Transforming care with analytics – Fullerton Health Q&A
Advanced analytics is transforming healthcare today, helping providers improve the quality of care while lowering costs. Fullerton Health, a leading provider of integrated enterprise healthcare solutions across Asia, operates over 200 fully-owned clinics and serves high quality, affordable care to over 10 million people. The company is leveraging KenSci Clinical Analytics, a solution built on Microsoft Cloud technology, to save lives and money with machine learning. We sat down with Fullerton Health Chief Information Officer Ted Minkinow to learn more about how his company is driving increased coverage, accessibility, and quality of care while minimizing costs.
What are the most pressing challenges that Fullerton Health faces as a largescale healthcare provider?
Making healthcare more affordable and accessible is critical to our mission. Unfortunately, inaccurate claims due to fraud and errors are the number one driver of the increased cost of healthcare. In some of the countries we operate in across Asia, 40 to 50 percent of healthcare transactions are inaccurate in some way. If about half the money spent on healthcare is potentially unnecessary, then analyzing transactions to fight waste and abuse will cut the cost of care significantly.
Another big challenge is that, at the moment, healthcare is very manually intensive, inefficient, and error-prone. Machine learning will transform care, empowering care teams to be more efficient, more accurate in their diagnoses, and much less likely to make a medical mistake. For example, we are looking at using bio-identification to automatically alert doctors about a patient’s health history, helping care teams diagnose the right conditions and prescribe safe medications for every patient.
Finally, protecting the privacy and mobility of the data for the over 10 million people we serve is very difficult. We are a multinational healthcare provider, and some of the people we serve choose to use their medical benefits to acquire care in a different country than where they are from. Bringing people across borders, with their private data and their benefits intact, so they can get the healthcare they feel most comfortable receiving is a huge challenge. Each country has its own set of regulations, and we must make sure we comply with all of the regulations in every country that we serve.
Given these challenges, how is digital transformation changing the game for providers?
We have been able to reduce the cost of care by about 15 percent with our managed care model, KenSci’s advanced machine learning analytics, and the security and efficiency of the Microsoft Cloud. We are moving all our data into the cloud – Microsoft’s data centers are far better protected physically than ours, and Microsoft’s cybersecurity investments are much greater than a company like us would ever be able to afford.
The cloud enables us to not only access our data anywhere, anytime, but to standardize, centralize, and enhance collaboration. Before, a lot of our management was reactive as we would wait for reports and then give our input. Now we are actively involved in decisions around business pursuits, clinical standards, and compliance throughout the region. The cloud has also empowered us to retire legacy systems while bringing our latest systems online in new countries. We have signed significant new business just by demonstrating our updated systems running in different countries in the cloud.
Combining the power of the cloud with KenSci’s analytic systems has been truly transformational. Now, we analyze data from our disparate systems to surface powerful insights on population health, fraud protection, surgical procedures, and more. We use clustered analysis to see if our customers are being charged the right amount or being overcharged. The cloud and KenSci have immediately improved the healthcare that we provide, made our care far more accessible by dramatically bringing down costs, and made our company more aware of what everybody’s doing. We now act as a single healthcare organization instead of 15 or 20 different providers operating in different areas of Asia, enabling us to easily propagate best practices across dispersed clinics and offices.
What made KenSci’s Clinical Analytics solution the right fit for Fullerton Health’s needs?
The KenSci solution enables us to enhance the efficiency and efficacy of our entire ecosystem. We are increasing the length and quality of people’s lives using analytics, by automating processes, improving care, and reducing operating costs. Saving lives is ultimately our goal. Even identifying inaccurate claims is a method to the end of making care more affordable and accessible so we can help more people. KenSci’s solution has helped us identify and combat fraud, lowering healthcare costs for everybody. The cost savings empower us to provide more free healthcare for disadvantaged people across Asia – enabling us to provide free medical checkups and free prescriptions for chronic conditions in every country we serve.
With KenSci’s solution, we are empowered to act on predictive insights. Now we have visibility into what kind of care our customers will need, so we can look at actual conditions, whether they are chronic or acute but approaching chronic, and predict healthcare spend while formulating intervention strategies. Then, we act by implementing wellness programs to target groups that will need care. Data science gives us a time machine to look into the future, and we change the future for the better with tailored, preventive care.
What are you planning on doing with Clinical Analytics next?
Moving forward, we are working with KenSci on a bespoke transaction processing system that is based on the same platform as our existing healthcare analytics. This new system will enable our clients to utilize roles-based authorization controls for granular visibility into corporate care. For example, we will be able to empower individuals in HR departments or insurers with deep insights into how we are performing our healthcare duties for their employees – and provide them with recommended policy changes. We will be able to monitor for activities like doctor shopping or for people that may be showing early signs of certain diseases. Plus, we will be able to help our clients intervene sooner. We are pushing toward putting more of our data to work for more people, helping individuals live longer, healthier, and happier lives.
In the future, we plan to use even more analytics to back up doctors, surfacing potential diagnoses for patients before they even walk in. With more predictive care, doctors will be more efficient and have more time to fine tune diagnoses, identify the proper tests, prescribe the best medications, and more.
KenSci’s Clinical Analytics, built on Microsoft Cloud technology, is available now on Microsoft AppSource. Learn how Clinical Analytics transforms care, saving lives and money, by trying the solution today.