Better patient outcomes through tailored, personalized engagement

Prasad Dindigal is a leading expert in understanding how patients and providers can maximize the value of engagement while focusing on patient safety, quality, and experience. Prasad and his team leverage human ingenuity to transform real-world data into meaningful insights, utilizing a combination of AI/machine learning, natural language processing, data visualization, and interactive dashboard tools. Below, Prasad answers questions that focus on patient engagement, and how organizations can best utilize technology, data and analytics. 

PD: Before any patient engagement strategy can hope to be effective, it needs to be able to accurately identify and stratify the target population based on risk. With advanced analytics, it is now possible to stratify health risk across a wide range of detailed attributes, including previous clinical experience, costs, social determinants, and several other factors.

In one recent example from a V-BID engagement with a large, self-insured employer, we designed a strategy to improve cancer care. With a goal of improving outcomes and experience for covered employees and their dependents by optimizing oncology care, eliminating waste and moving to high-value services, we set out to a program focused on five cancer types: breast, prostate, cervical, lung and colon. That meant digging into several data sources to get a 360-view of the complete healthcare experience of the employee population. This process allowed us to not only identify the cohort of patients most at-risk of a cancer diagnosis, but also track the patterns of clinical engagement and healthcare utilization they’ve experienced over time.

PD: Identifying the right technology can be quite a challenge. Look for solutions that are cloud-based, quick to scale up, and easy to tailor to organization needs. Healthcare leaders should also evaluate their organization readiness for change, current technical infrastructure, and digital quotient of their workforce. Also, power to the patient is key. Patients want more control of their healthcare, and to be active participants in their treatment decisions, and the technology must reflect that.

PD: New technology solutions can help organizations with preventing patient no-shows, improving compliance, reducing accounts receivable delays, attracting new patients, and expanding patient access. The use of digital channels for patient engagement, real world data analytics, and teleconsultations with providers and nurses are some of the most important technologies that can help healthcare organizations improve patient safety and quality.

Recognizing the need for such a platform, EXL Health designed its own cloud based omni-channel patient engagement platform that we’re very excited about. The EXL Patient Engagement Platform is our new approach to outcomes-based patient engagement. It combines more than 20 years of certified clinical expertise with widely accepted digital technology and behavioral science techniques to reach patients at the right time, with the right message, over the right channel, and achieve the best possible outcomes. By taking a member-centric, whole-person approach to healthcare, the platform helps close the gap between identifying points of intervention using analytics and achieving outcomes, while driving cost savings and quality care through continuous improvements in best practices. Additionally, our doctors, behavioral psychologists, computer scientists, and strategists understand why people behave the way they do and use persuasive psychology to get the right results.

PD: Machine-learning predictive analytics can generate valuable patient insights. EXL’s data algorithms utilize an integrated model to generate insights that facilitate intervention at the right point in a patient journey to positively impact outcomes.

One key factor is the ability to standardize and integrate various systems based on outcomes you need to achieve. Consider having a standard data hygiene process and a data governance program. Defining proper outcomes can guide the right data, the right format, and the right integration. Barriers that we’ve seen include lack of standardization of data across various channels, mounting regulatory scrutiny, and evolving patient needs.

To learn more visit: exlservice.com/patientengagement