Healthcare innovation

 Digital Health Innovation Is Hard. How Can Data Help?

Four Key Takeaways

Healthcare innovation’s greatest promise is its potential to solve a stunning range of problems.

1. The cloud bolsters security

As a physician with three autoimmune disorders, Suhina Singh heard plenty of talk about patient empowerment but saw few results. She founded Jonda Health, a startup that launched this past summer with the goal of enabling patients to conveniently access, control, and leverage their personal health data.

Jonda found a niche in serving patients with rare diseases and moderate to severe chronic conditions. To stand out among the crowded health app marketplace, Singh drew on the data and her intimate knowledge of the patient experience. That led her to pursue strong security protections and intensive data-processing capabilities — making her customers’ lives simpler and safer.

They may vary from a localized hepatitis C outbreak and the absence of insights in virtual care encounters to patient data access barriers and inadequate brain health measurements. Where else but in digital health can Fortune 500 organizations and stealth-mode startups alike leverage similar technologies to address such unique challenges?

InterSystems recently assembled a diverse set of innovators to discuss how they use healthy data, actionable insights, and proven technology partnerships to achieve patient health and business goals. Here are four key takeaways.

2. Ensure access to innovation

Cognetivity developed a fast, repeatable, reliable way to evaluate brain health, filling a long-standing unmet need that delayed treatments. The path to market for the startup encompassed research and development, pilots, fundraising, clinical trials, regulatory approvals, and high-stakes deals.

Along the way, Cognetivity realized access — to data, informed decision making, and medical advances — was everything. The company required seamless data retrieval, while clinicians needed easy access to the technology and its resultant insights. But most of all, the new brain health assessment had to be available to patients, including those who face financial and other barriers to testing.

3. Pursue insights, not widgets

Data is the heart of a plan by Baxter International, a global leader in medical technology, to improve nursing workflows and reduce medical errors through clinical decision support. With a footprint spanning every care setting — including patients’ homes — the company needed to ingest and leverage information in each venue.

Baxter’s leaders found that success depended on, above all else, actionable insights at the point of care. The team laser-focused on integrating health data, which put it on track to release a commercially viable product quickly.

4. Don’t try to solve everything

If anyone knows laboratories, it’s the Rhodes Group. For more than 20 years, the company has extracted value from clinical lab data, helping their clients operate and collect revenues. Its analytics solutions fuel risk adjustment profiles for patients, identify undocumented diagnoses, and even help fight hepatitis C.

Rhodes Group CEO James Brown says their accomplishments stem from sticking to what his team knows best: lab data.

“No one can solve healthcare,” he adds. “But what gets us excited is that we can do our part.”