Enhancing Community Health with Predictive Analytics

Beacon Health System: Community Needs Assessment

"Thinking critically, I can’t think of another organization that I would trust with this type of work…We have had past success and I can’t think of another organization that can keep the project moving forward."

The difficulty in gathering and analyzing disparate sources of hospital and community health data limits the ability of hospital community outreach services to measure, monitor and develop the most impactful programs that truly reduce health disparities.

Beacon Health System’s Community Health Enhancement office sought the help of enFocus to define a key performance indicator (KPI) management system for monitoring health and financial data from the local hospitals. enFocus worked with over twenty community partners, 73 outreach staff and key members of hospital information systems leadership to gather patient quarterly and annual primary health outcomes data in support of the six key priorities for Community Health Enhancement. enFocus then used IBM’s Watson system along with other machine learning and statistical software and techniques to yield predictive trends specific to disease states and future demographic probabilities. An example is the ability to predict the incidence of certain types of patients presenting to the emergency room with diabetic complications. The data has been used to improve strategic planning and performance management of all of Community Health Enhancement’s tithing programs.