Health, Not Just Healthcare: A Data-driven Approach

Our current health system in the United States operates in a silo model that is plagued by broken feedback loops that lead to misaligned incentives between payers, providers, managed care organizations, and social service agencies. A dearth of communication and interoperability between systems contributes to uncontrolled costs and missed opportunities to improve operational efficiency. Furthermore, the most vulnerably patients - individuals who experience adverse social determinants of health in addition to medical and/or behavioral challenges – are often excluded or made worse by the system’s inability to coordinate care across social and medical domains. With a universe of data at our fingertips, we can and must find creative solutions to these problems. By bringing together social and medical data, we can see a more global view of the healthcare system – more specifically, where it’s working and failing. By linking social and medical utilization data from the whole ecosystem of care, we quickly see overlaps in care, avoidable redundancies in services used, and unmet needs on a population level. We integrate these insights into a comprehensive health management system that supports shared care plans between social and medical agencies, providing a holistic view of patient needs through real-time dashboards. While we have a long way to go to fix our healthcare system, we have the data to help move us towards a more equitable solution, where healthcare can be affordable and accessible to all in our communities.