Babylon Advisor: Empowering Patients with Health Data Insights
This blog is the third in a three-part blog series about how Babylon’s global technology solutions may be effective in reducing the health costs of populations we serve while increasing the quality of care. [Read Part One and Part Two here].
Data without context is just a collection of numbers. Smart analysis and visualization unlock the real power of data. In the healthcare sector, care providers can use the power of data to sustain positive changes in patient outcomes.
While other Babylon technologies focus on smoother data intake, clarifying population health trends, and helping at-risk patients quickly, Babylon Advisor uses data to design and customize more effective care plans for each individual.
Babylon Advisor brings helpful, easy-to-understand data insights back into the hands of the patient.
Why Legacy Health Record Systems Don’t Work Today
Healthcare data has long been clunky and, until recently, stored and shared ineffectually.
Many people think their health data is inaccessible or even off-limits, though patients have legal rights under HIPAA to access their health information. Hospitals make it expensive for patients to get copies of their records. Some providers don’t make it easy to share information, opting for CDs or fax machines instead of modern technology. These barriers have traditionally prevented patients from engaging deeper in their health data trends.
For many average Americans, engaging in their health often takes a back seat to other life priorities. Learning new technology may not be a challenge worth facing to certain demographics. Factors like time, cost of care, and other social struggles can make learning about your health less of a priority, especially for people who are working hard to make ends meet. But the nature of healthcare data is changing.
The Pandemic Shift to Equity Awareness
In recent years, the greatest shift in healthcare technology started out of necessity during the COVID-19 pandemic - patients needed to make a change in their care and communications with their providers. The pandemic also exposed the weakest areas of global healthcare systems. In the U.S., the differences in care accessibility and risk to exposure were starkly contrasted between different sectors of the population.
People are now beginning to understand that health equity is an important factor in measuring the quality and success of its structure. Healthcare accessibility and convenience make a dramatic difference in the health quality of a population. Within the last two years, the drive to achieve better health equity is much clearer: the pandemic exposed the need for greater access to high-quality care for all people.
Babylon Advisor Puts Data at Patients’ Fingertips
Technology is the key to bringing accessibility, convenience, and equity to healthcare solutions – all at a lower cost. This is also our mission at Babylon – affordable and accessible care for every person.
With Babylon Advisor, our aim is to redefine the care plan based on patient data and AI-informed insight. AI plays an essential role in all of our technology, especially Babylon Advisor. AI can scale at a lower cost to big populations and can reduce the most expensive part of care – the human part.
We know that a future with overall lower healthcare costs means that patients must play an active role in their healthcare. This could involve:
- Being aware of their general health patterns, baseline statistics and vital signs
- Being able to access and view their entire health data portfolio easily
- If anything goes out of balance, they should receive alerts and engage with a care provider to address those changes.
Babylon Advisor puts data back into the hands of patients and expands the ways patients engage with their data. Babylon’s ongoing data and analysis are constantly updated to detect possible health issues and proactively connect patients with providers. As well as this, Babylon Advisor handles patient data on some of the most prevalent diseases serving a global population. We look across different cultures, languages, and countries to design care plans so that the information is localized and relevant to each population.
In this way, data can deepen the connections between patients and providers along an individual’s care journey. While doctor visits may be seldom and nurse check-in calls and alerts more frequent, patients have a constant integrated information source at their fingertips to monitor and engage with their health data.
Just as Google powered all the world’s knowledge from a webpage, Babylon is working to expand patients’ knowledge through data. Visualizing the data with Babylon Advisor gives patients more power to make informed, proactive decisions about their health.
To learn more about Babylon Advisor, visit https://www.babylonhealth.com/en-us/services/babylon-360
