Hospitals and health systems have historically failed to mine the rich seams of data they produce every day. This is despite the wealth of insights trapped within these data sets that could help improve resource allocation, workforce planning and service delivery.
William Flanagan, co-founder and technology and commercial director at OpenSky, a pioneer in AI-driven digital transformation, says it is “almost a given” that, in any healthcare setting, data is siloed, unstructured, unprocessed and uninterpreted. “This leads to blinkered decision-making and inability to react in real time to events as they are happening,” he notes.
Thankfully, innovative solutions in augmented analytics and seamless electronic health records (EHR) are allowing health systems to access, integrate and interpret their data in real time allowing for rapid decision-making and ultimately improved patient care.
Flanagan, who will be presenting on this topic at the Future Health Summit, calls this “collective intelligence”. He says it is reshaping healthcare delivery, empowering healthcare providers to shift from reactive to proactive care and enhancing both patient experiences and healthcare outcomes.
Flanagan gives the example of a hospital emergency department experiencing an unexpected patient surge. “They may have no data other than what’s in their EHR and might not have any instant correlation with what’s happening in the public health space at that time whether there is an outbreak or a local incident,” he says. “They may not be properly staffed or [have] resources to deal with these challenges and it might be ... that there is an outbreak among their own workforce but they don’t have immediate access to that information.”
In this scenario, connected intelligence would be indispensable, Flanagan says. “In most cases hospitals and health systems don’t have that holistic view and don’t find out until the end of day or week or month report. The technology has now changed the capabilities of the landscape here so that they can react in real time to the challenges on the ground and plan for the future.” And the capabilities are endless – with the Microsoft Fabric unified data platform, hospitals can link their financial systems with their patient data, allowing them to determine an accurate cost per procedure, for example.
‘Historically the healthcare system hasn’t been very proactive using data to power resource and activity planning, but now we are seeing hospitals begin to join the dots’
The good news is that the availability of this technology has made such an endeavour far more cost effective than it would have been in the past. Flanagan explains that, historically, to build out a unified data platform would have been a huge undertaking in terms of investment and resources, as well as time, to produce and maintain the complex infrastructure that would be required.
“You would almost need a full team just to maintain the infrastructure before you even started to get any insights back from the data,” he explains. “It was very rare that people took on a challenge like that. At OpenSky, we’ve worked with hospital groups and healthcare providers to implement this technology so that insights are actionable from day one. Our approach prioritises the most impactful use cases, ensuring that hospitals see measurable improvements in operations, finances, and patient care – quickly and cost-effectively. Within that environment you can do those advanced analytics that are giving you the full synergised view of your entire system.”
OpenSky is building solutions for hospital groups such as Blackrock Health using Microsoft Fabric and solving a lot of the problems they have historically encountered. “It makes health systems much more agile and incremental about building their success in this area as they can prioritise the insights they require most,” explains Flanagan. “Is it accuracy around your staffing levels and your workforce planning or is it around profitability or budget management or tracking real time information such as your emergency department and use extra capacity as and when you need it? By prioritising your key areas of focus and going after them you can deliver value within a very short space of time – weeks rather than years as it was previously – and deliver to stakeholders as quickly as possible.”
Most innovative technology platforms require a hefty investment but the connected intelligence solutions are inherently cost-effective, given that they are costed on a “pay for what you use” basis. “It makes strong financial sense,” Flanagan says. “By targeting priority use cases, the investment is less onerous and the return on that investment is greater.”
Flanagan believes that these connected intelligence solutions will be “truly transformative” for healthcare. “Historically the healthcare system hasn’t been very proactive using data to power resource and activity planning, but now we are seeing hospitals begin to join the dots.”
