Healthcare spending for heart failure and other chronic cardiovascular diseases may see a drop in the near future, thanks to the data-driven digital health solution developed by Boston Scientific and Accenture.
Besides reducing the cost for treating these patients, Advantics Care Pathway Transformation, as the solution developed by Boston Scientific and Accenture is called, will also improve outcomes in hospitals from all over the world. Using this cloud-based digital health platform, healthcare providers will be able to correlate data analytics with patient population health paterns, in order to make more informed decisions.
Advantics is based on Accenture’s analytics insights platform, and will focus on three important aspects:
- Pathway Analytics
- Care Management
- Patient Engagement
These refer primarily to how the patient is served through the hospital system, how long each step takes and how the entire process can be improved. The second measurement refers to how patients are diagnosed, treated and monitored, as well as what medical personnel was involved in this. The last aspect refers to educating, monitoring and communicating with patients during the hospitalization, as well as after discharge.
“Boston Scientific and Accenture designed this digital health platform to help providers standardize care, reduce overall length of stay and lower readmission rates,” explained Mike Mahoney, president and CEO, Boston Scientific. “The Care Pathway Transformation solution is designed to support healthcare professionals and patients to have more informed relationships, leading to better health outcomes and lower costs for health systems. Together, we are addressing an acute need for some of the most costly chronic conditions.”
To test the system, Boston Scientific and Accenture collaborated with Karolinska University Hospital in Sweden and Tampere Heart Hospital in Finland, two of the largest hospitals in Scandinavia. Since heart failure is one of the costliest diseases to manage, improving the way patients are managed will surely reduce the hospitalization costs.
“The collaboration with Boston Scientific and Accenture exposed significant opportunities to increase provider collaboration and improve the quality of care that patients experience when coming to our hospital,” explained Dr. Kari Niemelä, CEO of Tampere Heart Hospital. “For example, we identified a 25 percent unnecessary heart failure readmissions rate, and therefore a definite need for better care coordination, supported by modern technology and processes that can decrease overall costs.”
“Socio-economic changes are driving the market to move to value-based care, and new data-driven care transformation services are a great enabler of delivering high-quality healthcare at the right cost,” concluded Anne O’Riordan, senior managing director at Accenture Life Sciences. “Working together with Boston Scientific, we are able to bring to market digital capabilities and analytics-driven insights that focus on improving patient and economic outcomes.”
The Care Pathway Transformation digital health solution will first be available in hospitals from the UK and Scandinavia, but Boston Scientific and Accenture plan to extend this to the rest of Europe and the United States.
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