Healthcare: Why Integrated Care Systems Need to Focus on AI and not BI

Change is happening fast across the NHS with the focus squarely on harnessing the huge amount of data the NHS generates —  to drive forward the transformation programmes needed to address the backlog for elective care and growing demands for services.

As Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) in England officially launch, we take a look at the key opportunities presented to ICS regions to harness cutting-edge modern and integrated analytical frameworks to accelerate the attainment of operating efficiencies, the modernisation of care pathways, and the improvement of patient outcomes.  

Transforming the Workforce

Staff are both the NHS’s greatest asset and its greatest vulnerability. This is being particularly felt by trusts as the high volume of nursing staff vacancies impacts operational delivery and patient care.  As ICSs develop plans to deliver around 30% more elective activity by 2024-2025 than before the pandemic, the need to retain clinical staff is paramount.  NHS organisations are used to using workforce KPIs to manage staffing levels, but the real opportunity is being able to identify staff that are at risk of leaving post and to implement strategies to retain their much needed talent.

Snowflake provides a state-of the-art data platform for collating and analysing workforce data, and with the combined addition of DataRobot Solution Accelerator models, trusts can have predictive models running with little experimentation — further accelerated by the wide range of supportive datasets available through the  Snowflake Marketplace.

  Responding to COVID-19 as it mutates and continues to impact society

The pandemic has affected all of our lives and those of our families and communities. The rapid creation and subsequent evolution of regional dataflows and analysis was a cornerstone of the UK’s COVID-19 response and action plan and the recently published Data Saves Lives policy paper sets out the UK Government’s plan for data-driven healthcare reform.

DataRobot and Snowflake have been at the heart of the pandemic response across the globe  including supporting NHS trusts and ICSs build predictive solutions, building and sharing COVID-19 datasets, partnering with US states to responding and preparing for future disease outbreaks, and driving the distribution of 20% of the US’s vaccine rollout.

Tackling the elective backlog

Ensuring that patients waiting for elective operations are prioritised and treated is the top concern for the NHS, and research predicts that the number of people waiting for treatment will reach 7 million by 2025.

Through the integration of Snowflake and DataRobot, ICSs can rapidly build solutions to not only risk-assess all patients waiting for treatment but also harness geospatial predictive capabilities to model which citizens are likely to require intervention in the future to enable pre-admission intervention. This exact approach is being taken by Greater Manchester Health and Social Care Partnership who have built a Snowflake ICS data platform and are also building and deploying DataRobot models to identify risk and to suggest prioritisation order of patients waiting for treatment across the region.

Resetting urgent care performance and delivery

The way the NHS measures urgent care performance is evolving and the change is welcome as the 4-hour standard is a crude method of measurement with patients waiting for increasingly long lengths of time (during March 2022 27% of all patients (in England) requiring emergency admission waited for over 4-hours from decision to admission). Accurately forecasting non-elective demand is a necessity for ICSs and acute trusts, but this task is complicated by the pandemic and the data disruption that ensued.

DataRobot’s Automated Time Series forecasting capability gives ICSs the ability to generate highly accurate hour-by-hour forecasts and to augment historically acute data with environmental datasets from the Snowflake Marketplace that are proven to have predictive value — including weather forecasting, public holidays, etc. 

Enabling population health management and reducing health inequalities

Population health management is regarded as the essential approach to sustainable healthcare delivery and is a core strategic aim for ICSs.

People are living longer but with an increased burden of disease and mental health disorder, however much of this could be preventable if health systems are able to transition from being reactive to proactive. Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) are proven to impact on a citizen’s life, and quality of life, expectancy and ICSs have a unique opportunity to either build or ingest (from the Snowflake marketplace) and share datasets that will add predictive value including data relating to citizen housing, employment and education.

Health systems around the globe are already doing exactly this, and they are sharing datasets through Snowflake and deploying DataRobot models that are predicting with accuracy citizen and community disease propensity. The step for ICSs is to  both understand the health and care needs of their populations and implement actions to take preemptive action, and there is a growing body of evidence that this is eminently achievable through the correct data-driven approach.

Improving patient outcomes through a data-first approach

Whether it is harnessing the power of automated machine learning to better identify patients at-risk of readmission, predicting hospital acquired conditions, or looking to improve patient outcomes through operating theatre data – DataRobot:Snowflake integration gives trusts revolutionary power to derive deep insight into patient condition, deterioration and outcomes.

Through the Snowflake Data Cloud and DataRobot AI Platform and by adopting a partnership approach, ICSs and NHS organisations are able to leverage our experience of the types of data that give the best predictive output, and to then harness them so that they deliver accurate, and decision-ready predictions.

Action to Take

• Learn more about the Snowflake and DataRobot partnership.
• Register for the HETT Show on 27-28 September in London where DataRobot and Snowflake will have a joint stand. Book an appointment to talk to the team and see a live demonstration of both platforms.
• Watch for more healthcare blogs to stay up to date on how DataRobot and Snowflake enable rapid, secure, scalable, and integrated health and care transformation.

About the author

Rob O'Neill

Healthcare Field CTO, DataRobot

Rob O’Neill has twenty years’ experience in the healthcare industry and has a passion for the harnessing of data to drive health service transformation and improve patient outcomes. Prior to joining DataRobot as Field CTO for Healthcare, Rob led the delivery of data science and analytics for an integrated healthcare provider and system in the UK. Rob has worked in analytical leadership roles within a variety of healthcare providers within the UK’s National Health Service.

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Benjamin Tucker

UK&I Regional Director for Government, Education, NHS

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