What is the top challenge or obstacle facing health care today?

Healthcare innovation is occurring at such a rapid pace that many organizations are struggling to prioritize initiatives. Arcadia recently partnered with HIMSS (Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society) to survey healthcare leaders at various sized health systems and the results are illuminating. We found that 71% of respondents experience challenges investing in or upgrading analytics platforms due to competing strategic priorities (HIMSS Market Insights January 2023 research, Data Analytics Platforms, sponsored by Arcadia). This tells us that healthcare leaders see the transformative value of healthcare technology. However, ambitious plans and competing priorities can make it challenging to move the needle in any one direction. Often the key to success can be zeroing in on a specific goal, such as improving operations or patient outcomes, and going all in on achieving that work. Focusing efforts more narrowly can enable organizations to see progress sooner than they might by focusing on a broader set of efforts. This is especially true for organizations with limited resources, such as staffing or budget.

What are the top priorities for your organization this year?

Arcadia is a healthcare data company with a platform that delivers actionable insights to advance care and research, drive strategic growth, and ensure financial success. Our company has strong expertise in connecting disparate platforms and data to allow our customers to analyze their data and make better informed healthcare decisions. This year, our priorities include investing in and scaling our data platform, the robust and broadly applicable solutions it powers, and continuing to strengthen the support we offer our customers — such as a team dedicated to helping customers glean insights from their data to improve efficiency and care delivery across their network.

What technological advancements make you most excited in health care today?

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are among the technological advancements that are most exciting in healthcare today. While these tools have existed for years, the release of ChatGPT propelled their capabilities into the spotlight. As an industry, we’re more aware of the potential these advancements can bring — including the ability to drive a much more efficient workforce that’s able to practice at the top of their license. That’s not exclusive to care delivery, such as a medical license. It applies to everyone’s license — such as an analytics leader being able to provide the most valuable outputs and an executive having the right inputs to be the most effective in their role. Arcadia has been using AI and ML to unlock transformation in healthcare for more than a decade. We do this by aggregating troves of data and using AI and ML to harness that data to help providers make critically important decisions about patient care. This curated data is specific to its users, respective patient populations, and unique market conditions. The result is providers leveraging data and insights to deliver quality, efficient care that improves patient outcomes and meets business objectives.

What do you feel are the key drivers of health care transformation?

Hospitals produce an average of 50 petabytes of data each year with as much as 97% of that data going unused (World Economic Forum: 4 Ways Data is Improving Healthcare, December 2019). This statistic illustrates how unlocking big data is critical to achieve healthcare transformation. This encompasses access to the right data and ensuring that it is high-quality and accurate. It also includes the right governance, infrastructure, and analytics to make the data effective and useful. In other words, data is only as good as the actions consumers of that data can take with the insights it unlocks. Trust in data is another key driver in adoption of data-driven decision-making. A way to earn trust and utilization of data is to measure the outcomes it can drive. For example, quantifying how applying big data helps solve a problem, such as improvement in quality. Organizations that can successfully aggregate their data and analyze it to tell a story and inform business actions can demonstrate the application of data actually works.

How has the pandemic changed the way health care organizations think about data and technology?

The COVID-19 pandemic transformed the way healthcare organizations think about data and technology in many ways. Perhaps the most salient example is the demand for enhanced interoperability to connect desperate systems and make data fluid and in real-time. Consider the need to report confirmed cases of COVID-19 with public health agencies, to share clinical information with researchers and to stitch together patient data from various sites of care — such as telehealth providers and pharmacist-administered vaccines. The pandemic also taught healthcare to invest in technology and platforms that can help overburdened providers do their jobs more effectively — such as analytics tools that surface insights and recommend actions within existing workflows. An example of how Arcadia supported the acute needs of healthcare organizations during the pandemic can be found in the responsive approach we took to develop patient intervention and engagement tools. Within 10 days of the declaration of the state of emergency, Arcadia introduced new patient stratification algorithms to help providers identify which patients had high, moderate, and low risk of developing COVID-19 complications so that intervention strategies could be deployed effectively. We also created new communication tools that helped providers reach patients with information about COVID-19 and available resources, such as hotlines and telehealth. Arcadia also deployed an engagement tool that enables healthcare providers to stay connected with patients through remote patient monitoring and an interactive symptom checker to securely capture information about patients’ care needs.