Innovating healthcare with solutions available in AWS Marketplace

Across the healthcare industry, providers want to connect physicians to patients and turn insights into outcomes. Healthcare providers can use cloud solutions to achieve this goal.

Ever-increasing amounts of healthcare data bring new challenges. Patient data is generated and stored in so many different systems, such as electronic health records (EHRs), patient monitoring systems, imaging modalities, and wearables, to name a few. The lack of interoperability between all these different datasets makes it difficult to connect information across the continuum of care. This data proliferation can bring also introduces security issues. As providers make their data more accessible, they can protect their data against external security threats.

Spurred by initiatives like CDC’s Data Modernization Initiative (DMI) to improve data access and sharing, the industry is moving towards one public health community. Cloud solutions will play a central role in this transformation, helping healthcare organizations address challenges of data proliferation and security.

In a recent webinar, Innovating healthcare through AWS Marketplace, industry leaders discuss how cloud solutions accelerate healthcare innovation. I’m Michael Leonard, the Global Lead for Healthcare in the AWS Partner Organization (APO), and I led this webinar. Industry experts from Southwestern Health Resources (SWHR), a community health network, and Arcadia, a population health management platform provider, joined me.

Southwestern Health Resources partners with Arcadia to improve population health

SWHR is a clinically integrated network of 31 hospital locations. The health network’s more than 7,000 physicians and clinicians care for almost 800,000 patients across North Texas.

In its mission to make healthcare more connected, accessible, and affordable, SWHR needed to integrate over 20 years of historical clinical data from hundreds of sources. These data sources include claims, admission, discharge, and transfer (ADT) data, risk adjustment data, quality care gaps data, and disparate EHR systems. “In all, it makes for a very complex data operation,” Shashi Vangala, chief data analytics and value creation officer for SWHR, emphasizes at the beginning of the webinar.

Arcadia’s role in bringing value-based care to SWHR patients

SWHR employs Arcadia, a population management health platform available in AWS Marketplace, to overcome its data integration challenges. Arcadia aggregates, integrates, and normalizes SWHR’s data at the patient level. From here, the data is ready for use in a variety of contexts, all supporting SWHR’s mission of value-based care.

One of these contexts is at the point of care. Arcadia delivers standardized data back to respective EHR systems to assist care providers in capturing missing information during patient visits. In this way, Arcadia fosters a continuous cycle of patient record enrichment.

SWHR also uses Arcadia as a platform to automate its key operational workflows in support of population health processes. For example, quality teams interact with the data stored in Arcadia to perform chart abstraction activities. Risk adjustment teams review coding accuracy.

Once SWHR further enriches the data in Arcadia through patient and operational team interactions, it’s ready for analytics. SWHR uses Arcadia’s out-of-the-box analytics as well as custom analytics that ingest data from Arcadia’s data warehouse. Arcadia’s analytics support allows SWHR to uncover insights that optimize workflows and build predictive models that identify at-risk populations.

Andrea Purjue, director of enterprise solutions for Arcadia and guest presenter for the discussion, sums it up: “Arcadia’s mission is to transform diverse data, and I think what we’re seeing here [SWHR’s use case] exemplifies that,” says Purjue.

SWHR sees positive impacts throughout its health network

Before SWHR adopted Arcadia’s population management health platform, the health network was grappling with cumbersome legacy processes. Through its Arcadia partnership, SWHR has drastically simplified and automated key operational workflows for both its provider organizations and operational teams. The insights surfaced by Arcadia’s platform have contributed not only to these newfound workflow efficiencies but also to improved provider and patient engagement as well.

Over the past 12 months, SWHR has doubled provider engagement due to the superior physician experience through the Arcadia platform. SWHR credits EHR system enhancements for reducing computer interactions and moving provider focus back to patient interactions. Timely insights at point of care also contribute to increased engagement.

As SWHR transforms into a data-driven culture with the help of Arcadia, its ability to move insights to action is accelerating. “We’re able to take the insights we’re gaining and push them back into the workflows for operational efficiencies,” explains Mac Marlow, chief information officer for SWHR and session guest presenter. “Predictive models help us stratify our patient populations and do a better job of truly engaging patients in a way that they’ve never been engaged before.”

Whether unifying patient data across EMRs, implementing healthcare analytics, or improving patient and caregiver experiences, AWS Marketplace provides partner solutions that healthcare organizations can use to transform their business.

What is AWS Marketplace?

AWS Marketplace is a curated digital catalog that makes it easy for customers to find, buy, deploy, and manage third-party software, services, and data. AWS Marketplace offers quick, easy, and secure deployment, flexible consumption and contract models, and streamlined procurement and billing operations. More than 330,000 organizations large and small use AWS Marketplace monthly to accelerate digital transformation and improve efficiencies across their enterprises.

Independent research from Forrester shows it takes around half the time to find, buy, and deploy a solution through AWS Marketplace compared to other sales channels.

Conclusion and next steps

In this post, I showed how healthcare organizations are using solutions available in AWS Marketplace to innovate. In particular, Southwestern Health Resources shared how it used solutions from Arcadia to double provider engagement and move the focus back to patient interactions. To learn more about healthcare solutions in AWS Marketplace, visit Healthcare solutions in AWS Marketplace. To learn more about the topics and solutions discussed in this blog post, watch Innovating healthcare through AWS Marketplace.

About the author

Michael Leonard is responsible for developing healthcare partnerships for the AWS Partner Organization and growing the AWS Marketplace and AWS Data Exchange healthcare vertical business. His previous role was as a Principal Product Manager on the AWS Storage Gateway team. Over the past 20 years, Michael has progressed through a variety of roles in business development, product management, and engineering at AWS, Commvault, Iron Mountain, Merge Healthcare, and GE Healthcare. He built and managed teams to develop healthcare IT solutions focused on medical imaging, EHR systems, hybrid cloud storage services, and data protection solutions.