Analysis: Advanced analytics company partners with Emory Healthcare

• Alphabet’s digital health subsidiary Verily launched a partnership with Emory Healthcare, Georgia’s largest health system, according to MedCity News.
• Verily will analyze Emory’s medication and lab ordering patterns and will also introduce other big data projects to improve the health system’s efficiency, the MedCity article reported.
• HFMA’s Chad Mulvany says it’s natural that health systems would look to partners with core expertise in advanced analytics to manage and manipulate data to provide insights that then could be shared with process improvement teams and clinicians.

MedCity News is reporting that, “Alphabet’s digital health subsidiary launched a partnership with Georgia’s largest health system. The company will work with Emory Healthcare to analyze its medication and lab ordering patterns, and will later roll out other big data projects to improve its efficiency.”

“Based in Atlanta, Emory Healthcare has 10 hospitals and more than 250 locations,” according to MedCity News. “Its partnership with Verily is just one of a handful of partnerships the Alphabet subsidiary recently struck. In October, for example, the company announced partnerships with the Veterans Administration Palo Alto Healthcare System and Atrius Health to help optimize their care delivery. It also started working with Wake Forest Baptist Health in December to find ways to better connect older adults with care professionals while allowing them to be independent at home.”

Takeaway

Partnerships necessary for future success: As highlighted by my Jan. 7 blog on the high cost of most things healthcare related in the U.S., the imperative to reduce the cost to deliver care is real. And if providers are going to be successful, they need to understand their cost to deliver care at the case/patient level, which means understanding utilization patterns (to identify inappropriate utilization) at the patient level.  

Given that many organizations have struggled to integrate and manipulate the disparate, large datasets necessary to provide these insights and deliver them to process improvement teams and clinicians in a timely, usable manner, it’s natural that health systems would look to partners with core expertise in advanced analytics. Like analytic efforts led by internal staff/consultants, health systems will still need to engage clinicians who deliver care throughout the process to ensure that the insights surfaced using AI tools are accurate, will be accepted and ultimately catalyze action.

Why engagement can be a challenge: The engagement challenge will likely be greater given that AI tools deliver results from what many perceive as a “black box.” Success will likely require additional effort and resources be dedicated to educating key clinical stakeholders about the tools and involving them in key decisions ranging from how the analysis is designed and run to how the outputs are displayed and used.