“From the payer’s side, we’re looking very closely at efficiency, and that’s all driven by data,” Chow continues. “We collect data on the time it takes to do things, the time it takes to get resources to get where they are needed, the implications of certain kinds of decisions. We use analytical tools to see how we can become more efficient while providing the same or better quality of care. As a very large organization, we look at the data challenge from many points of view, and while different internal groups may have different agendas, we are all on the same page as far as quality, service and affordability goals are concerned.”

Chow expects other healthcare organizations to follow KP’s lead, and suspects the ones who don’t will be left behind.

“With all the information that’s out there, patients are going to be looking at their healthcare situation very carefully and comparing their options,” he says. “In the future, there will be much more visibility and accountability. If another care provider down the street is getting better results than you for the same cost, you’re going to lose patients.”

Big Pharma Perspective

Andy Palmer, co-founder and former president and CEO of Vertica Systems and co-founder of a half-dozen other successful startups over the past 20 years, made his mark and his money as an entrepreneur in analytics, big data and data management software. Today, in addition to his entrepreneurial activities, he spends a considerable amount of his creative, analytical talent on the life sciences, working with companies such as pharmaceutical giant Novartis (as an executive director) in the area of drug discovery. Palmer has a particular passion for cancer research. For example, he served as an advisor to the Lance Armstrong Foundation on the development of an iPad app for cancer patients.

“Drug discovery and research is a fundamentally interdisciplinary activity that requires scientists on a daily basis to integrate information from across many different organizations and many different scientific disciplines,” Palmer says. “I think of it as the hardest analytical and data integration environment on the planet, but also one that offers the biggest benefit: finding important new medicines for patients with unmet medical needs.”

The bottom line for any pharma company is developing new and more effective drugs and getting them to the marketplace as soon as possible, given all the research and clinical trials that are typically involved. How does analytics help make that happen?

“Pharmaceutical companies make decisions every day on where they are going to invest research dollars,” Palmer says. “It’s a huge distraction and waste of time, energy and effort to start a new clinical trial only to find that there are not enough patients out there in the general population to make the trial successful. It’s important to make sure that we are investing our dollars and our energy as efficiently as possible, and that we’re making the best possible decisions so that we can effectively discover new drugs for patients.

“Every decision should be analytically and data-driven: which trials to run, how those trials are going to be run, where they are going to be run, which patients to recruit for which trials. All of these things should be reviewed in an integrated way. It’s a very challenging analytics and big data problem.”

Chronic Diseases & Telehealth

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), chronic disease accounts for about 75 percent of U.S. aggregate healthcare spending, which makes chronic disease an attractive target for any entity interested in reducing national healthcare costs. Since unhealthy behavior and non-adherence to prescribed meds often results in complications involving chronic diseases such as diabetes, the concept of telehealth is one way to improve chronic disease management, yet it, too, has run into resistance in certain segments of the medical community.

Unlike traditional medical intervention that basically stops when the doctor writes a prescription (at least until complications commence), telehealth is a means for healthcare providers to continuously reach out to patients through telecommunication technology. Telehealth can be as simple as sending an e-mail reminder to chronic care patients to take their meds, or it can be an intensive monitoring and information exchange system using sophisticated software systems and online questionnaires to ascertain a patient’s health status and to discover early on if the patient is developing a problem – all without the patient ever visiting the doctor’s office.

Adherence to meds and early detection of potential problems translate into fewer complications and fewer emergency room visits, according to a 2011 study published in the policy journal Health Affairs. In the study, Stanford University researchers, reporting on a telehealth demonstration project involving 1,700 Medicare patients with various chronic diseases, found that a telehealth system trimmed spending by 7.7 percent to 13.3 percent, or $312 to $542 per person, each quarter.

Dr. Jasper zu Putlitz is president of Palo Alto, Calif.-based Robert Bosch Healthcare, developers of the telehealth system used in the demonstration project cited in Health Affairs. “I think that telehealth will be an integral part of healthcare in the future, not only in developed countries such as the United States, but in emerging countries like India where access to healthcare is really an issue,” he says. The prevalence of smart phones around the world, even in many emerging countries, enhances the capability of telehealth as a versatile, viable delivery system.

Dr. zu Putlitz, a medical doctor by training who practiced internal medicine in Germany and Switzerland for seven years, envisions that telehealth systems will be integrated with electronic medical records and health information exchanges, creating a wealth of integrated data and opening up a world of opportunities for analytics. “You want to be really smart about how you analyze the data,” zu Putlitz cautions. “Whatever we do in analytics should be about enabling the physician to make the right decision. The goal is to take all of the data and create a prediction around what a particular patient will require next and make it a very personalized intervention.”