Athenahealth Launches athenaInsight: A New Healthcare Big Data Intelligence Platform
By Liu Tianyuan
“Use data to reconstruct more authentic health trends.” This is the goal of the athenaInsight platform. athenahealth, which has long been cultivating the medical cloud service platform, has also begun to target the field of healthcare big data.
Recently, athenahealth officially launched its new big data healthcare information platform, athenaInsight. The platform can accurately analyze personalized case information of 80,000 medical professionals and 81 million de-identified patients within the healthcare network, providing supportive recommendations and guidance for the efficient operation of healthcare systems, effective physician management, and trends and changes in public health.
As a unicorn company with over 4,000 employees, connecting 72,000 service providers and healthcare systems globally, athenahealth (NASDAQ: ATHN) provides cloud-based electronic health records, practice management, patient engagement, and care coordination services to physicians and hospitals. It streamlines the entire clinical workflow and insurance billing processes, thereby enhancing efficiency. What is the purpose behind the recent launch of its big data platform, athenaInsight?
In the United States, the healthcare sector is facing severe challenges. Both large organizations and medical institutions are struggling to survive in a constrained environment due to the lack of basic strategic guidance. Insights into trends based on big data are as desperately needed as rain during a drought.
AthenaInsight serves as an information provider and insight discoverer. Grounded in extensive medical data samples on the cloud platform, it offers fresh perspectives, innovative models, and practical solutions to physicians, hospitals, and healthcare institutions when addressing challenging issues such as improving clinical performance and financial outcomes, preventing physician burnout, enhancing patient self-diagnosis experiences, and tracking clinical trends and infectious diseases.
The platform is website-based, featuring sections such as “Editor’s Picks,” “Perspective Discovery,” “Leadership Insights,” “Performance Insights,” and “Data Insights,” with a visual presentation dominated by data visualization charts.
In the healthcare industry, information asymmetry has always been a persistent challenge. Zacks, a stock market observation media outlet, commented that athenaInsight will serve as an efficient information dissemination platform, effectively addressing the issue of information asymmetry in the healthcare sector and offering a fresh perspective on the future prospects of medical data. This service will significantly enhance athenahealth’s competitive advantage within the industry.
“The healthcare sector lacks a comprehensive and timely system for information and knowledge sharing.” When asked about the rationale behind creating this platform, Jonathan Bush, CEO of athenahealth, stated: “With the launch of athenaInsight, we can establish such a system and leverage one of the largest proprietary healthcare databases in the United States to identify highlights in medical services, which serve as critical support for medical innovation. We can share what we see, know, and learn with our clients and other relevant practitioners, making these insights openly available to the entire industry.”
How large is athenahealth’s data sample? Its proprietary cloud-based technology has enabled a healthcare network that covers the entire United States. The annual volume of information exchanges reaches 1.2 billion, supporting electronic health records for 5.5 million patients. In 2014 alone, the system automatically generated 15 million patient communication text messages. Moreover, athenahealth is continuously enhancing the quality of in-network medical services and transitioning toward population health monitoring.
Following the release of the information platform, other healthcare service networks can obtain timely and precise analytical insights in real time, which is of significant importance for enhancing the overall level of healthcare services in the United States, tracking clinical practice trends, and conducting public health surveillance.
As part of the release, a typical application involves athenaInsight leveraging its own healthcare network data to study domestic trends in opioid prescriptions in the United States and to generate reports on U.S. opioid prescribing patterns from multiple perspectives. Unlike conventional reports, this ongoing research project explores prescribing patterns and their implications, features patient narratives, and focuses on physicians and clinical settings, incorporating data charts and information visualization.
athenaInsight generates highly visualized data reports based on big data sample analysis
As part of its commitment to helping address the opioid abuse crisis, athenahealth collaborated with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to publish the “Guideline for Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain,” which has become the most-viewed guideline within Epocrates (athenahealth’s clinical decision support app for physicians, ranked No. 1 in the medical information reference app category).
“Currently, the landscape for opioid medications within the healthcare sector is highly complex and continuously evolving,” said Dr. Todd Lininger, Chief Medical Officer at Prospira Pain Center. “Big data technology plays an essential role in addressing these challenges: from helping us understand regulations and providing best practice examples, to even establishing channels of communication between healthcare providers and patients when necessary. The initiatives that athenahealth is promoting across its entire platform are precisely what healthcare services require.”
About athenahealth:It is a healthcare services company leading in cloud-based technology services. Its product portfolio includes athenaCollector for revenue cycle and medical practice management, athenaClinical for electronic health records (EHR), athenaCommunicator for patient engagement management, athenaCommunicator Enterprise for population health management, athenaCoordinator for order delivery systems, athenaCoordinator Enterprise for patient information access and collaborative care services, and Epocrates for clinical decision support. Its main competitors include AdvancedMD, Inc., Allscripts Healthcare Solutions, Inc., CareCloud Corporation, Cerner Corporation, eClinicalWorks, LLC, Epic Systems Corporation, Greenway Health, LLC, McKesson Corp., NextGen Healthcare Information Systems, LLC, Optum, Inc., Practice Fusion, Inc., Quality Systems, Inc., SCI Solutions, Inc., Medscape, UpToDate, Inc., and WebMD, LLC.