Introduction
Herself Health is a value-based care organization, providing advanced primary care services to 65+ year-old women across the U.S. Data plays an important role in Herself’s ability to efficiently provide high-quality care to their patients. Herself has access to many healthcare data sources, including medical records, labs, HIE, ADT, and claims data, several of which are refreshing daily.
Herself’s primary goal was to leverage this data to deliver the best possible care for their patients, driven by data insights, in a fraction of time of other organizations.
Herself’s technology team is experienced, led by CTO Masoud Nourmohammadi, and includes many individuals with deep expertise building value-based care technology and analytics from successful companies like Strive Health and Oak Street Health. Very early on, Herself recognized the need to build a healthcare data platform capable of delivering advanced analytics for optimizing clinical workflows. Their experience – specifically understanding the challenges of building a healthcare data platform from scratch – is what led Herself to partner with Tuva.
Building a Healthcare Data Platform
At the core of Herself’s data strategy is their healthcare data platform, which is built on AWS, Snowflake, and Tuva. The data platform aggregates and harmonizes Herself’s myriad data sources into a single, unified, longitudinal data model with enriched clinical concepts, measures, groupers, and risk models that make it easier to create advanced analytics.
While the Tuva Data Model provides this standardized and enriched data out-of-the-box, a primary challenge for Herself was ingesting and transforming their data sources into the Tuva Data Model and managing ongoing data refreshes of these sources over time. More specifically these challenges included:
- ETL Orchestration + Automation
- Data Refresh Monitoring + Alerting
- Data Quality Monitoring + Alerting
- Data Model + Data Quality Change Management
- Software Upgrades
Managing this work would typically require recruiting a team of multiple healthcare data engineers. However, by partnering with Tuva and leveraging Tuva Data Factory – our technology-enabled managed service for managing data feeds into the Tuva Data Model – Herself was able to offload this responsibility to Tuva for less than the cost of a single FTE, resulting in significant cost savings and allowing them to reallocate internal resources away from managing data refreshes to building advanced analytics and solving higher-value problems.
Transforming Clinical Operations with Analytics
The first use case Herself had for advanced analytics was empowering their clinical care teams with information about patients they were scheduled to see that day. To this end, Herself created the Daily Huddle dashboard. The Daily Huddle efficiently displays relevant information about patients that have appointments that day, so that care teams can proactively prepare and optimize care for these patients. It includes things like:
- Chronic conditions and relevant lab test results
- Medication refills that may be needed
- Gaps in care related to clinical quality measures
- Gaps in clinical documentation related to risk adjustment
- Recent ED visits and acute inpatient visits
There are two reasons that the Tuva Data Model was ideal for powering the Daily Huddle dashboard. First, the Daily Huddle needs to be powered by multiple sources of data. For example, gaps in clinical documentation largely come from medical records and HIE data while recent ED and acute inpatient visits come from ADT data feeds. The Tuva Data Model unifies all of Herself’s data sources into a single longitudinal record, on top of which the Daily Huddle was built.
Second, the Daily Huddle relies on advanced clinical concepts that aren’t present in raw healthcare data sources, but are present in the enriched Tuva Data Model. This includes things like quality measures, chronic condition definitions, readmissions, and HCC suspecting indicators.
As a result of building on top of the Tuva Data Model, the Daily Huddle was built and deployed in just a few weeks. Without the Tuva Data Model this would have taken around 12 months to complete.
Impact
The Daily Huddle has now been deployed across Herself’s care sites to great effect and is in-use every day, empowering care teams with the information they need to deliver better clinical care. Beyond the Daily Huddle, Herself is building more analytics applications on top of their data platform, including an application called Panel Management which streamlines access to key information for clinicians about the panel of patients they are responsible for.
By leveraging Tuva, Herself was able to quickly build and operate their healthcare data platform with the following benefits:
- Cost Savings: The entire data platform was built and operated for roughly the cost of a single FTE while a similar data platform, either built from scratch or purchased from other vendors, would typically cost 10x as much.
- Control: Tuva is built on a modern tech stack and built to be deployed inside any cloud and data warehouse, giving Herself complete control over how it works, including granular data model customizations.
Contact us to learn more about Tuva and how we can help you build an operate a world-class data platform for a fraction of the typical cost.
With Tuva transforming and enriching our 3rd party claims data we've cut the time it takes us to generate publication-ready research in half.
Masoud Nourmohammadi
10%
of the cost of a similar data platform, either built from scratch or purchased.