Sonic Healthcare USA is the world’s third largest pathology/laboratory medicine company with operations in eight countries. A recent article discussed how the company is now using lab test data generated in its labs for predictive analytics focusing on patients with neglected diabetes. The various laboratories then directly contacted these patients, urging them to seek medical treatment (see: Sonic Healthcare Uses Test Data to Create Shared Savings Opportunities for Clinical Laboratory and Providers). These actions, in turn, reduced medical costs by this early intervention. Below is an excerpt from the article:
Using integrated financial and clinical analytics, Sonic is developing technologies to build clinical decision support tools for its provider and health plan clients. The providers and health plans use those tools to engage patients and help them manage their health....Sonic uses lab test results and financial data to show providers how some low-cost patients over time can become high-cost patients....Sonic [then] uses lab test data to help physicians identify low-cost patients who may need certain interventions before they become high-cost patients. Providers have opportunities to intervene with patients who have renal failure, congestive heart failure, ischemic heart disease, diabetes, and other conditions....
Over several years, Sonic has worked with one client provider group to identify patients who would benefit the most from interventions to prevent their healthcare costs from rising sharply....Sonic found that about two-thirds of high-cost patients were in the low-cost group just one year earlier.....[T]he reason they were low cost the year before was not because they were healthy. Instead, it was because they did not engage with the healthcare system for their chronic disease management.....Sonic used its iMorpheus data analytics system to show that 26.5% of the low-cost patients had diabetes, but that they had not seen their physician in the previous 12 months....[T]he company developed an automated interactive voice response system to call the patients. Sonic recorded the patients’ physicians and then had the system place the calls. Of the patients who received the calls, 44% responded and visited their physicians.
I have posted a number of previous notes about predictive/diagnostic analytics (see, for example: Diagnostic and Predictive Analytics and Their Possible Link to the Future of the LIS; Three Examples of Predictive Analytics in Clinical Practice). However, I was pleasantly surprised to discover via the cited article above that a global laboratory company had both developed a proprietary data analytics system, iMorpheus, and was then using the system to predict/diagnose disease. Ultimately, the patients were alerted about this finding with an automated telephone system using their physician's voice.
All of this is both admirable and highly unusual. Although clinical labs enable clinicians to make myriad diagnoses with lab test results, they seldom take a proactive role in predicting and diagnosing disease in patients. Sonic's program provides early insight into the potential value of various types of analytics software installed in the labs. In a recent note, I also discussed how analytics will play a critical role in the future for the professional career of pathology informaticians (see: The Future for Pathology Informaticians Inexorably Linked to Analytics). This fascinating news from Sonic reinforces this same idea.
Comments