The Journal of mHealth Vol 2 Issue 4 (August) | Page 37

Transforming Patient Data into Actionable Insights What benefits does analysing unstructured data (in addition to structured data) deliver in terms of healthcare provision? “As much as 80 to 90 per cent of today’s health data is in unstructured formats like patient histories and physician notes, yet most of it goes unused. It’s unfortunate because there is so much valuable information that lies in all this untouched data. Having the ability to analyse this unstructured data, in combination with structured data, provides several benefits for clinicians, including more accurate risk stratification, increased practice efficiency, optimised patient interaction coding, better, more specific diagnoses, and stronger patient outcomes.” What are the difficulties associated with combining unstructured data, in terms of issues like privacy? “We take privacy very seriously. Personal health information (PHI) is more valuable to hackers than credit card information because it has a longer shelf life and is more able to be used in identity fraud. It’s critical that players who deal with PHI make sure all data is protected, and we have systems and processes to ensure this happens. It’s also important that data traveling from one silo using a particular patient ID is matched accurately with data from another silo, which might use a different ID. This is hard to do, and we’ve got to get it right every time.” As individual health data expands exponentially - with the growth of personal digital health solutions what type of actionable insights can we begin to expect? “There has always been an immense gap between provider and consumer access to health information. But we’re seeing this gap slowly closing due to the personalisation of healthcare and increased consumer use of wearables and mobile health apps. These devices help patients and their providers gather valuable insights that will help them better manage their health and the health of their local populations. For instance, devices and applications that track steps can help patients and their physicians to better plan and track against weight loss goals. Combining current and historical data can also help doctors spot trends and understand what is happening with the patient. In addition, having aggregated data from multiple patients in a population can even lead a healthcare provider into a new market – such as providing more services for chronic conditions.” and unstructured patient data – and close those gaps in near-real time. Since the implementation, clinicians at Village Family Practice have seen a 16 per cent improvement in coding accuracy.” What are the new value pathways within healthcare that these datadriven insights are helping to achieve? How far advanced is this process, across the industry, and what can we expect for the future? “Risk adjustment is critical, particularly now as we’re moving to value-based care. Data analysis is used by many commercial payer organisations to more accurately predict the health costs of each patient and adjust reimbursement rates accordingly. In addition,