Women's Healthcare Providers Leveraging Data Science

Women’s Healthcare providers leveraging Data science

by General

Good Healthcare is important for everyone, but there is a need to bring women’s health issues separately under the magnifying lens. Most past clinical studies recruited candidates which had a higher representation of men than women and hence it’s taken a long time for researchers to know that certain diseases manifest differently in women than in men. Also, specific areas of healthcare related to pregnancy, fertility, and pelvic health, menopause, to name a few, are especially relevant to women’s health needs. Over the past decades we’ve seen a increase in the number of women’s health care providers. In this post we will focus on the benefits of data science for women’s healthcare providers.

Availability of big data has now made it possible for data scientists and healthcare experts to understand the factors that lead to certain undesirable events related to women’s health which can be prevented by bringing in timely intervention and having the right preventive actions in place. We’ve listed the journey for women’s health care providers as they step on the wagon to become more data savvy and start reaping the benefits of data science for women’s healthcare.

Creating an integrated data repository known as a “Data Lake”

Care providers might not have a single source of truth which collates and ingests data from varied data sources such as Electronic Health Records or EHR, diagnosis from past medical check-ups, health indicators such as body mass index, blood sugar etc, pregnancy and surgical records from the past, diseases and health emergencies. Along with this any other demographic details such as age, genetic conditions, and family history are also crucial pieces of information. Starting point for drawing the benefits from data is to establish and maintain a steady stream of relevant data from all available internal and external sources and then storing them in a data repository. Data Lake is one such useful storage where data of all formats, shapes and sizes can be stored and made available for analysis as needed. 

Making the data ready for business intelligence and analytics

Often data in its raw form is far from being useful. There can be many issues with the raw data such as missing values, corrupted codes, erroneous values, created due to technical issues while reading information and duplicate values. All these reasons make it important for data to be cleaned and processed before analysts start to make sense of it. Along with the reasons mentioned above, data also needs to be pre-processed before it becomes suitable to be analyzed by machine learning models specially the ones that make assumptions about the values related to data distribution, ranges of data values, format of data such as numeric or non-numeric etc.

Having insightful dashboards for ongoing monitoring and decision making

Business Intelligence is the very first mandatory step towards becoming data savvy. An organization needs to have a collection of insightful reports, scorecards and dashboards that have been carefully designed with a purpose in mind. Some of the relevant dashboards for health care providers include those related to insights about hospital admissions, costs incurred by patients based on treatment type, operational metrics related to waiting and processing time for forms and documents.

Building predictive models to improve outcomes

There are many use cases where data can be converted into actionable intelligence such that professionals working in the women’s healthcare facilities can work alongside the machine-based recommendations to expedite their own decision making in way that improves final outcomes.

For example, there are many undesired situations related to child birth which can be prevented or treated in a timely manner with the help of data science. Preterm labor is one such example. The World Health Organization (WHO) categorizes preterm births based on the gestational age as follows: “Extremely preterm (<28 weeks), Very preterm (28–32 weeks), Moderate or late preterm (32–37 weeks)”

An earlier preterm birth is strongly associated with increasing mortality, incidence of disability, high intensity of neonatal care, and higher consequent costs incurred by the patients. Data can be used to develop an individualized prediction model of preterm birth risk, to estimate the delivery period using a wide range of clinical variables obtained at the initial hospital admission. These include useful patient information related to demographics, obstetric and medical histories and basic laboratory test results, including blood tests and vaginal discharge findings for clinical and basic characteristics. Health care provider can use this score to evaluate the risks and provide appropriate information for avoiding or managing preterm birth.

Predictive models can also be used to analyze factors related to incidences of infections occurring post Caesarean sectional births at the hospital. Despite World Health Organization (WHO) recommendations that the optimal rate of Cesarean sectional births should lie between 5 and 15%, these surgical operations are significantly increasing and the reasons for the continued increase in the rates are not completely understood. Postpartum fever, surgical site infection, puerperal sepsis and maternal mortality are among common complications of Cesarean birth. Global reported rates of Sectional Site Infections are reported to be 3–15% which poses great burden on health-care systems, as they increase the length of hospitalization and subsequent re-admissions inflating the overall costs of post-discharge care. Data science models can help to bring these numbers down in a significant manner.

Data Science for Women’s Healthcare can be very useful for providers to specifically target the ailments that are pertinent to women’s health. Overall, when used effectively they can help to improve health outcomes and reduce costs for the patients and hospitals.

