How Apexon’s Patient 360 and HDAP Platform Transforms Healthcare

By Dr. Atif Farid Mohammad, Head of AI, R&D Center of Excellence – Apexon
By Rahul Ghate, Sr. Partner Development Specialist, Analytics Healthcare – AWS
By Venkat Gomatham, Sr. Partner Management Solutions Architect – AWS

Apexon

Providing an excellent patient experience is essential for high-quality healthcare. In recognition of this, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recently changed its methodology for evaluating Medicare Advantage (MA) scores to reflect the importance of patient experience. By 2023, metrics relating to customer experience will determine 57% of overall star ratings, an increase of 25%.

While Medicare Advantage plans have long included a customer experience component, healthcare providers are increasingly incentivized to prioritize exceptional patient experiences. For many, this means a shift in how they gather and interpret patient data and, in turn, how they deliver a more intuitive, personalized patient experience.

Patient data collected from doctor visits, diagnosis, and medication, as well as data collected through wearables, play a huge role in delivering quality patient care and improving the patient experience. However, healthcare data is complex and full of sensitive information. This makes it challenging to share or utilize for a unified patient view.

Increasingly, healthcare organizations recognize the need to achieve a better all-around understanding of patients. Solutions like the Patient 360 healthcare framework powered by Apexon Healthcare Data Analytics Platform (HDAP) consolidates patient and member data across the care delivery system to provide a unified view of the patient, facilitating better outreach and improved health outcomes.

Apexon is an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner with the Life Sciences Consulting Competency that leverages technical expertise to ensure organizations take full advantage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) capabilities. Apexon’s HDAP platform is available on AWS Marketplace.

The Data Platform Powering 360 Degree Vision

Patient 360 is a healthcare framework designed to provide an all-around view of the patient and predict the correlation and causation of disease symptoms and health conditions. It’s built on AWS and is powered by Apexon’s Health Data Analytics Platform (HDAP), which is a healthcare-specific data unification and analytics platform.

HDAP enables healthcare and life sciences organizations to rapidly implement a technology platform for leveraging their data assets to provide a single source of truth for patient and member data. Using data transformation techniques and advanced analytics, HDAP empowers health organizations to drive improved clinical outcomes for patients, increased medical adherence, and treatment that is tailored around individual patient needs.

Patient 360 contains ready code for processing standard healthcare data types like HL7, CCDA, DICOM, FHIR, labs, and other known electronic medical records (EMR). The platform also supports standard models such as Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP), and enables regulatory healthcare reporting, key performance indicator (KPI) calculations, and leveraging data for research.

The reference implementation of this platform can be done using AWS and native AWS components which allow for pay-as-you-go processing. This greatly alleviates capital expense and customers only pay for what they use.

Architectural Components of Patient 360

Core components of the Patient 360 platform—like data sources, data pipelines, data ingestion components, data transformation storage, data analytics, and visualization—are designed using event-driven, microservice, and serverless technologies on AWS. This implies scalability, reliability, resiliency, security, and cost optimization without any performance compromises.

Figure 1 – Logical architecture of HDAP.

Apexon uses infrastructure as code (IaC) templates to implement this solution. These are highly configurable pre-built templates to accelerate the solution implementation by many folds. It also enables Apexon to quickly customize cloud templates for spinning up infrastructure components catered to the exact customer needs.

The solution leverages many AWS services which enable event-driven design for executing data processing jobs for a defined set of transformations and analyses in near real time. Out of the box, it includes monitoring, logging, and alerts that adhere to industry best practices and are customized to satisfy customer business requirements.

Figure 2 – Solution architecture of HDAP.

Patient 360 utilizes several machine learning (ML) algorithms and pre-trained models across the solution, like de-identification and predictions. HDAP is flexible enough to incorporate custom ML models to cater to specific customer needs. It also leverages Amazon SageMaker for building, training, and deploying its ML models.

The solution adopts an elegant MLOps leveraging SageMaker Pipelines and the SageMaker Model Registry. It also leverages Amazon Redshift, Amazon Athena, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets, and Amazon EMR for data processing and analytics.

Ensuring Data Privacy with Patient 360 and HDAP

Apexon takes security and compliance very seriously. HDAP was developed with security, privacy, and compliance at its core, enabling granular and least privileged access controls for better governance and security adhering to best practices.

HDAP ensures data is processed and stored securely through in-transit and at-rest encryption. It also leverages AWS security services to monitor, detect, and respond with respect to data protection. For example, the solution uses Amazon Macie to detect sensitive data and take necessary action.

This modern solution is fully hosted on AWS, leveraging managed AWS services that are compliant to industry security and regulatory standards like PCI-DSS, HIPAA/HITECH, FedRAMP, GDPR, FIPS 140-2, and NIST 800-171, and more.

