Icreon transformed 2700+ leading hospitals and health systems with its healthcare analytics platform.
The Advisory Board Company (ABC), a healthcare research and consulting firm, wanted to improve their Crimson Medical Group Advantage enterprise software platform. The platform combines data systems in a healthcare organization to provide visibility across all areas of medical performance, through easy-to-read dashboards. With this platform, administrators and physicians can quickly move from problem diagnosis to strategically implementing effective and sustainable change.
For the software platform to be successful ABC needed to provide a 360-degree view of the patient experience. Unfortunately, scaling data analytics in the healthcare industry is among the toughest, due to highly complex applications, data privacy, and stringent licensing and regulations. Icreon was brought in to help solve this complex problem and build a scalable digital product. Combining the expertise of Icreon developers, researchers, and analysts with leading technology and an expansive data sphere, Icreon helped ABC build a distinct database-driven solution allowing ABC clients to gain better insight and compare physician, clinic, and hospital performance.
The Advisory Board Company was serving a huge network of hospitals, health systems, and universities to provide services including research, executive education, development, and consulting. The Advisory Board was experiencing rapid growth in the number of hospitals using its products, and company leadership wanted to make sure it could develop new features quickly and ensure their accuracy and quality. They also wanted to upgrade their technology stack to be compatible with their current product.
The Advisory Board company acquired Crimson Continuum Care based on its industry-leading analytics capabilities across hospitals and systems. With the heavyweight acquisition, the client was looking for a way to streamline its physician-management system.
Through collaboration with Crimson, the Advisory Board needed to work on enhancing its capabilities with features that could quickly tell which hospitals were underperforming and how specific physicians were performing when compared against their peers on the basis of following metrics like patient satisfaction scores, treatment outcomes, adherence to protocols and guidelines, patient volume, mortality rate, etc. The use case required comparing a doctor's metrics to industry standards and benchmark data to analyze underperforming ones. In addition, the software would determine what percentage of revenues each hospital's physician management program generated from highly profitable physicians (i.e., those who generated more revenue than they spent).
Hospital executives use the physician management system to analyze the productivity and profitability of their physicians, which helps them determine which doctors are underperforming or expensive and how they can improve their performance. Because this system was so important to hospitals' bottom lines, it's critical that The Advisory Board deliver it quickly and with high-quality features.
Icreon deployed a team of highly professional developers at the client site to support them build a custom solution for The Advisory Board's needs. A private cloud-based platform that allows them to analyze their data in real-time, gain insights about how physicians are performing compared to other physicians within the hospital system and use these insights to
make decisions about hiring and retaining physicians who are improving patient outcomes. The other important part of the application was Crimson Market Advantage that helps hospital networks with analytics, business development guidance and implementation to keep with the demand of efficient healthcare delivery, regulatory compliance, patient satisfaction in the healthcare industry.
Working with the client, the team realized several things – the healthcare technology market is highly complex & fragmented. It is mainly because of many factors like the involvement of multiple stakeholders (pharma companies, insurance providers, healthcare providers, Govt.), different payment models, strict regulations, inefficient information exchange from siloed patient data, etc.
There are a number of laws and regulations regulating healthcare that vary from country to country, from state to state, and even within the same organization. Care coordination can be challenging due to the diverse payment models for healthcare services in various regions and insurance types. In addition, quality of care varies greatly by location and healthcare provider, making it difficult for patients to access consistently high-quality care.
Due to the lack of standard, interoperable electronic health record systems, data is fragmented and siloed, making it challenging for healthcare providers to get an accurate picture of patients. As a result, the healthcare market is complex and fragmented, making it difficult for patients and providers to navigate. It also impacts patient care quality and cost.
To solve these biggest challenges, Icreon worked with the leadership team to understand different ways they could analyze patient records for doctors and administrators. This led to defining multiple, distinct database-driven products that could be used in tandem to help physicians better care for patients.
Ultimately, Icreon was able to produce multiple custom software technologies that will allow them to gain better insight into physician performance and cost of care outcomes. The data, analytics and business intelligence tools leveraged the latest .NET technology with combined skills in application scalability, distributed architecture, authentication, and performance to create some of the most sophisticated health-related technology on the planet.
Icreon collected data about the applications, systems, infrastructure, and users before building physician management system. It included basic information, such as hardware/software models, as well as more complex information like what applications are running on each device or how they are configured.
Icreon worked with the Advisory Board to define their strategy, aligning it with their business goals and objectives. This process included market research, competitor analysis, and a detailed audit of the Advisory Board’s current digital presence.
Using the latest in .NET MVC technology, Icreon engaged in building sophisticated health-related technology by combining expertise in app scalability, distributed architecture, authentication, and performance. We used Data Visualization Techniques for graphical representation of different metrics - for an efficient, interactive and visual UX.
Icreon helped the company with CI/CD pipeline implementation using Jenkins and Bamboo tools so that new features could be developed quickly and efficiently. The Icreon team geared up to upgrade the technology stack of the products into a new one that would support in navigating the complex business challenges.
The Advisory Board and Crimson was able to quickly identify which hospitals were most successful with their physician management programs, which hospitals were underperforming relative to others in their region, and which specific physicians were performing well or poorly when compared against their peers. Additionally, they were able to see how much revenue each hospital's physician management program was generating as well as what percentage of those revenues were coming from highly profitable doctors (i.e., those who generated more revenue than it cost them). This information gave them insight into what worked best across different types of hospitals.
Because the Icreon team was staffed with experts who were familiar with the specific needs of this sector, Icreon was able to create a solution that was not only effective for The Advisory Board but also delivered on time. Icreon was able to deliver a solution that met all of the company's criteria: it had to be quick and easy to implement, feature-rich, compatible with their existing hardware and software, and allow them complete control over how they used it.
With this new system in place, The Advisory Board has made more informed decisions about their physicians' performance. With better data at hand, they can now identify underperforming doctors more quickly and offer them training or other resources to improve their performance. This allows them to invest their resources more effectively so that they can continue providing quality care for patients without affecting any other parts of their business.
