Defining the Patient-Centric Focus in Healthcare

The boundaries across industries have been quickly blurring over the past few years. Very pointedly, Bob Evans, Co-Founder of Acceleration Economy, asks, “Where’s the boundary now? Where’s the dividing line between where healthcare merges into life sciences? Life sciences into data sciences? And, on the other side all of us trying to take better care of ourselves.”

This sets the stage for the second day of the Industry Cloud Battleground Week. The primary theme of the day was the patient-centric focus built on the foundation of actionable data. However, the subtle differences from each tech leader were clear as they jockeyed for the attention of the audience.

Microsoft on Healthcare

The “connected care experience” sums up Microsoft‘s approach with its Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. The fabric of this solution is an ecosystem with a standards-based platform, built upon a consolidated dataset. Here are the major points to consider that Microsoft surfaced:

• The Azure Healthcare Bot could potentially solve up to 50% of patient interactions.
• Microsoft Teams helps collaboration between teams such as clinicians and administrative personnel and delivers virtual visits between doctors and in-home patients.
• Microsoft has developed a massive partner ecosystem that leverages its platform to provide virtual health solutions, analytics solutions, patient engagement solutions.
• AI and machine learning are infused into Microsoft’s platform. This empowers real opportunities for transformational change for healthcare for clinicians, business staff, and patients.

Workday on Healthcare

Workday addressed the core of healthcare in a couple of phrases: “digital foundation” and “digital backbone”. These phrases highlighted how Workday views its healthcare strategy. First, they recognized the current challenges facing organizations today with labor and supply shortages. Second, they acknowledged that “clinician burnout is at an all-time high.” So, what’s Workday’s answer to these real-world challenges?

• The “digital foundation” upholds the framework of scalable solutions for the supply chain needs that the Workday Healthcare Supply Chain Management addresses. Hospitals and other medical facilities have critical needs for PPE, vaccinations, and more to meet current demands.
• Operational administrators, clinicians, doctors, and nurses need to have access to transaction-level information. This provides insights into the cost of care, improves care pathways, and increases value for the patient.
• The Workday Talent Management solution is powering AstraZeneca to quickly fill staff roles, move talent internally, and upskill personnel. Additionally, Workday Peakon is helping Sanford Health with greater engagement with employees to ask tough questions and find out the effectiveness of its mental health programs.
• Workday’s Healthcare Advisory Council helps them continue the innovation by involving customers in the co-creation and overall strategic direction.

Salesforce on Healthcare

For Salesforce, they sought to answer the question, “How are our Trailblazers are using our platform to deliver new kinds of care?” This starts by recognizing that 1) the patient is at the center of everything and 2) they are looking for digitally connected experiences.

Further, this continues by understanding the complexities of the disruption happening between patients and providers. According to Salesforce, 40% of patients are willing to switch providers because they aren’t loyal to a specific provider, they are loyal to convenience. What is Salesforce doing to address these complexities?

• The Salesforce Patient 360 is bringing together data from disparate sources to give doctors, providers, organizations, and pharmacies the information they need to deliver the right care to the right person.
• Empower sales teams and marketing teams to have unique connections with customers. For example, a large surgical device manufacturing company often sees its sales reps spending their day inside ORs, helping physicians understand their products and how to apply them appropriately. Salesforce is closing the geographical distances much faster for sales teams through its platform capabilities.
• Salesforce is focusing are three main areas in conjunction with its customers: customer visibility, scalability, and building for success.
• Tight collaboration and co-creation with customers and partners are bringing valuable capabilities to the market. Case in point, Salesforce partnered with Change Healthcare to integrate with payers, validate benefit eligibility, and simplify communication through SMS text.

Google Cloud on Healthcare

Many people still equate Google with search engines. However, the Google Cloud Healthcare Data Engine solution is delivering powerful capabilities to its customers for their healthcare and life sciences needs. Additionally, Google is rethinking the health and wellness of patients from the ground up. They are architecting patient experiences for smarter, continuous, and more responsive care.

Two areas of focus emerged from Google. The first is around data interoperability and the realm of care delivery. The goal is to provide doctors with a much more unified view of their patients. The second is in the area of virtual care and the huge shift in acceptance of telehealth and hybrid care. For example, Google partnered with Amwell to scale virtual health, powered by artificial intelligence, to embed real-time captioning and translation services. This allowed Amwell to increase health access and have a better understanding of patients.