While AWS ensures compliance “of the cloud” per the Shared Responsibility Model, Apexon’s HDAP solution ensures the “in the cloud” portion follows security best practices, standards, and controls to meet compliance and regulatory requirements.

Extracting Value from Data

At the core of HDAP’s value proposition are its transformational advanced analytics and machine learning capabilities, which healthcare organizations leverage to build, train, and deploy powerful ML models.

The platform makes it easy for customers to implement machine learning operations and manage the complete life cycle of an ML model—from exploring data and model training to tuning hyperparameters, registering models, and more.

Additional services like Amazon QuickSight and Amazon Athena can be implemented for building dashboards and conducting analysis on top of the data.

Here are a few more ways HDAP can handle data:

• Integrates different types of data for multiple uses and users, such as billing data for administrators, patient diagnostics and treatments for physicians, adverse conditions/reactions for nurses, and data analysis for researchers.
• Captures complete patient medication histories and makes it easy to share with other providers and public health organizations to ensure safer and more effective care. This data can also be used for administering immunizations.
• Maps and validates critical patient care codes to ensure complete information is available for accurate patient care, tracking, and billing.
• Offers a data tagging engine which can provide added context and checkpoints to existing data. This enables better data visibility, verification, and application for prescription safety, clinical decisions, operational planning, and more.
• Standardizes healthcare classification codes [ICD, SNOMED], procedure codes [CPT], labs results code [LOINC], medication and drug codes [NDC], image-related codes [DICOM], and more to enable more intuitive care analysis and correlation. It also allows for comparative research with other countries.
• Mines clinical notes in unstructured formats like free text and presents it in a consumable format for easy analysis and insights.
• Maps and optimizes core data that may use different labels in different environments to make it more consumable, searchable, and actionable.

How Health Organizations Are Using Patient 360

Many leading healthcare organizations already leverage traditional datasets like claims, clinical data, and operational data. However, they frequently leave critical data on the table that can be important for patient-facing applications. This includes propensity to pay, social determinants of health, survey data, housing and transportation data, contact center data, appeals and grievances, and so on.

What makes the Patient 360 framework different is its ability to combine all of these datasets and unleash personalized patient-facing applications that are more robust and engaging.

Using this 360-degree view of the patient, healthcare providers gain an in-depth view of patients’ health history including medications, allergies, conditions, and treatment plans. Providers can even filter down to search for patients based on different criteria, opening an exciting array of applications to deliver improved health outcomes, precision healthcare, and medical adherence, as well as improved operational efficiency.

One such use case is for candidate selection in clinical trials. One of the most challenging aspects of clinical trials is ensuring patients’ participation from start to finish.

Typically, less than 40% of initial participants go on to complete a study in which they are enrolled. However, using the advanced analytical and machine learning capabilities of the HDAP platform, clinicians can understand which individuals are most likely to complete the study and select participants accordingly.

Additionally, healthcare organizations have used the Patient 360 framework to create models that reduce readmission, provider and payer forecasting, demand planning, and personalized care.

Solving Healthcare Problems with HDAP

Healthcare organizations require powerful platform and infrastructure capabilities to process high quantities of data efficiently, securely, and within the tight regulations governing the sector.

HDAP is a healthcare data unification tool structured to handle complex use cases related to healthcare. The platform is both highly configurable and customizable to factor in client-specific healthcare data needs and analytics.

Additionally, HDAP is available for organizations who want to get value out of their data and apply those insights to business effectiveness, process evolutions, and compliance procedures.

It also provides high degrees of automation for major API infrastructure configuration backed by service-level agreement (SLA) metrics, which helps customers easily handle sudden spikes or heavy traffic. Appropriate alerts are pre-configured to make customers aware of such spikes, and the solution is designed to automatically respond to sudden usage spikes through auto-scaling.

HDAP largely built using AWS serverless compute services, and it does not incur any significant upfront costs in its default state. Its simplicity, AI/ML sophistication, and serverless architecture provide customers with a pay-as-you-go model that’s cost effective without having to compromise on performance, scalability, reliability, and security.

Conclusion

Patient experience has become an increasingly important factor in determining health outcomes and impacting the success of many healthcare providers and life sciences organizations.

Apexon and AWS have collaborated to enable healthcare providers and life sciences organizations to reframe the way they engage with patients. Patient 360 powered by HDAP collects and unifies all of the diverse patient data points in the patient experience lifecycle and harnesses them to provide clear, actionable intelligence to improve patient outreach, health outcomes, and operational performance.

Apexon HDAP, built on AWS-managed components, acts as a data accelerator and enables users to harness healthcare data assets more effectively for diagnostic, exploratory, predictive, and prescriptive needs.

For further information, take a look at the Apexon fact sheet on humanizing patient care with HDAP-powered Patient 360. You can also learn more about HDAP on AWS Marketplace.

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Apexon is an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner that leverages technical expertise to ensure organizations take full advantage of AWS capabilities.

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