Wrapping Up

VNB Health is a Microsoft certified Power BI solutions partner and a Gold Partner for Data Analytics, providing BI and Analytics solutions to customers for over 15 years. We can partner with you on your data science and analytics journey using Microsoft Purview, Synapse Analytics and Power BI. Contact us for a free consultation.

Untapped Potential of AI in Healthcare

Untapped potential of AI in Healthcare

by General

AI has been instrumental in transforming multiple industries. The potential of AI hasn’t been fully achieved in healthcare and there is a lot that can be done when medical practitioners truly work along computers.

While people are great at empathizing with colleagues at work and contextualizing the problems being faced, AI in Healthcare can help to perform complex computations that can provide a lot of insights to improve the quality of outcomes for the healthcare industry. Unlike other fields such as retail and logistics, data collection and usage in healthcare is highly regulated as it pertains to personal data of the patients which is often sensitive in nature. Many use cases of AI in healthcare, which are technically feasible often don’t materialize into real solutions due to regulatory constraints and lack of trust and know-how by the specialists in the AI technology. In this blog we have listed down some of the benefits of AI in healthcare and how AI can bring transformational change over the coming years.

AI in Healthcare: Helping drive efficiencies in text processing

Most healthcare providers perform a series of manual tasks related to reading and storing documents. These functions could be automated by digitalizing, extracting, and analyzing the forms filled by the patients automatically using Natural Language Processing techniques. NLP is a field of AI that makes the machines adept at understanding and contextualizing language. Textual data can be converted into structured tables and fed into the health records of patients which can be very useful in providing timely and accurate care to patients. This can lead to massive savings in time and costs which can be channeled into prioritizing the healthcare needs of the patients without causing fatigue to clinicians.  

24/7 monitoring via smart wearable devices

The smart gadgets that are being worn by individuals these days are a great example of how the health parameters of patients can be monitored 24/7 to prompt timely action, such as a recommendation to head to a nearby clinic. This use case of AI falls into the class of Internet of Medical things where sensors collect health data and transmit it to the internet to provide round the clock monitoring of one’s health. ECG or the Electrocardiograph app on Apple watch that can record the timing and the strength of the electrical signals that make the heartbeat is one such functionality.

Providing preventive care to the patients

The main goal of providers is to provide timely care to patients and very often preventive care is the best answer to many health urgencies. The electronic health data including lifestyle information and past medical records can all be fed into powerful predictive models that can trigger alarm in case the likelihood of a certain health emergency is high and hence extra care and precaution can be taken by providers to stop the situation from worsening. This can enable huge benefits in terms of saving lives and prevent the escalation of medical costs which is a big concern for most patients. For example, providers of women’s healthcare needs, those specializing in maternity care, can greatly benefit from implementing predictive models that flag high likelihood cases of emergency C-Section and other complications related to surgical site infections.

Making healthcare equitable and accessible

One of the biggest concerns for governments and regulators is to ensure equal benefits of healthcare facilities to all groups of the population. This concern is especially valid for classes related to minority races, weaker socio-economic groups, and women. Many drugs and treatments are more catered towards certain well-established segments of the populace and tend to ignore the needs of those that have been underprivileged in the past. Predictive models can be checked for such biases and adjusted to make amends for these drawbacks by doing the required data driven testing to ensure fairer final outcomes.

Wrapping Up

This post talks about some of the benefits of data science and AI in healthcare industry. While many providers are now beginning to adopt these into their functions, the pace of adoption has been lagging due to the complex regulations and sensitivity of patient data. For healthcare to fully achieve its goals the regulators, providers and patients need to be more open to changing the status quo and accepting the AI driven transformation in the industry, without this collaboration any meaningful change can only be superficial!

Cloud for Healthcare - Microsoft Industry-Specific Cloud Offering

Microsoft launches Cloud for Healthcare: The first industry-specific cloud offering

by General

At the recently concluded virtual Build conference, Microsoft announced the launch of Cloud for Healthcare. This vertical industry-specific cloud offering from the technology giant is now available in public preview and as a free six-month trial. Microsoft expects to roll out the Cloud for Healthcare for general availability starting in the fourth calendar quarter of 2020.

The Cloud for Healthcare brings trusted and integrated capabilities together for healthcare organizations to improve their collaboration, decision making and operational efficiency. This will help healthcare organizations to better engage in a more proactive manner with their patients. It also allows caregivers to deliver effective care and actionable results with better streamlined workflows and interactions.

The Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare will bring together Azure, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365 and Power Platform with a common data model that makes it easier to share data between applications and analyze the data; built on a foundation of security and compliance. This helps to deliver better experiences, better insights and better care.

Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft

Check out this opening remarks video by Satya Nadella on the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare brings together both existing and future capabilities of the Microsoft Cloud ecosystem. In addition, the offer delivers rich data analytics for both structured and unstructured data that enable customers turn insights into action. The offering aims to bring together the following capabilities for customers and partners to enrich patient engagement and improve operational efficiencies –

  • Enhance patient engagement
  • Empower health team collaboration
  • Improve operational and clinical data insights

Enhance Patient Engagement

Healthcare organizations can better engage with their patients in more proactive ways by extending the value offered by Microsoft Dynamics 365. Healthcare providers can create care plans that are customized for patients, or groups of patients. In addition, they can make relevant content and proactive outreach to patients on specific devices when the patients need it.

Microsoft’s Healthcare Bot Service has been delivering assistance to healthcare providers to build COVID-19 self assessment tools. There have been over 1,600 instances of COVID-19 bots that have gone live since March. This service has impacted more than 31 million people across 23 countries. These self assessment bots have been very useful as it addresses the most common questions faced by users and reduces the stress on the hospital emergency hotlines.

The Cloud for Healthcare offering also gives the benefit to physicians and care teams to build enhanced patient engagement portals. Both patients and providers can interact with each other through the portal and perform the common tasks like appointment booking, setting up reminders, bill payments, virtual patient follow-ups through surveys and assessments etc. There are similar portals that already exist, but this will give a better seamless experience for the provider in terms of connectivity and adaptability to other areas of the care infrastructure.

Physicians and care teams can also create referrals, search for other providers, and understand physician spend, satisfaction, and enhanced analytics on referral categories through different patient outreach approaches. Providers can use Microsoft Power Platform to generate secure, scalable data from medical devices for care teams to continuously monitor patients. With real-time patient insights, care teams can provide timely, personalized, predictive care.

Empower Health Team Collaboration

Cloud for Healthcare offering will help healthcare teams to collaborate, coordinate care, and generate insights that will improve the patient outcomes and team performance. Better collaboration results in faster decisions and improved care.

Microsoft has been investing in building capabilities on Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams that will provide a secure platform for connected care coordination. The Microsoft Teams Patients app integrates with electronic health record (EHR) systems using a Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) interface to bring valuable medical information into Microsoft Teams.

The COVID-19 has put a lot of stress on the healthcare staff and frontline workers. It’s important to realize the fact that clinicians also need greater flexibility and convenience in how they are able to connect with patients. To tackle this situation, Microsoft announced the general availability of the Bookings app in Teams that enables healthcare providers to schedule, manage, and conduct provider-to-patient virtual visits within Microsoft Teams. The Bookings app will send patients an email of their appointment schedule. Patients can join their virtual appointment in a single click from their computer or mobile phone (both iOS and Android).

Improve clinical and operational data insights

The present pandemic situation around the world has forced healthcare organizations and clinical providers to create apps and workflows in just hours instead of days/months. These apps and workflows provide valuable data and insights in real-time. As a result, providers can deliver individualized care plans for patients.

Cloud for Healthcare will offer first-class interoperability between Microsoft Teams and Power Apps to build automated workflows. Many organizations organizations are now relying on these new interoperability solutions to manage their coronavirus response to patients.

Cloud on Healthcare – Built on Interoperability, Trust and Security

Organizations are already taking advantage of capabilities such as FHIR to organize and collaborate with the health data within the cloud. This gives healthcare organizations the freedom to perform remote work and deliver care to patients without having to physically interact with patients. Healthcare providers can take advantage of the generally available Azure FHIR Service that allows them to ingest and persist the data in FHIR format. Providers who have already been taking advantage of FHIR on Azure have been able to collaborate effectively with their patients and deliver better care.

Overall, Microsoft is looking to improve the healthcare infrastructure by taking advantage of different aspects of the Cloud technology. This is the first amongst a set of cloud offerings that is planned for specific industry verticals.

How VNB Health can help you?

VNB Health has 15 years of experience providing healthcare interoperability and care coordination services using Microsoft platform. As a Certified Microsoft Healthcare Cloud Partner, we can help you build healthcare solutions using Microsoft cloud technologies. We can help you build customized Apps for healthcare using Power Apps and Clinical, Administration or Financial analytics using Power BI.

Contact us today for a free consultation of your current environment and have a discussion with one of our expert FHIR Apps consultants.