What is a health data platform, and why does it matter?
Data-driven decision-making lies at the heart of XUND and every step we take toward making digital healthcare more accessible. With our technology, we empower healthcare providers to build health data platforms of their own.
In this insight, we introduce health data platforms as an innovative, evidence-based solution to the challenges of modern-day systems. We dive into how integrating artificial intelligence (AI) services can enable data-driven healthcare decision-making, how XUND empowers its customers to build the health data platforms of tomorrow, and more.
The need for data-driven healthcare
Despite countless breakthroughs, modern-day healthcare research and development (R&D) tends to follow a "one size fits all" approach to patient treatment and diagnosis. Healthcare providers are thus unable to predict healthcare outcomes sustainably as their predictions are based on outdated preclinical models.
The need for data-driven healthcare has never been more evident. However, the lack of reliable, long-term data is one of the main reasons for these challenges. Data management and sharing issues in healthcare slow down medical treatments at the expense of patients.
In addition, fear of misuse causes patients to hesitate to share private healthcare information with digital healthcare providers. However, these electronic health records are crucial to uncovering patterns in human pathology and their evolution over time — ultimately taking healthcare to the next level.
What is a health data platform?
A healthcare database is a system of electronic records where your healthcare provider inputs your clinical and medical data. A health data platform takes things one step further: It transforms electronic healthcare data into long-term, actionable insights. Health data platforms use different clinical data sources to build comprehensive health profiles for individuals. They aggregate this data across populations for new findings that are analyzed for long-term trends.
A health data platform might include:
- electronic health records (such as laboratory tests)
- payments to pharmacies and insurance companies
- results of any clinical research you might have taken part in
- data from wearable devices, such as smartwatches and fitness trackers
- Google searches for symptoms and illnesses
An example of a health data platform is Propeller Health, which monitors data from asthma patients and provides long-term care and assistance in managing their condition. Their application uses long-term electronic health records to identify and anticipate when an asthma flare-up might occur and sends medication reminders. Similarly, mySugr helps diabetic patients manage their condition by providing tips, indicators, and warnings when analyzing data from patients' blood sugar levels.
XUND's technology likewise leverages the power of AI to provide a product that enables building health data platforms. It ensures that healthcare providers can both support patients better, as well as transform aggregate healthcare data into actionable insights. XUND's AI-driven Medical Database draws from millions of medical publications, and its digital assistant feature uses this medical database when it comes to healthcare decision-making. The technology is backed by a Solutions Engine that provides the highest-quality medical content and treatment options to help patients successfully navigate the healthcare system.
Electronic health records (EHR) & the benefits of health data platforms for healthcare providers
Health data platforms innovate healthcare through discovery and access to different medical indicators, create new services and applications, and drive better patient outcomes. By establishing a trusted, large-scale database, healthcare providers can:
- identify gaps in healthcare treatments
- use long-term data to better understand the multifactorial nature of diseases
- develop new, innovative therapies for patients based on individual needs
- empower patients to make informed health decisions
By leveraging AI services, health data platforms encourage innovation in medicine, keeping health records (EHR) and healthcare analytics. They can include information on nutrition, health behaviors, the impact of medical interventions, and other details that create a holistic yet individualized picture of a patient’s medical history. Patients can make informed health decisions from this electronic health data, while healthcare providers can develop personalized interventions based on long-term data trends.
Building health data platforms: challenges and solutions
Building health data platforms comes with various challenges. Three of the most prominent ones include:
- The high cost of building a platform: developing technology is resource-intensive — especially if you start from scratch.
- Aggregating healthcare data efficiently to provide valuable information you can work with needs skill and data science expertise.
- Ensuring the protection and security of healthcare data.
- Achieving a fast time to market to keep up with the competition.
Below we will go into more detail about these challenges and how XUND helps its customers build the health data platforms of tomorrow.
The cost of building data-driven healthcare platforms
Ready to spend up to $27 billion on building a health data platform? Researchers from McKinsey estimate it might just cost around this much to build, for example, a health data platform for neurology. According to their research, this sum far exceeds annual spending figures on R&D efforts by global pharmaceutical companies.
But you can avoid such high costs altogether by integrating existing technology into your product and/or service range.
With XUND, healthcare providers can integrate a health data platform with their existing technology through our API — all for a fraction of the cost of building a healthcare platform from scratch. This vastly cuts down the resources needed to gain long-term insights from aggregated patient data. Healthcare providers can understand diseases better, ensure more data-driven and better-researched clinical trials, and inspire people to take preventive actions.
Aggregating healthcare data efficiently — to gain actionable insights
When a vast amount of healthcare data is generated, it can be challenging to capture, store, and aggregate it to provide actionable insights. It also needs to be cleaned and categorized, which can delay healthcare innovation. It's beneficial to store electronic health records on a single, centralized platform; when it exists across multiple platforms, this data can be difficult to validate and may even be inaccessible.
The power of AI solutions can make data-driven healthcare a more efficient process. XUND has pioneered the usage of AI-driven insights in making healthcare more accessible and innovative: our history spans from gathering simple data from health checks to creating centralized health data platforms that enable long-term, actionable healthcare insights.
Our Medical Engine is one example of such an application. It combines various patient healthcare data points, such as personal risk factors, demographic data, and symptoms, to identify statistically and medically relevant causes. This provides patients and healthcare providers with more detailed, individualized information on how diseases develop and evolve over time and what steps they can take to prevent them.
Ensuring data protection for electronic health records
The ability to use data to make informed decisions is critical in every sector, including healthcare. Patients want transparency in how their data is being used. When they can exercise control over their electronic health records, they can be encouraged to share information so they can receive personalized treatments or participate in research trials. If the data is protected and anonymized under regulations, it sets the stage for further research on innovative therapeutic treatments in healthcare analytics.
At XUND, we encourage data sovereignty and confidentiality by using only anonymized or aggregated data. Electronic health data records are locally stored in Austria, and our cloud provider Exoscale uses ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 certified data centers located in a military building in Vienna. Health data stored with us never leaves the European legal area. This means that XUND's partners who have integrated our API are automatically recognized as data-sensitive healthcare data platform providers.
Build your data-driven health platform with XUND, cut your time to market in half
At XUND, we're pioneering tomorrow’s health data platforms by providing a technology that can deliver evidence-based solutions to patients and healthcare professionals so they can prevent, manage, or treat diseases.
Our driving force has always been towards making digital healthcare more accessible and innovative. Centralizing our services from simple health checks into a data-driven, actionable health data platform was our natural next step. By integrating our API, you as a healthcare provider can easily:
- overcome the high costs of building a health data platform from scratch
- efficiently gain long-term, actionable insights through aggregate healthcare data
- abide by data protection standards of the highest quality
Curious how our health data platforms help translate electronic healthcare records into real-world evidence? Read more about XUND's numerous applications and benefits for pharmaceutical companies through our partnership with pharmaceutical giant Roche and its subsidiary RoX Health.