At the Healthcare and Life Sciences Forum 2021, Snowflake connected with John Supra and Dustin Evancho from Prisma Health, South Carolina’s largest healthcare provider, to hear how their company is using data to improve preventative medicine and health outcomes while reducing costs for everyone.
The cost of providing healthcare continues to rise. Fortunately some innovative health systems such as Prisma Health are finding ways to do something about it.
Prisma Health is establishing direct relationships with employers, insurance companies, and other groups to leverage data to deliver better patient care for at-risk populations, driving costs down for everyone. “We have the analytics to prove that if we provide better outcomes for at-risk populations, total cost for healthcare will drop,” said Evancho. “It’s a win for patients and for the companies.”
“We can directly improve preventative medicine using in-depth statistical analysis. But it’s only possible if we can collect, aggregate, normalize, and analyze a huge volume of data from many sources.”
—Dustin Evancho, Data Operations Manager, Prisma Health
By focusing on what keeps people as healthy as possible—mammograms, mental health checks, and management of diabetes and weight —preventative care can improve outcomes for an entire population. “We recognized through statistical models that if we address these key things, people stay healthier and need fewer expensive ER visits,” Evancho said.
Data at 10X the Speed for Half the Price
When it comes to data, the number of data sources from hospitals, clinics, insurance companies, and others grew so large so fast that Prisma Health’s old compute resources couldn’t keep up. It took months to unify so much data and make any sense of it.
“When we moved to the Snowflake Data Cloud, we got results 10 times faster for half the price of our legacy system. Now we can spin up a new database, securely share the data with teams that need it, and then pay for only the compute resources they use. That was hard to do with our old solution. The move to Snowflake has been phenomenal.”
—Dustin Evancho, Data Operations Manager, Prisma Health
A Data-Driven Vaccine Rollout
Prisma Health launched an extensive COVID-19 vaccination program fueled in part by data analytics. It was able to bring electronic medical record (EMR) data, vaccine administration management system (VAMS) data, and the CDC social vulnerability index into its Snowflake environment. Some of that data resided in Amazon Web Services and some in Microsoft Azure, but Snowflake enabled Prisma Health to build a Power BI dashboard that combined all the data sets so it could create accurate models and roll out vaccinations to its patients quickly and effectively.
“Having visibility into our vaccine operations allowed us to make decisions by mapping out which communities and populations were receiving the vaccine. We could then determine which communities we should go into next.”
—John Supra, Chief Data Officer, Prisma Health
Prisma Health moved the state government’s vaccine supply data through Snowflake and into its dashboards every day. It did the same thing with data about COVID-19 testing, infections, and hospitalizations.
Forecasting Prevention
Beyond vaccinations, going forward, Prisma Health is looking at adding environmental data, weather data, and data on consumer purchasing habits to drive preventative care forwards.
“One study found that a person’s buying habits can lead to a significant increase in ER visits,” Evancho said. “By directing our nursing staff to proactively reach out to people and give them the support and information they need, we can keep people healthier and hopefully out of an ER.”