Enabling smart health care with a modern analytics architecture

Overview

Health care organizations around the world share a common problem—managing the surge in costs of care while supporting the health and the well-being of an increasing and aging population that is significantly impacted by lifestyle-related non-communicable diseases (NCDs). NCDs can range from heart disease, cancer, and diabetes, to mental health conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, and other chronic conditions.

Can managing NCDs be difficult? Traditionally, transactional relationships between stakeholders, competing incentives, and limited insights into underlying patterns of patient behavior made it an arduous task. With the growth in personalized medicine, smart connected devices, advanced analytics, and accurate master data delivered through cloud-based platforms, health care leaders see a new era. Together, these capabilities have created an environment for a modern analytics architecture that promotes a more sustained, collaborative payer-provider-consumer relationship and addresses the universal challenge of improving health care access, value, and effectiveness. Such an architecture can give rise to smart health care community networks that can radically transform the delivery of population and individual care—by generating better insights into their population segments, identifying the most effective evidence-based treatments, monitoring outcomes in real-time, and anticipating future health care needs.

This article outlines the impact of NCDs on global health and reviews consumers' evolving health care needs in an increasingly complex and connected world. It discusses the components of a modern analytics architecture to support smart health care communities and proposes a path forward to engage stakeholders in a collaborative effort to treat NCDs and related complications.