Every time someone visits a doctor or hospital or undergoes a test, data is created, but that information is often locked in legacy healthcare technology systems without creating business value.

When insurers, healthcare providers and patients have better access to this data, they can make choices that ultimately lead to better outcomes and lower costs, such as finding the best treatments, figuring out why a prescription is not being filled or stopping a duplicate test or scan, according to Krishna Kottapalli (pictured, left), chief commercial officer at Abacus Insights Inc., a data management company that harnesses the power of the healthcare data explosion to enhance people’s lives.

“A lot of data is proliferating inside the healthcare system, whether it’s through the internal sources, external sources, devices, patient monitoring platforms, and so on,” he said. “Essentially, the users are looking to get insights out of it to solve problems.”

Kottapalli and Sumant Rao (pictured, right), chief product and operations officer at Abacus Insights, spoke with Natalie Erlich, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the AWS Startup Showcase: The Next Big Things in AI, Security & Life Sciences. They discussed the challenges of handling health data, Abacus’ proposed solutions to unlock the value of that data and how partnering with Amazon Web Services Inc. enables Abacus to do this at scale. (* Disclosure below.)

Platform allows customers to share and leverage data

Breaking data silos and freeing healthcare data to impact the health experience of consumers is the goal of Abacus Insights.

To that end, its interoperability platform allows healthcare plans to integrate and share data with doctors’ offices, hospitals, pharmacies and laboratories, along with various digital healthcare applications. In practice, by establishing and maintaining secure connections in this industry, it allows healthcare plans to become engines of healthcare innovation.

The idea is to make healthcare providers and patients part of the ecosystem so they can make better use of the data.

“The journey that our clients are going through is actually a transformation journey, so they are thinking about ‘How do we seamlessly interact with our stakeholders … being members and providers so that they don’t get frustrated and feel like they’re interacting with multiple parts of the health plan?’” Kottapalli said. “When you call the health plan, you feel like you’re calling five different departments, so they want to have a seamless experience.”

In the first step of this framework to drive innovation and enable analytics, Abacus helps its customers build a database with a focus on increasing business value.

“We firmly believe that data analytics is not a linear journey; you cannot say, ‘Oh, I’ll build my data foundation first and then have the data and then they shall come.’ That’s not how it works,” Rao explained. “Think about your business users, get them engaged and have small milestones driven progress that you make along the way.”

Abacus then works on what it calls data reusability, which means identifying and leveraging customer data assets. The company uses its team’s deep knowledge of the healthcare area, as many of its members come from this industry, to build a system that is easy to manage and adapts to changing rules. It also partners with data governance experts, according to Rao.

To do all this work at scale, Abacus is supported by the AWS infrastructure.

“We don’t innovate for the sake of innovating. [We] reuse your assets, leverage your existing IP, make things configurable, data changes, and then leverage best-in-class infrastructure,” Rao said. “Abacus’ strategy progresses across those four dimensions.”

Data enrichment allows for better analytics

While there are many companies in the market helping businesses handle large amounts of data, Abacus believes it differentiates itself from competitors for several reasons. One of the most important is the ability to enrich the data.

Abacus brings a data source to life in less than 45 days. It then applies a library of high-quality rules to it and uses public datasets as a reference to fill in blanks in the data.

“All of this is the end state; let’s make the data shovel-ready for analytics,” Rao explained. “So, we do all of that along the way, so now applying our expertise, cleansing data, making sure the gaps are all filled out and getting this ready. And then comes the next part where we tie this data out.”

Another differentiator is distribution.

“We have a philosophy that really the mission of the whole company is to get data available,” he said. “So, rather than make this a massive change management program that takes five years to implement and really scares your end users away, our philosophy is let’s have incremental use case all along the way, but let’s talk to the users, let them interact with data as easy as they can.”

A third differential is the security that the platform offers. Security concerns are the main reason healthcare providers did not go to the cloud until about three or four years ago, according to Kottapalli. So even though it is in the secure AWS infrastructure, Abacus has invested heavily in its own certifications and resources to give that confidence to customers.

“Last but not least is how we actually approach the whole data management deployment process,” Kottapalli said. “Our clients think about us in two dimensions: total cost of ownership, which is typically 50% to 60% of what it would cost internally, and, secondly, time to value – you can’t have an infinitely long deployment cycle.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Startup Showcase: The Next Big Things in AI, Security & Life Sciences. (* Disclosure: Abacus Insights Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Abacus Insights nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE