Healthcare 2.0 will shift the healthcare ecosystem towards innovative care delivery models because of Healthcare Analytics which comprises of deployment of Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things and advanced Data Analytics and more.

Healthcare has become one of India’s largest sector, both in terms of revenue and employment. Healthcare comprises hospitals, medical devices, clinical trials, outsourcing, telemedicine, medical tourism, health insurance and medical equipment. The Indian healthcare sector is growing at a brisk pace due to its strengthening coverage, services and increasing expenditure by public as well private players. The Government of India is planning to increase public health spending to 2.5 per cent of the country's GDP by 2025. India has also become one of the leading hubs for high-end diagnostic services with tremendous capital investment for advanced diagnostic and medical facilities at a very low cost compared to other countries.

Healthcare 1.0 was broadly defined by a focus on defensive medicine, billing, and fee-for-service, culminating in the mass adoption of EMRs and data proliferation.  Healthcare 2.0 is a new wave focused on improving clinical efficiency, quality of care, affordability, and fee-for-value –  culminating in a new age of healthcare analytics.

The healthcare analytics market in India is expected to reach a value of INR 47.04 Bn by 2025, expanding at a CAGR of ~20.49% during the 2020-2025 period. Factors like an increased focus on collection and analysis of data from different healthcare sources for improved customer service, technological advancements and rising adoption of electronic health records are expected to drive the growth of the healthcare analytics market in India. Analytics is rapidly gaining power as it helps healthcare systems reduce healthcare costs, improve quality of care and facilitate preventive care.

What Exactly Is Health Care Analytics?    

Healthcare analytics is the branch of analysis that emphases on offering insights into hospital management, patient records, costs, diagnoses, and more. The field covers a broad band of the healthcare industry, offering insights on both the macro and micro level.

Healthcare analytics also integrates business intelligence suites and data visualization tools to reveal and understand historical data patterns, predict future events, and provide actionable insights to make fact-based decisions and improve clinical, financial and operational performance of healthcare organizations.

Data analytics in Health Care

This are some of the skills and techniques that will allow us to connect the potential of data analytics in Health Care.

• Correlation & Regression analysis
• Hypothesis testing
• Statistical Process Control
• Probability distributions
• Factor Analysis
• Cluster Analysis
• Patient Profiling
• Patient Segmentation
• Structural Equation Modeling
• Machine Learning
• Neural Network analysis
• Natural Language Processing
• Image recognition and
• Speech analysis
• Data mining
• Artificial Intelligence

What to expect from HealthCare Analytics?

HealthCare analytics can be broadly classified into descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive analytics.

• Descriptive analytics: What has happened?
  In its most basic form, healthcare data only tells you what has already happened.   How many patients were admitted to the hospital last year?  How many were discharged within a week?  Average billing amount per patient?Descriptive analytics is the ability to quantify events and report on them in a human-readable way using tables and charts.  It’s the first step in turning big data into actionable insights, and there is a lot to be learned from this level of analytics.
• Diagnostic analytics: Why it happened?
  It takes descriptive data a step further and provides deeper analysis to answer the question: Why did this happen? Often, diagnostic analysis is referred to as root cause analysis. This includes using methods such as data discovery, data mining, and drill down and drill through.Diagnostic data analytics works backward from the symptoms, explore data, make correlation & association to suggest the cause of what has happened. While doctors continue to be responsible for the final diagnosis, they can use this data analytics to save time and to avoid possible errors of judgment.
• Predictive analytics: What might happen in the future?
  It uses information from diagnostic and descriptive analytics to predict the future events. For example, which patients will have the highest risk of hospitalization next week? Which person is more prone to heart disease based on his medical history? Which patient may default in paying hospital bills?In predictive analytics, statisticians & data scientists use historical data to train models to predict future events by employing advanced statistical and computational techniques.
• Prescriptive analytics: What needs to be done?
  Prescriptive analytics is the most advanced healthcare analytic because it allows us to make specific recommendations on patient care delivery interventions based on the predictive model. It recommends specific actions in response to individual patient symptoms and medical history. The benefits of prescriptive analytics range from the identifying areas of improvement in treatment and protocols to reducing the rate of re-admitted patients, and lowering the cost of healthcare in general- from patient bills to the cost of operations in hospital billing departments, government expenditure.

Challenges to HealthCare Analytics in India

Though there are tremendous growth opportunity in this field, there are a set of challenges in implementation of HealthCare Analytics:

• Skilled workforce
• Lack of Digitization
• Complex and Incomplete data
• Sharing of data
• High investment Cost
• Establishing standards and governance
• Data Privacy & Security
• Over dependence on Public healthcare system

Conclusion:

HealthCare Analytics encompasses mainly three types of analytics solutions, namely descriptive analytics, predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics. Healthcare practitioners, healthcare providers, patients, the government and pharmaceutical companies are the major end-users of healthcare analytics solutions. As in any nascent industry, adoption will be gradual, beginning with early adopters and then to mass market. But there is no doubt that the field of health care analytics is one whose time has come and will create immense value to the entire healthcare ecosystem in the next decade.

Companies like IBM Corporation, McKesson Corporation, UnitedHealthcare Group, Oracle Corporation, Allscripts Healthcare Solutions, Wipro etc.  provide professional healthcare analytics services. But still there is a dire need for more such start-ups and companies in India.

The talent needed in country to leverage data analytics is in limited supply. Medical & pharmacy researchers, Statisticians, data scientist, biostatisticians could begin to use data and machine learning to produce game-changing insights and unlock the value of large structured and unstructured data. Healthcare Analytics is sure to become a vibrant new career opportunity in India.

Dr. Parag Shah
Ph.D Statistics