I recently had a chance to talk with Robert Slepin, Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer at Axispoint Health. They’re doing some fascinating work in population health management. During our conversation he pointed out what I think has been the missing connection in most of the health analytics solutions I see on the market today. Most healthcare analytics doesn’t connect the data to the intervention. Obviously, Robert and Axispoint Health are striving to fix that disconnect.
I think most of us agree that data is going to drive many costs savings and health benefits in the future. This is true with the limited data sets that are available today and is only going to get better as the data becomes higher quality and more comprehensive. It’s great that we’re collecting all of this data and understanding what it means, but then what?
The same is true for the many interventions that are available to improve someone’s health. There are a plethora of solutions on the market, but many of the patients that need these solutions don’t know their options. If you missed Melissa Adams VanHouten’s story on Gastroparesis, you’ll see first hand what I mean. There were solutions available, but the data that said she had Gastroparesis wasn’t connected to the possible interventions that could help her.
The moral of the story is that we need to better tie the health solutions with the data if we’re going to move the needle in healthcare. It’s not enough to just know what’s wrong with someone or which patients are going to cost the most money. We have to do something with that data and connect those patients with the assistance they need. Otherwise we’re going nowhere fast.
This also came up in a conversation I had with Mandi Bishop from Aloha Health. We were talking about SDOH (Social Determinants of Health) and pushing that data to the point of care. While it would be great to inform a doctor about the various SDOH that are impacting a patient, what next? What’s the doctor suppose to do with a patient who has a fever because they can’t afford heat in their home? That’s right. It’s not enough for us to push the data to the provider. We have to also connect them to the tools and interventions that can impact the patient.
