In data-driven tasks, using structured data is an excellent first step that can get people very close to the goal. Unfortunately, too many organizations rely on it past its early usefulness.
Structured data in healthcare is effectively a codified derivative of what’s “real.” It’s an approximation based on a few narrow parameters that are input in a way that machines can recognize them. Best case scenario, it represents 20% of the whole leaving a lot of useful, actionable information untapped. When you’re starting from nothing, structured data is an excellent way to get closer. However, as the title here implies, “Close only counts in horseshoes,” Especially in a world where NLP engines and clinical inference can help you hit the target itself. Fortunately, we’re here to help.
Health Fidelity’s Lumanent solutions are embedded in payer and provider workflows throughout the country, from national health plans to ACOs leading savings and performance. There is another entire segment to our work, though: partnerships. Health Fidelity partners with organizations offering value-based care services and solutions across the US, from large, publicly traded companies to venture-backed, innovative startups.
There are several reasons companies come to us for partnerships, though most often they’re looking to go from getting close with an approximation via structured data to using NLP to nail a ringer on their toss, so to speak. This is, admittedly, a fun metaphor, but in the end, it illustrates what healthcare needs and what Health Fidelity provides with its technology. Despite healthcare services and technology being increasingly interested in leveraging data to improve outcomes and refine processes, most everyone is only getting small snapshots (only getting close.)
That’s why they come to us. With Lumanent Insights, healthcare organizations, especially those interested in identifying conditions, don’t settle for close, hitting the target becomes not just feasible but repeatable.
Sometimes, though, with that sort of opportunity, technology and service partners don’t know where to begin with us. That’s why today, I want to break down the nature of those relationships, each falling into one of three categories: strategic alliances, integrations, and affiliations.
- Affiliations are the most straightforward partnerships. These are technology and service providers that resell Health Fidelity’s Lumanent solutions outright, fully integrated and packaged with their own offerings. In doing so, organizations with significant market penetration can expand their ecosystem offering, and we can do our part to help ensure complete, accurate, compliant risk capture, something current events have proven is increasingly important.
- Integrations are like affiliations, but more direct. They’re a pure technological connection or outright adoption by a service provider rather than a health plan or health system. They can be a point-of-care workflow vendor embedding Health Fidelity’s Lumanent solutions directly into their system to allow easier deployment, or coding services providers using our systems. The configuration and use-case changes by design, depending on desired outcomes and end-user needs.
- Alliances are more about data pipelines than workflows. They involve partnerships with complementary solutions like population health analytics firms that dramatically expand and deepen their datasets with NLP support via Lumanent Insights. This also isn’t limited to NLP output and can, like the first two categories, enjoy clinical inference as well, identifying prospective risk opportunities or any unique tuning. Depending on need, thanks to Health Fidelity’s unrivaled dataset to draw on, our innovation team can shepherd machine learning techniques to “spin up” new approaches in short order.
I began this piece with a silly metaphor, but the volume of healthcare data doubles so often, editorials discussing its growth keep updating their sensational numbers: 8 months, 6 months, 6 weeks, etc. No matter how it’s framed, access to that data remains gated behind the technological ability to understand and interpret it. And now more than ever, accessing the data itself, and not just relying on sampling, is critical. If your company is tired of only ingesting that 20% of structured data to drive your business or support your customers, contact us today to discuss a partnership.
