There is a growing interest in sharing clinical algorithms on the part of medical institutions utilizing proven open marketplace models. The idea is to provide advanced analytic algorithms freely while charging provider delivery organizations for other related tools. Hospitals, surgical centers, home-health agencies, outpatient facilities, labs and urgent care centers do not have economical access to the best-in-class analytic engines without contracting with specialty vendors. Many of these provider groups have their own data scientists, researchers and clinicians mining and analyzing their vast amounts of healthcare information. However, developing and testing algorithms designed to improve quality, patient outcomes or administrative operations using this data is expensive and time consuming.
So what are these algorithms? Authored by some of the most advanced data and medical scientists in the world, they include clinical pathways, protocols, quality & safety measures and disease predictors – just to name a few. They are all evidence-based and offered by organizations such as the Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic and many other medical institutions globally. Technology providers in Big Data & Analytics have historically offered these tools and services to their provider customers. But now the medical centers themselves are offering to share, promote and sell their expertise and knowledge via a marketplace model such as those offered by Apervita or Teradata’s Aster Community. These are not simple formulas or canned reports. They are precision algorithms designed to produce the highest level of accuracy with the lowest level of false positives for clinical outcomes. With widespread use, peer review and outcome case studies by provider users; the best ones will naturally rise in popularity and quality ratings. Much of consumer selection of products and services are “review” based with recommendations and star type ratings available from relevant online sites. More of this transparency is coming to healthcare.
These “pre-packaged” insights are important to providers who are moving to value-based healthcare where delivering preemptive and predictive clinical decisions at the point of care is critical. By improving patient outcomes with fewer repeat visits and less trial and error, we believe this lowers the overall cost of healthcare for everyone. Many providers are not equipped to create and deliver an extensive portfolio of predictive or prescriptive models to improve population health. An open marketplace reduces or prevents vendor lock-in and by testing and validating the offered models with their own data, providers also make them better. It’s a continuous loop of discovery, testing and validation that is driven on data portability, self-service and open access. More importantly, this forces new valuation models for information assets on the part of these disparate providers and institutions. Through subscription fees on a trading platform, stakeholders create monetization opportunities to continue ongoing funding and investment of their own capabilities. As industry participants learn how to sell, trade or license their intellectual property, while providing much of it freely, they can help drive innovation in the healthcare sector where it is greatly needed.