This blog is the first in a three-part blog series about how Babylon’s technology could help reduce health costs while increasing quality of care.
Healthcare systems are complex and oftentimes expensive. In the U.S., the system is reactive to problems, focusing on sick care rather than health care. Inefficiencies in the system have driven the cost of care up beyond the reach of most patients. Technology and smart data analysis play an important role in the future of healthcare, taking a proactive approach to reduce system-wide costs across all patients.
But how? At Babylon, we rely heavily on our Health Graph to represent the health-related information of each person who engages with our digital platform. Our goal is to revolutionize the actionability of healthcare data spanning a multitude of health services, devices, and legacy records sources.
What is the Babylon Health Graph?
Health Graph is a FHIR-based data platform that provides a 360-degree view of a patient's health and wellbeing using all the data available. Health Graph pulls in patient data from over 100 integrated data sources, from current lab results and clinician notes to other medical records from other systems and healthcare providers, to create a complete picture of the patient’s health. Not only can Health Graph ingest data from an electronic health record (EHR) to improve and secure the dataset, but it also natively captures data from Babylon's applications. Health Graph can also collect additional information from third party data providers and our partners’ various applications, creating an even more diverse set of data that can be analyzed as a unified data source.
Babylon uses a graph database to store, view and search within the 80 billion data points comprising its population health data. In this format, Babylon can quickly and easily find trends in the data and discover hidden relationships in unrelated data sets.
Babylon’s Health Graph leverages event-driven, real-time data inputs and outputs such as hospital notifications, personal wearable devices, and remote monitoring devices for major chronic diseases. This provides faster times to insight and risk predictions, allowing providers to take necessary actions like sending communications and alerts to patients.
In the meantime, patients can engage with their personal Health Graph and take a more hands-on, informed approach to their care and health data.
Why is Health Graph important?
Data is the key to unlocking better efficiencies in global healthcare systems, including in the U.S. Insights gleaned from the Health Graph can help providers better understand, for example, which members of the population are at elevated risk and in immediate need of care. Proactive, early intervention helps improve the quality of care while limiting the need for expensive, chronic or later-stage healthcare. This lowers the overall health costs of the populations we serve, benefitting the entire healthcare system.
For Babylon patients, Health Graph plays an important role in leveraging the power of the Babylon Data Platform to better understand their health. Patients can engage with the platform’s natively-integrated artificial intelligence models to gain deeper insights about their health and be more engaged at every step of their healthcare journey.
The future of Health Graph
Recently, we have strengthened our ability to populate personal Health Graphs with key member medical information even before they first engage with Babylon.
This may compress our time frame to address patient care needs from weeks to just days. We can more rapidly and more accurately analyze members’ health needs and isolate those that need more immediate help at the top of our queue.
Babylon believes that direct engagement with our members leads to an increase in our members’ personal investment in their healthcare outcomes. Ultimately, better technology and active patient involvement may improve patients’ health and wellbeing.
Building a data-driven healthcare revolution?
Having an extensive amount of population data supplemented with real-time health information provides the vital backdrop to quickly and continuously assess health risks across the population.Those most acutely in need of intervention are serviced at the top of a queue.
A more integrated and intelligent approach to personal health data in the Babylon platform helps patients and providers alike better understand a person’s holistic health and predict their potential future development.
At Babylon, we aim to provide proactive, comprehensive and convenient digital-first care to the populations we serve, driven by insights from one of the most advanced healthcare data platforms in the world. This helps us to raise the quality of care while bringing down healthcare costs across the board. By realizing these benefits earlier in the care cycle through the power of data and with the help of our Health Graph insights, we can more quickly achieve cost reduction benefits and improve patient outcomes.
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