Digitally enabled pathway personalisation is leveraging actionable data insights and dynamic intelligence to drive better outcomes as part of the Prevention 3.0 agenda
When it comes to the case for diabetes prevention, we know that the rising global prevalence of Type 2 diabetes has placed acute strain on healthcare budgets, attracting the attention of US and UK policymakers.
The US National Diabetes Prevention Program established credible evidence linking lifestyle change with reducing risk of Type 2 diabetes onset, leading policymakers in the UK to establish the NHS England Healthier You Diabetes Prevention Programme.
Early provision, or prevention 1.0, was geared to helping those identified with elevated blood sugar levels to create a lifestyle change plan in face-to-face settings.
Prevention 2.0 built on this by leveraging telehealth and nascent digital-enablement to reinforce face-to-face provision with remote support.
Pushing the boundaries of the possible
Hitachi’s diabetes prevention journey started in 2010, when the company developed its first digitally-enabled service to support its employees in meeting their wellness goals. Hitachi’s programme attempted to move provision towards telehealth and digital-enablement, or prevention 2.0.
By bringing together a blend of telehealth coaching and digital tools, Hitachi was able to personalise the provision of care, while giving its employees the means to effectively self-manage their lifestyle changes.
Since 2010, the solution has been rolled out to other Japanese corporates and used as a foundation for Hitachi’s collaborations with the NHS in England, aimed at leveraging clinical expertise, remote telehealth and digital solutions to create a new model of provision, or Prevention 3.0.
Actionable data insights and dynamic intelligence
Hitachi’s Smart Digital Diabetes Prevention solution, underpinned by its Prevention 3.0 vision, firmly establishes data as a critical enabler for improving service performance and patient outcomes. Developing an appropriate data lake consisting of cohort, progress and engagement data (to be described in the forthcoming OAG e-book due to be published in October 2018) is the first step towards delivering dynamic intelligence.
The next step is to surface data insights through advanced analytics and combine these with qualitative analysis, using user-centric design methods and a co-creation approach with commissioners, digital teams and frontline NHS health advisers to identify opportunities and strategies for service improvement.
Service personalisation
Actionable data insights and dynamic intelligence allow Hitachi and its clinical partners to help support personalised service provision, so that appropriate support is provided to patients at the right time. This helps to ensure that patients’ needs and preferences drive health adviser engagement and coaching, providing patients with the best opportunity to achieve positive outcomes (reduction in risk of Type 2 diabetes onset), while furnishing the service with the intelligence needed to ensure constrained resources are targeted to those with the greatest need.
Examples of how Hitachi’s Smart Digital Diabetes Prevention solution has leveraged actionable data insights and dynamic intelligence to support service personalisation include:
- Personalisation of patients’ lifestyle change goals based on cohort and presenting needs data captured through an online self-assessment and processed with algorithms.
- Personalisation of the health adviser dialogue with their patients based on cohort and progress data, such that it focuses in on the greatest areas of need.
- Personalisation of the pathway based on population-level cohort insights, such that patients who require more intensive health adviser support receive it at the right time, while allowing those who can self-manage do so.
Hitachi’s Smart Digital Diabetes Prevention solution leverages actionable data insights and dynamic intelligence to help support personalised service provision at patient and population level to improve health outcomes and optimise allocation of resources to support defined areas of need.
Service improvement
Actionable data insights and dynamic intelligence allow Hitachi to better understand how patients engage with digital tools, allowing an agile continuous service improvement agenda to be implemented. The latter includes enhancement to both the digital tools and the coaching and education delivered by health advisers, to respond quickly to needs identified at population, cohort and patient levels. Examples of how Hitachi has leveraged actionable data insights and dynamic intelligence to support service improvement include:
- Evolving health adviser and patient dialogue from a transactional to transformation dialogue, whereby the dialogue is focused on addressing the individual lifestyle needs rather than a mere description of lifestyle habits, thus ensuring patient support is as personalised as possible.
- Ensuring that minority cohorts (such as those with limited access to digital tools and limited IT literacy) can engage with the pathway and receive additional support where appropriate.
- Evolving the digital tools to promote active patient engagement while in service. This includes the design of new features, auto-generated behavioural prompts and signposting to appropriate and tailored structured lifestyle information.
Hitachi’s Smart Digital Diabetes Prevention solution leverages actionable data insights and dynamic intelligence to enhance the scope and impact of continuous service improvement activity to help ensure that support offered to patients continues to evolve in line with best practice and patients’ engagement with the digital service.
Commissioning of services at population level
Commissioners at national, regional and local levels are eager to ensure the services they procure address population needs, while remaining flexible to meet needs at more discrete levels. While ‘hard’ clinical data offered by service trials and clinical studies continues to be the gold-standard for decision-making:
- Commissioning organisations are finding it increasingly difficult to commit both the funding and resources required to deliver them.
- The timescales prohibit rapid delivery of data insights in what is a very fast-moving digital healthcare economy.
This means that commissioners are turning to both qualitative and quantitative data-points established through patients’ engagement with digital tools, thereby allowing them to access dynamic intelligence at lower cost. Hitachi’s Smart Digital Diabetes Prevention solution provides data insights that can help commissioners realise these objectives:
- Providing access to dynamic intelligence that identifies opportunities for developing new and integrated services and/or transforming existing service offerings to ensure maximum reach and outcomes for patients.
- Allowing dynamic intelligence to be accessed throughout the service management lifecycle, allowing commissioners to ensure that services evolve with the regional and/or local healthcare economies.
- Informing both the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ metrics commissioners build into future service contracts to ensure they are meeting the needs of their populations at optimal cost.
Please note: this is a commercial profile
Hitachi Consulting
Tel: +44 (0)20 7842 7800
