Improving Health with Better Data

by | Dec 9, 2019 | Portfolio News

Decisions in health care are often flawed because they are based on limited information. However, the growing ability to capture massive amounts of data and apply artificial intelligence to its analysis provides a growing potential for better insights into health care and improvement of patient outcomes. Komodo Health is at the forefront of this initiative with its AI-driven platform that captures 15 million patient interactions with the health care system every day to provide a real-time picture of patients and their various encounters.

In a recent episode of the Bio Report podcast, Komodo Health Chief Medical Officer and Senior Vice President of Corporate Development Aswin Chandrakantan and host Daniel Levine discussed the changing data landscape, how Big Data has the potential to reshape health care decision-making, and what that data is enabling everyone from patients to payers to do differently.

The healthcare ecosystem is really fixated on cost, Chandrakantan said. But the real problem is that there is no truly effective way to track outcomes. By collecting large amounts of data about where patients are, the diseases they have, and what the result of their treatment is, Komodo Health is enabling better outcomes and cost savings.

Health care data suffers from several challenges: a lack of full representation of population rather than specific risk pools; fragmentation, so providers and payers only have a partial view of the patient’s entire journey through the health care system; and timing, as in, some health care data doesn’t contain information about the dates patients were seen. With that in mind, it’s really hard to collect all the data about that patient’s full course of treatment.

Komodo Health is trying to bring all this information together on a granular level to gather information on how to help patients. The platform also allows people to see changes at the population level. The health care map Komodo developed is “the journey of de-identified patients to discover the ground truths of health care,” according to Chandrakantan. Providers can use this health care map as an underpinning to build a platform, allowing them to get the right therapy to the right patient at the right time. The platform enables other health care stakeholders to add their data sets to Komodo’s in order to provide a more complete view.

Ultimately, he said, “we’re going to understand patient disease burdens—morbidity and mortality—on a level that we’ve never been able to do. This will allow health systems to make better care choices for each individual patient.”

Listen to the podcast here.