Challenges in healthcare management: a more preventive and customized approach

With an ageing population, the wide prevalence of chronic diseases and the shortage of health professionals, doctors in healthcare units are over-stretched, leading to care that is reactive, rather than pro-active/preventive.

This means that healthcare units need to have a holistic outlook. In other words, they need to get the most out of the clinical information at their disposal (often underused), such as their patients' clinical report, enabling them to provide a better and more customized service.

A healthcare organization with around 2,500 physicians and online clinical records needed to have a more holistic picture of its patients and to keep one step ahead of their need and their probability of developing particular pathologies, such as diabetes or hepatitis.

Opportunity: innovation in health with the development of a platform to support preventive healthcare.

A platform was designed to help doctors prioritize which patients need attention and preventive care. The platform created enables the healthcare organization to have a doctor's assistant which is "always on" and just one click away, capable of going through five million electronic files each night and supplying specific clinical recommendations on medication, improving the quality and safety of care, as witnessed at first hand by one of the organization's directors.

Patients are presented to doctors in line with their potential risk of developing particular clinical conditions, or by holistically combining the weighted risk of several clinical conditions. This decision supporting engine was developed on the basis of automated clinical pathways and daily analysis of five million online clinical records, in order to provide customized recommendations for follow-up and treatment, promoting preventive care for diseases such as diabetes, osteoporosis and hepatitis C.

For instance, the platform can identify individuals at a high risk of having the hepatitis C virus. Detection of hepatitis C with this platform is a hundred times more efficient than with traditional screening programs. It was designed as a generic platform, capable of being applied to different pathologies, and is independent of the type of original data (structured, images, ...).