, while capturing the reward and promise of their value-based contracts.
• New data and analytics platforms. 2022 should see new vendors offering consolidated, end-to-end platforms that provide a wide variety of data and analytics capabilities. That is no longer just the purview of such standbys as Epic and Cerner. For example, Innovaccer and Arcadia.io have both expanded their data sources and capabilities beyond population health management and value-based care to create broader analytics offerings.
• Specialized platforms. New data platforms are springing up to rapidly manage the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as focus on specific conditions, such as behavioral health, and population health.

An example is start-up Truveta, which collects and sells data from its nearly two dozen sponsoring health systems. (The information is normalized and de-identified to protect patient privacy and security). In 2021, the company analyzed information on 1.7 million patients belonging to the sponsoring health systems who were fully vaccinated against COVID-19. Results found that vaccinated people with diabetes, chronic lung disease or chronic kidney disease or who are immunocompromised are nearly twice as likely to be hospitalized from breakthrough COVID-19 infections than the general vaccinated  population. However, adverse events occurred in less than 1% of fully vaccinated patients, the results showed. The analysis only took a couple of weeks, putting  actionable data into the hands of clinicians and policymakers in record time.

Looking ahead.

There is no doubt: this year will be a year of change and opportunity. Point-of-Care Partners (POCP) is here to help. Our team of experts tracks trends and can create strategies to help your organization meet the challenges ahead in 2022. Reach out to me at jocelyn.keegan@pocp.com.