• Google stressed an alarming statistic: 55% of preventable hospitalizations or mortality in rural settings is due to lack of access to specialty care with telehealth and access to top specialists.
• Consumers now have the power to act on and share their device data, sensor data, phenomic data claims, race and ethnicity, and more. This is where the longitudinal patient record becomes more robust, and there’s a new level of personalization that’s within reach. Google sees the longitudinal patient record as central to an interconnected world where the healthcare data engine can harmonize records for better care, better research, and better operations.
• During the pandemic, for example, services such as Google Cloud’s Call Center, coupled with the Rapid Response Virtual Agent, leveraged natural language processing (NLP) to power intelligent web bots to interact with patients, interpret symptoms they’re reporting, and triage patients. This connects the patient with the right clinician in a short time all while minimizing unnecessary exposure that could put patients and health care professionals at risk.
• Google is unlocking new treatments using AI, NLP, and computer vision for text or image-based data processing. A great example is Alphafold developed by a Google sibling, Deepmind. A breakthrough in understanding the shape of natural proteins provides critical information for the development of drugs and accelerates research.

Oracle on Healthcare

The outcomes of bringing together disparate data emerged as a central theme for Oracle. They are combining EMR, public data, claims data, and operational data together to deliver better business outcomes, support providers, and evidence-based solutions.

Moreover, Oracle realizes the importance of decentralized clinical trials in light of the pandemic. This requires a strong focus on tools and solutions for unifying data, as well as streamlining and automating data collection. The method, in combination with AI to power digital case intake, created a 50% reduction in digital case intake, and an improvement in accuracy and compliance. In addition to this great work, Oracle is seeing further impacts with its Oracle for Healthcare solution, such as:

• Collaboration with the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change is helping several African countries speed up data collection and vaccine administration programs to better monitor and combat COVID, yellow fever, HPV, polio, and measles. The program oversaw the vaccination of over 75,000 people just within the first ten days of use.
• Oracle Cloud is being used by Properdtx to personalize healthcare plans for cancer patients. This startup company uses data to create insightful visualizations for patients to see their predictive care plans to avoid hospitalization.
• During the pandemic, Northwell had to expedite the onboarding validation process for almost 700 temporary employees to deal with the influx of care. They used Oracle Analytics to display their staff scheduling data and patient census information from dozens of hospitals. Further, they used an Oracle HR dashboard to help everyone to stay abreast of patient influx, staff recruitment, and resource requirements necessary for critical care.
• Children’s Medical Research Institute, a premier Australian medical and biological research institute, organizes experiments that produce several terabytes of data that need to be analyzed. This data includes genomic sequencing and proteomics with high-resolution images from microscopy and simulations. The institute wanted to optimize its processes to improve performance, facilitate seamless collaboration between its researchers. Oracle provided the data much faster to the people who needed it and reduced the simulation time from 30 days down to only 5 days.

SAP on Healthcare

We can all acknowledge that the pandemic forced a drastic shift in expectations across many industries. The level of expectations from travel to retail and more have now spilled into healthcare. For SAP, tapping into this “new normal” was important, and, for Heidelberg University Hospital it was a critical part of every stage of its operations. New emergency protocols were implemented across the region to manage emergency ambulance transports and the location of patients. This required the regional public health authority, the Fire Brigade, and all regional hospitals to work together across a scalable and extensible cloud-based solution. The partnership with SAP allowed them to go live with a viable solution in less than 10 days.

However, this was not the only way SAP was creating solutions for healthcare customers around the world. This was exemplified by:

• Parkland Health in Dallas, TX took their existing SAP cloud solution to apply real-time analytics to help with capacity planning. This equipped them with a single point of view of their health care organization. This increased their operational throughput to transport patients to the right place at the right time and uses predictive capabilities to estimate future needs for daily use.
• SAP has taken decades of experience from multiple industries to harness data in the healthcare arena. This translated into solutions for successful patient diagnosis, treatment, decisions, follow-ups, and research. It also helps treatments to be much more individual by taking into account a person’s genetic pre-disclosure towards certain medication and increasing the effectiveness and safety of further treatments.
• Artificial Intelligence is helping to identify patterns and propose statistical evidence to doctors which might not be immediately visible. SAP believes that AI will be a tool, not a replacement, for doctors to make more informed decisions and focus more on the patient. However, they are still in control and able to question AI results, helping them augment their capabilities.
• Lastly, SAP demonstrates the speed and agility that customers expect from technology in collaboration with software and service partners to enhance the healthcare solutions needed.

---

Industry Cloud Battleground Week: Available On-Demand

Sponsored by Salesforce, Google Cloud, Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, and Workday, this 5-day digital event delivered insights to inspire, educate and engage business and technology leaders who are actively defining their industry-specific cloud strategy.