Experian Health is a key player. It knows people and the data science and analytics that go beyond someone’s clinical diagnoses or health status. Experian Health is crunching data for approximately 11,000 healthcare organizations representing 500,000+ providers and covering almost 60% of the entire U.S. healthcare market.
To learn more, we conducted an interview with Victoria Dames, Senior Director of Product Management at Experian Health.
1. Tell us about Experian Health.
Experian Health works with more than 3,400 hospitals and 7,300 other healthcare organizations to provide data-driven platforms and insights that help in making smarter business decisions and fostering stronger patient relationships and, ultimately, better patient outcomes. Our products and services cast a wide net across healthcare, from helping streamline patient access and patient identity, boosting the bottom line though revenue cycle management, and levering data to help better understand patients and improve their experiences with the healthcare system.
2. How is Experian Health helping the industry tackle the COVID-19 pandemic and lessen some of the stressors placed on healthcare as it works to emerge from this unprecedented moment in time?
Right now, we are treating “re-opening” as a global problem and putting our best minds against this challenge to help the public, small businesses, healthcare organizations, governments and nonprofit organizations. We developed an interactive heat map of geographic populations most susceptible, or at risk, for contracting COVID19. Called CORE, for COVID Outlook & Response Evaluator, the map models risk with data from Experian Health, Experian Targeting, and publicly available data. The data and models fall into three categories: health indicators defined by pre-existing conditions per guidance by the CDC such as chronic lung
3. How is the heat map helping?
One way is by peeling back some of the hidden layers on high-risk geographic populations based on individuals’ pre-existing medical conditions, demographic, and socio-economic traits, to predict impact on communities, healthcare organizations and help identify the services and organizations those populations might need. It is a risk modeling tool that government, nonprofits and healthcare organizations can use to inform communication and outreach strategies aimed at high-risk populations. It can help align various healthcare, community, and government programs and can even assist in the decision making around allocation of CARES stimulus funds.
4. What are some challenges facing healthcare in post-pandemic America that are not top of mind or grabbing lots of attention?
As the economy emerges from the pandemic, we are going to see a changed healthcare landscape that is nothing less than stunning. For example, approximately 78 million initial jobless claims were filed during the pandemic – that is nearly half of the country’s workforce, and we lost more than 10 million jobs. The resulting changes create new barriers for patients accessing healthcare and identifying them accurately when they do. Their health insurance plans might have changed or been lost entirely. They might have lost the inclination to seek care due to new financial constraints or other barriers. Patient needs have and will continue to change as they contend with long-haul conditions and learn to manage the
5. Where should the focus be for healthcare as we emerge from the pandemic?
On the positive side, we have a pretty clear picture of what the road ahead looks like. There are three key areas of focus that will help better navigate through this:
Invest in tech. Challenging times challenge us to innovate. Telehealth is one area that shows immense promise and we have seen patients get comfortable with it during the pandemic. Going to a website can be far easier than making an office appointment. Relegating certain diagnostics to remote engagement can be more cost-efficient. Integrating that data across touchpoints is important, as is exploring ways to make telemedicine available and attractive to vulnerable populations.
Integrate with community programs. Engagement and resulting data from interactions beyond the four walls of the clinic can be crucial to better health outcomes. Technologies exist to link to food banks, shelters, counseling services and community programs, so you can learn more about patients. Just as important, you can innovate your own activities, like shuttle services, to augment patients’ healthcare experiences.
Streamline the data load. About 12% of demographic data become outdated within a year due to such facts as 70% of married women change their names. A third of that data are misspelled, incomplete, or incorrect. The challenges of consistent and reliable patient identifiers are nothing new but take on new currency when the challenges dependent on the data increase and become more complex. Today’s solution helps preclude tomorrow’s problem.
6. What might healthcare look like on the other side of the changes hastened by COVID-19?
The pandemic served as a much-needed catalyst for digital transformation. Ideally, we emerge with a transformed network of patient information, enabling an integrated, interoperable healthcare ecosystem. Healthcare’s digital transformation begins and ends with accurate and holistic patient identities. This starts with consistently and correctly linking disparate clinical and non-clinical data across silos to generate the single best, most accurate patient record. It is the only way to know who a patient is before they show up – to gain insights into who they are and leverage that into.
About Victoria Dames
For the almost 20 years, Victoria Dames has focused on building technical solutions across credit, marketing and healthcare industries. As a Senior Director of Product Management at Experian Health, she is responsible for evolving products within healthcare around fraud and identity management. Dames grew up in Chicago, IL and holds a Master of Science in Business Information Technology from DePaul University and Bachelors in Computer Science from Loyola University Chicago.
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