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    Making Data Simple

    Data Empowerment Unleashed: The Making Data Simple Podcast with Carolyn Ward

    Wed Jul 12 2023
    Healthcare DataInteroperabilityPatient RecordsAPIData SharingPhysician Burnout

    Description

    The episode discusses the importance of comprehensive healthcare data and the challenges in accessing and sharing patient information. Particle Health offers a solution through their API, allowing physicians to access consolidated patient records from different EMRs. The company aims to expand data sources and provide actionable insights for individual health outcomes. The role of AI in healthcare and the issue of physician burnout are also explored.

    Insights

    Comprehensive data empowers informed decisions

    Having access to comprehensive data about an individual's lifetime can empower both physicians and patients to make informed decisions.

    Data fragmentation hinders tailored healthcare

    Data fragmentation in the healthcare system hinders progress in tailoring prescriptions and diagnoses based on individual needs.

    Particle Health's API enables interoperability

    Particle Health provides an API that allows querying for patient information across national networks and consolidating it into one longitudinal history.

    Expanding data sources for actionable insights

    Additional data sources being considered include laboratory data, pharmacy fill data, claims data, genetic data, social determinants of health data, and wearable data.

    AI can help extract insights from patient data

    AI can be used for diagnostic capture, note-taking, and automating routine healthcare tasks, helping physicians discover insights they couldn't find themselves.

    Chapters

    1. Introduction
    2. The Power of Comprehensive Data
    3. Challenges in Healthcare Data
    4. Particle Health's Solution
    5. Data Sharing and Privacy
    6. Expanding Data Sources and Insights
    7. The Role of AI and Physician Burnout
    Summary
    Transcript

    Introduction

    00:03 - 07:22

    • Carolyn Ward is an internal medicine physician with eight years of experience in healthcare.
    • She is the director of clinical strategy at Particle Health, responsible for developing the clinical product roadmap and ensuring providers and patients are represented throughout the research and development process.
    • Carolyn envisions using aggregated lifetime data to provide personalized healthcare recommendations based on individual characteristics.

    The Power of Comprehensive Data

    06:57 - 13:58

    • Healthcare data can be used to create a digital twin of an individual, allowing for simulations and modeling to predict health outcomes.
    • Additional data beyond traditional healthcare data, such as where someone lives and their lifestyle habits, can greatly impact their health.
    • Having access to comprehensive data about an individual's lifetime can empower both physicians and patients to make informed decisions.
    • Determining the optimal amount of certain behaviors, like coffee consumption, requires understanding individual barriers and goals.

    Challenges in Healthcare Data

    13:35 - 20:44

    • Data fragmentation in the healthcare system hinders progress in tailoring prescriptions and diagnoses based on individual needs.
    • The way information is captured in healthcare is influenced by reimbursement structures, which can limit the usefulness of patient records.
    • Interoperability challenges between different healthcare systems hinder the sharing and aggregation of patient data.
    • There may be financial motivations for drug manufacturers to prioritize mass production over personalized medicine.
    • Physicians face challenges in accessing and navigating patient health records, leading to frustration and limited information capture.

    Particle Health's Solution

    20:25 - 27:41

    • Particle Health aims to solve the problem of clinical EMR data interoperability.
    • They provide an API that allows querying for patient information across national networks and consolidating it into one longitudinal history.
    • Physicians can access comprehensive patient records from different EMRs without the need for patients to fill out extensive forms during visits.
    • Particle Health deduplicates and combines the data from multiple EMRs, which can be ingested into customers' systems for clinical use or higher-level panel management.
    • Their service becomes especially important for smaller organizations or digital health providers who don't have access to a large network like Epic.

    Data Sharing and Privacy

    27:27 - 34:36

    • Epic is incentivized to capture as much of the market as possible.
    • Interoperability should extend to other data sets like wearable data and food information.
    • Particle Health sells predominantly to providers and customers with a direct treatment relationship.
    • They charge per query based on usage through their API.
    • Particle's customer enablement team ensures compliance with regulations and protects patient privacy.
    • Customers must fill out a questionnaire to get approval from national networks for querying data.
    • Permission comes from the network, not Epic, and the data goes directly into an EMR at the provider.

    Expanding Data Sources and Insights

    34:08 - 41:00

    • Health insurance companies cannot directly query patient data unless they have a treatment relationship with the patient.
    • The company's main technology is the ability to search networks and find the correct person's data.
    • There are checks and balances in place from the networks to ensure accurate information sharing.
    • The company aims to track patients' data generation across different sources and provide a complete set of data.
    • Improving navigation around networks and mapping clinical concepts together can help display relevant information to clinicians at the right time.
    • Some EMRs integrate wearable data, but there are concerns about completeness and potential data loss.
    • Additional data sources being considered include laboratory data, pharmacy fill data, claims data, genetic data, social determinants of health data, and wearable data.
    • Mapping out factors like food deserts, transportation deserts, and healthcare access deserts can provide insights into their impact on health.
    • The goal is to make generated health data usable for actionable insights that affect individual health outcomes.

    The Role of AI and Physician Burnout

    40:38 - 47:02

    • Wearable data can provide insights when combined with clinical EMR data.
    • Current EMR systems make it difficult to extract insights from patient data.
    • Physician shortage in the US makes it challenging to scale the abstraction process of reading EMR charts.
    • AI can be used for diagnostic capture, note-taking, and automating routine healthcare tasks.
    • AI should help physicians discover insights they couldn't find themselves.
    • Particle Health is a startup based in Southern Orange County, California.
    • Physician burnout is caused by the impersonal nature of practicing medicine with computers.
    • Medicine today involves spending a significant amount of time in front of a computer screen, leading to disconnection and burnout among physicians.
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