520% increase in patient engagement

Predicting population risk among rural communities

Foulger and team have created digital programs, such as remote patient monitoring, based on data to identify, target, and communicate to patient cohorts and encourage healthy behaviors. 

“Data analytics is the foundation for a lot of the digital programs because we’re identifying cohorts of patients. For example, we have almost 150 different features that we use to risk-stratify and predict which patient population would be right for specific patient monitoring programs,” explains Foulger. 

Many of the features include social determinants of health. Simply understanding the ZIP code where a patient was born can have a profound impact on the individual’s health and care. 

“Once a patient is enrolled, we now have more data constantly coming into how their chronic condition is being managed. For example, we might find that for a patient who had a higher level of remote patient monitoring and care, their chronic condition is being better managed, and they can come down in the level of care to a lower tier,” continues Foulger.

Foulger shares another example where analytics and data support a digital care program to provide a modern obstetrics experience. The OSF OnCall Connect Pregnancy and Post-Partum Remote Monitoring Program provides 24/7 support from a digital care team. It is designed to support expectant and post-partum mothers in underserved communities.

“Because we serve in mainly rural areas, there is a lack of access to obstetrics and gynecologists. Some of the underserved populations don’t have the time or luxury to step out of their work or schedule to be able to have an appointment. We use data to serve those patients and encourage them to be in the monitoring program,” Foulger shares.

The program has seen success. “We’ve seen amazing results. In some cases, we’ve prevented some bad episodes from happening because there was data to connect us,” touts Foulger.

Harmonizing data with Teradata VantageCloud on Azure

With no shortage of data being generated in the healthcare landscape, organizations often face a challenge to integrate and harmonize data to make it usable by the broader business community. OSF HealthCare leverages VantageCloud on Azure and ClearScape Analytics™ as the complete cloud analytics and data platform for AI.

VantageCloud’s open and connected ecosystem allows OSF HealthCare to integrate Microsoft Azure first-party cloud services integrations with Teradata.

“We have Azure Data Factory pipelines, Event Hubs, and API gateways. Because we have all the data in VantageCloud, we’re also looking to leverage our data lake and integrate it with VantageCloud. I see a huge value proposition in terms of where Teradata is moving with VantageCloud and ClearScape Analytics,” Foulger elaborates.

Improving AI and digital care models with ClearScape Analytics

ClearScape Analytics provides OSF HealthCare with powerful, open, and connected AI/ML capabilities that speed up access to insights. OSF HealthCare uses in-database analytics to prepare, train, and deploy Python models directly in VantageCloud. This creates zero data movement while maximizing processing performance and scaling models efficiently.

Foulger describes a fully integrated approach. “Some of our AI models, and a lot of our predictive risk models, are running in Teradata as Python models. Having it run on Teradata is much more efficient in terms of speed and performance.”

Speed and performance provide OSF HealthCare with the timely insights needed to make clinical decisions. 

“With some of these models, clinicians depend on them as they are rounding on patients in the hospitals. Making sure information is available, and doing so within one ecosystem or one environment, increases the reliability and flexibility for us.”

Business users at OSF HealthCare benefit from VantageCloud’s ease of use and accessibility. According to Foulger, “OSF doesn’t have database administrators, or DBAs. Everyone is working on data, being knowledge workers, and designing solutions and data products. When we invested in Teradata, the goal was for our data engineers to not manage data but to spend time on  engineering and getting value out of data.”

The business value is impactful and tangible. As a result, OSF HealthCare is increasing patient engagement in its digital programs, which improves patient health. 

“The data we’ve built is for analytics, and now that we are using that to personalize and connect to patients, we’re becoming more proactive in identifying targeted outreach.” Foulger adds, “By using our data, we’ve seen a 520% increase in patients aligning to whatever they need to do, in terms of their care or care protocols.”