Problem
Public data and data from large health-solutions corporations, such as Humana, represent a massive, untapped resource for the healthcare industry. The more that is understood regarding the demographic distribution of people, their needs, the resources they use, and the facilities they visit, the better the disparities and shortcomings of the healthcare system can be understood.
Without this context, the efficacy of care provision cannot move past the individual level. To truly tackle holes in the system on a community-wide basis and coordinate care efficiently and effectively, a holistic understanding of the population of interest, in terms of their demographic information, geolocation, behavioral trends, and patterns, must be established.
The existing model of care across health systems nationwide has perpetuated the status quo by ignoring these data or failing to incorporate it constructively, with the intent of increasing efficiency, improving the patient experience and patient outcomes, and reducing the physical and monetary cost to the system.
Solution
Our team has partnered with Humana to create a bi-directional data feedback loop on path/discovery. What this means is that data from Humana’s expansive database, along with a plethora of public data from sources such as the census and CDC, are transferred to path/discovery for further cleaning and manipulating to identify holes in the system.
By accumulating data from such a variety of sources, our data team can represent, with great precision, community-wide metrics regarding population health parameters. For example, our team has developed dashboards to visualize resource utilization patterns, hot-spot maps depicting the density of food-insecure people across the city, and overlap maps showing which agencies are most frequently used by this population.
By providing Humana with these analyses of their data, a closed feedback loop is established that conveys specific areas of need and the agencies and resources available to support such a need. Thus, several intermediate steps are avoided in the care coordination/care provision process, cutting down on the time and cost required to deliver quality, individualized care.
