Solving 3 major data and analytics challenges for healthtech companies

Healthtech companies create and manage vast amounts of clinical and financial data. Often, this data proves equally or more valuable to clients as a healthtech company’s core services — especially if the company can integrate fast-evolving AI solutions to quickly analyze the vast datasets and provide fresh insights.

But healthtech companies may struggle to deliver here. Healthtech leaders may promise fantastic solutions to sales prospects — powerful analytics to help them make smarter business decisions — but then fall short of expectations once those prospects actually become clients.

Here are three key challenge areas to solve in order to deliver stronger offerings to your clients:

1. Fragmented data foundations

For healthtech companies that don’t use multi-tenant databases, data is often highly fragmented, with information broken up between several or even many databases. A company’s own data may also need to be combined with publicly available or supplemental data in order to provide real value to clients.

The ability to find patterns in large amounts of data is often incredibly valuable to your clients. Which means that one of the best things you can do for your business is build a secure system to centralize all your clients’ data, aggregate and anonymize it to protect client and patient privacy and then sell users the tools to analyze it.

The analytics capability is what’s most invaluable here. You can offer your clients access to raw datasets, but if you can build dashboards and other healthcare data analytics tools that allow clients to seamlessly draw their own conclusions from your data, then you can create premium products your clients will find worth every penny.

And if you can do this through a dashboard product that you can then market to all your clients, you’ll also save your development team a ton of time and energy responding to individual client requests for help analyzing data. In other words, if you center analytics in your core offering, you won’t have to create custom solutions for each client who wants to better understand the data they’re collecting.

Here, you’ll often benefit from consulting an outside advisor. If your core business is, say, building wearables or other IoT-enabled devices, you may do a better job creating a cloud healthcare data management and analytics platform if you can learn best practices or collaborate with a firm that has more experience in the latter area.

2. Governance and compliance issues

When it comes to healthtech governance and compliance, privacy and security are the main issues. If you’re planning on collecting healthcare data and then selling insights back to providers and healthcare organizations — each a HIPAA covered entity — you’d better first make sure that you’re also fully HIPAA compliant.

This starts with making sure that you sign an agreement called a business associate agreement (BAA) with all of the healthcare organizations you serve. A BAA is a contract that says you agree to be HIPAA compliant with all your clients’ data.

It may seem like a formality, but not having a BAA in place could expose you and your clients to liability in the event of a data breach or other HIPAA violation. Also consider that:

• You need to make sure that any data you’re managing or storing for your clients is fully protected. It’s essential to put controls in place to keep one client from accidentally seeing anything that belongs to another client.
• If you manage your own servers, you have to ensure that your servers are properly patched, updated, and use the right security controls.
• Equally important is training everyone on your team on compliance around appropriately using Protected Health Information (PHI), which includes any personally identifiable patient information in your possession.

If this all sounds obvious, you’d be almost as shocked by how many healthtech companies don’t do these things as you would be at the potential damages resulting from a failure to comply. If you’re storing data for hundreds of clients on your servers and you have unpatched servers and no BAAs in place, you could be exposing every one of those clients to liability — and inviting them to turn around and sue you in return.

Here, outsourcing your data storage to a cloud data-management provider or contracting with a company to run your internal servers can help you keep your data secure while allowing your own team to focus on your core business.

3. Security and risk challenges

One of the most valuable things you can do with your data is use it to fuel machine learning and predictive algorithms. If you can help providers and healthcare organizations accurately assess the likelihood that, say, a patient will be readmitted, your services will be in demand.

But you have to make sure that your algorithms do what you say they do. To your clients, AI technology may be a black box where nobody really knows what goes into the sausage, but you need to independently test your models for accuracy, consistency, and proper design.

It’s essential that you follow governance best practices here. For example, always work with an outside auditor to assess the quality of your AI output. Auditing your own work is never a good idea, because it’s too tempting to ignore bad results.

Doing this becomes all the more important as generative AI becomes integrated into more healthtech products and services. If your clients are asking your generative AI models to give them insights into things like patient care, it’s critical that your models offer appropriate, accurate and responsible answers.

Authentication and credentialing are also essential to consider. Not only do you need to protect one client’s private data from being seen by another, but you should also allow clients to offer different levels of data visibility to different members of their own organizations, depending on duties or level of seniority.

How data and analytics can drive healthtech growth

If you can responsibly manage your client data and create tools to dig into it for insights, you can deliver new growth opportunities to your business. Clients are hungry for all the market analysis they can get, so the more you can offer, the more value you create.

For companies that are excited about AI, especially, there is a wide-open market as long as you’re willing to put in the time to think about AI from a data perspective.

How Wipfli can help

As an advisor to healthtech companies, Wipfli can help you solve thorny data management problems and develop new products or services to meet client demands. We can also take the lower-level IT data storage or server management issues off your plate so you can free up your team to work on your core business. Learn more here.

Learn more about growing your healthtech business

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