The Challenge of AI and Machine Learning in Healthcare Innovation

The 1990 classic action film The Hunt for Red October provides a lot of great scenes and one liners. One, in particular, has always stuck with me: the moment when Connery’s character, Russian Submarine Captain Marko Ramius, directs his crew into a narrow passage on the ocean floor and they clearly think he is insane. The film cuts between different clips of the crew members becoming more and more nervous. Ramius gives precise instructions and navigates them through troubled waters. The solution was relatively simple: know your environment, trust your instruments, and align the organization.

What does that have to do with healthcare and data? 

Knowing your environment: Like Captain Ramius and his sub, the healthcare system has a multitude of moving parts, different departments, and despite what they say; not everyone shares the same agenda or vision. There are hospitals, private practices, insurers, medical equipment companies, software vendors, and the list of actors and systems goes on. With innovation technology and advancement in standards of care, each segment becomes more complex. Vast quantities of data are produced every day, while relying on outdated methods to share it.

Don’t believe me?

TigerConnect found in a recent study that 90% of the healthcare industry still relies on fax machines. That translates to roughly 14 million healthcare records faxed in a month! Meanwhile, another 39% of the industry is still using pagers.

Trust your instruments: The Obama administration spent over $30 billion encouraging hospitals and private practices to digitize health records. The program was a wild success, increasing the number of hospitals using electronic records from 9% in 2008 to 83% in 2015.

And yet, in 2020, there are still millions of faxes sent every month. Those numbers have probably tripled these past few months—thanks coronavirus! Every fax tears down and amplifies the challenges of healthcare data. Worse yet, this process is a loophole and puts patient data at risk.

Align the organization: Vendors in the Electronic Healthcare (or Medical) Record (EHR) industry only make things worse. Sharing data can eliminate their businesses or quickly commodify them, because hospitals will have less reason to convert to a different EHR.  With patient data locked away in proprietary software and data formats, these vendors maintain their competitive edge. Yet, the hospital and patients have no control over their own information. Despite healthcare innovation, individual records remain locked deep inside software vendor vaults. 

This is where Inonde comes in.

Inonde is French for ‘flooded’ and in the wake of COVID-19, if the industry was not already, it has quickly become flooded with data. The difference is a lot of this data is from outside our country, from hospitals not in our network, from systems that don’t integrate with ours, and in formats we are not familiar with. There is a lot of unstructured data in the form of text messages, emails, pdf files, word documents, and paper records.

Inonde has developed a novel way to empower healthcare workers to use that data and integrate the different types without the heavy lift of IT or the cost associated with bringing in an engineering team. It is a way for the medical community at large to leverage data without having to write some computer code or scripting. It is a way for anyone to break down those piles of EHR content, of any data, and merge it into something meaningful. 

We also offer a simple and intuitive way for anyone to digitize faxes and paper records. Our approach reduces IT costs, increases referral fees for providers, and results in higher patient satisfaction. How are we doing this?

• Supporting Clinical Trials. During the COVID-19 crisis, Inonde is actively engaging with the medical community to integrate and normalize massive amounts of clinical trial data. This will simplify data processes so the medical community can share and reuse its data. The data sets are cleaner and can produce more accurate analytics.

• Mapping supply chain shortages. Inonde is currently working with several start-ups to identify treatment facilities and track necessary hospital equipment. Our software can merge the data from multiple proprietary systems in real-time. This enables us to track the location and quantity of necessary resources.

• Reducing IT costs. Recently, a hospital we worked with acquired several small practices, and all of them were using different EHR systems. Inonde was able to unite the data from these systems without coding or scripting. This enabled medical staff to focus on their jobs without unnecessary IT costs or software vendor fees.

• Trends and Business Planning. After reducing IT costs and integrating EHR data, our hospital client was able to apply analytics to a much larger corpus of data. This let them identify trends and potential services to offer clients, increasing their revenue as a result.

In The Hunt for Red October, Sean Connery’s solution was simple: know your environment, trust your instruments, and align the organization. If you are in the healthcare community and want to move forward with confidence, let Inonde break down the barriers between the EHR systems. Let Inonde provide a simple way to know your environment, trust your data, and align it, regardless of the source or format.

 Are you ready to take control of your healthcare data?