Utilizing Your Data to Provide Personalized Healthcare with Snowflake’s Data Marketplace
with Milissa Campbell, Health Plan & Life Sciences Consulting Lead at NTT DATA
Milissa leads the Health Plan / Life Sciences Consulting practice at NTT DATA. She brings more than 25 years of Health Industry experience, both in payer and provider environments, with 10 of those years in industry consulting. She specializes in leveraging her extensive operations experience to develop analytics strategies and programs that deliver meaningful and actionable outcomes and value. Her passion for data-driven personalized health care delivered to the right people, in the right way, and at the right time serves as a guidepost for her work with healthcare organizations.
What is Personalized Healthcare?
The approach to personalized healthcare and personalization has many strengths and weaknesses, and we have a variety of approaches to combat those weaknesses. In this blog post, we’ll be forming a common definition of personalized healthcare through a framework that Milissa and her team have assessed in healthcare organizations and their personalization strategies.
The first thing most people want to know about their organizations is “What are my competitors doing?” While we all want to be one step ahead of the competition, your competition is every individual’s digital and consumer experience — not just their healthcare experience. Retailers like Amazon, have set such a high bar for the digital experience and personalization that the expectations in every industry have quickly risen to incredible heights.
“Personalized healthcare is the right message, or care, to the right person or persons, via the right channel, or modality, at the right time.”
— Milissa Campbell
The RIGHT Way
So how exactly do you provide the “Amazon experience” when it comes to healthcare? Personalized healthcare requires sending the right message and/or care to the right people in whatever way is best received by those individuals.
- The right message: The right message is individually determined to be optimized for that person to include outcomes or quality of life. It anticipates a need and/or answers a question before it’s asked.
- The right persons: The health ecosystem has a lot of roles, patients, members, providers, caregivers, spouses, and guardians. All of those roles have within them personas that are defined by the behavior and the way that they interact with healthcare. The right person or persons has an unmet need, whether they know it or don’t, that the messaging or care will address or assist with addressing.
- The right channel: This is where data becomes the real power tool in your toolbox — using analytics-driven identification of the channels and messaging that’s most likely to drive the desired behavior.
- The right time: The right message is anticipating a need or behavior change and driving action toward changing that or mitigating an undesired behavior or change.
Framework
We can assess a healthcare organization’s personalization maturity based on the definitions that exist within the framework we use. The maturity of your personalization strategy and program is dependent on two primary things: your analytics maturity (how you curate, ingest, and use your data) and your operational maturity (how you act on the output from those analytics).
- Passive personalization — This is the same as no personalization. Passive personalization consists of some people getting the same message in the same way. Think about a commercial, website, or poster. A tangible example in healthcare might be a poster in a doctor’s office reminding you about the importance of getting a mammogram. It’s a great message and reminder, but not everyone who needs to see it will see it, and it might not be compelling enough to drive any behavior.
- Generic Personalization — All people get the same message delivered to them at the same time in the same way, or it could be certain people getting the same message at the same time in the same way. This could be a mass email that goes to all clients, or even all female clients, between the ages of 40 to 64, reminding them to schedule their annual mammogram. While we’re narrowing down the audience for the intended message to a targeted list, the timing would also be important for each individual’s annual appointment. How many patients are scheduling an appointment 6 or 7 months in advance? It’s important to deliver this message at the right time, such as 30–60 days out from when the patient is due for their annual mammogram, in order to ensure the patient’s appointment aligns with their timeline.
- Targeted Personalization — Certain people get the same message delivered at different times in the same way. Targeted personalization is a little more specific than generic personalization. In the mammogram example, it could be the same mass email that is delivered to individuals on their birthday every year.
- Customized Personalization — Certain people will get a customized message delivered to them at a determined time in the same way. What this means is that women who are aged 40–64 (who have not had a double mastectomy), determined to be at risk of not having their mammogram, and have not had a screening within the last 2 years will receive an email reminding them of the importance of completing their annual screening.
- Personalized Care — Certain people get a customized message delivered to them through the channels that are most likely to be received and acted upon by the individuals. In our example, women aged 40–64 and men at risk for breast tissue cancer, who have not had a mammogram in a time period appropriate for their risk factors will receive outreach through means that are appropriate for the individual and are provided easy-to-use scheduling capabilities.
“When I look across the healthcare clients that I’ve worked with, most healthcare clients are falling in this area between high generic and low customize. That’s really where the dense population of healthcare organizations are sitting in their maturity, striving for that highly customized or personalized approach.”
— Milissa Campbell
Setting up the appointment is just the first step to driving the desired outcomes. After you have that appointment scheduled, you just rinse and repeat. After scheduling the appointment, go back to your analytics, figure out what behaviors you need to be driving to keep patients booking appointments, and proceed with follow-up care.
This is the framework that Milissa and her team use when they go into a healthcare organization — they talk to stakeholders, look at what they’re doing, and help them figure out where they are today, where they want to be tomorrow, and then, they can put together a map of how to get there.
What ingredient is key to success?
That’s pretty simple — data is the key (which shouldn’t be too surprising). But what data should healthcare organizations be using? The answer is “any data you can get your hands on.”
The way that all of us interact with our healthcare is not only dependent on the CPT codes in our medical records and the inpatient stay that we’ve had. It’s a function of our socioeconomic status, our education, our support system, and our experiences with the healthcare system.
Our healthcare behavior and experience are multifaceted — therefore, your data should be, too. Instead of asking limited questions of a narrow data set, use vast, broad datasets and let the data tell you what is important, predictive, and actionable.
So what do I do once I have these datasets?
You’re not the only person asking this question — there are plenty of organizations have the datasets but struggle with how to get started and what to do with them.
This is where the Snowflake Data Marketplace enters the picture to fill a need that many organizations have. More than 200 commercial and open datasets across 16 domains are seamlessly integrated into your data. It’s not only about having access to all that data, it’s about the ability to get to it quickly, have it be usable, and have your analysts and business users start delivering insights and designing interventions.
We’re all trying to tackle the social determinant of health problems, and we all know that data is the key to making that work. Data helps us understand it and address social determinants of health. Within the data marketplace, you have access to data covering all of the domains of social determinants of health and beyond.
Embrace change for what lies ahead
As you go on our journey and leverage the Snowflake Data Marketplace, let your analytics and your business teams start looking in the marketplace, start looking at your data samples, and work collectively and creatively to come up with the analytic strategies in order to address the questions that you’re trying to get answered.
Start with your analytics and business owners, and ask if personalization is a key part of your strategy. Obviously, the answer should be a resounding “yes.” If it is, then the right stakeholders are at the table looking at the data and putting together strategies to solve this.
Remember, it’s not “only” your IT people, it’s not “only” your analytics people. Bringing creative groups together to design experiences and creatively think about what data to throw at a problem is the way that you are going to make a change in personalized healthcare.
“Remember, your output is only as good as the questions you ask and the data you throw at it.”
— Milissa Campbell
Additional Resources
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