Among the most significant challenges facing the healthcare industry are rising costs, the aging population and the shrinking healthcare workforce. On top of that, policy changes are putting pressure on payers and there is tremendous uncertainty about federal research funding.
These challenges are causing healthcare organizations to ask how they can do more with less.
Organizations are adopting AI to improve operational efficiency. However, in a recent Becker’s Healthcare webinar, Calum Yacoubian, MD, Director for Health Data Enablement, Applied AI Science, IQVIA, explained why just improving efficiency is not enough. “Healthcare organizations must look for new ways of creating value from pre-existing resources and assets,” he said. The resources and assets he focused on are data and technology.
He shared five opportunities for healthcare organizations to create value by leveraging their data. These opportunities often involve partnering with industry sponsors, who care about speed, transparency and differentiated data.
- Privacy and governance at scale. One opportunity to create value is building linked datasets used for commercial purposes. In pursuing this opportunity, privacy and governance must be considered up front to avoid re-identification. Individual Re-identification Risk Determination is a useful tool to navigate this risk but lacks efficiencies and economies of scale for incremental projects. IQVIA recommends using platform re-identification risk assessment. Such an approach is part of a scalable privacy solution that can yield significant cost savings as well as opening up new revenue streams.
- Semantic enrichment. On average, health systems manage data across 14 different EMRs, each with different coding and data standards. In addition, there are 4 million medical terms in the US only. These are just two of the reasons why there is a semantic interoperability challenge. Solving this problem requires standardization across datasets. IQVIA’s Center for Health Data Semantics has solutions to codify health information that include a technology server, an authoring platform and a terminology service.
- Common data model. Participating in studies by furnishing real-world data can be an important source of value. In real-world studies, participating organizations must speak the same language, which requires a common data model. The most accepted common data model is OMOP. IQVIA played a big role in the consortium that created this model and can help healthcare organizations with technologies and services to convert data to OMOP.
- LLMs and natural language processing. While a great deal of health systems’ data is unstructured, deriving insights from this data are of great value to industry sponsors. Natural language processing (NLP), including generative AI can take unstructured data and convert it into something structured and more valuable. IQVIA’s NLP Platform helps health systems extract unstructured data with high precision.
- Clinical decision-support tools. The data within health systems can be used in training predictive models and decision-support tools. These models and tools can be used to ensure that patients are on the right treatment, identify patients who have been misdiagnosed, and identify other gaps in care. Increasingly, industry sponsors are working with healthcare providers to implement these tools to drive better outcomes for patients.
These examples are some of the ways that industry partners are looking to work with healthcare organizations to access and leverage their data. Partnerships between sponsors and healthcare organizations can improve care, close gaps, improve outcomes, and provide a new source of value for health systems.
IQVIA has tools, services and expertise to help healthcare organizations leverage data and technology to tap into these new sources of value.
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At the Becker's 11th Annual IT + Revenue Cycle Conference: The Future of AI & Digital Health, taking place September 14–17 in Chicago, healthcare executives and digital leaders from across the country will come together to explore how AI, interoperability, cybersecurity, and revenue cycle innovation are transforming care delivery, strengthening financial performance, and driving the next era of digital health. Apply for complimentary registration now.
