Personalised care at population scale has become possible through integrated data driven software, says Dr Umar Naeem Ahmad, CEO of Abtrace
There is a global challenge in healthcare and the scale of the problem is clear. By 2050, the population aged over 60 will double to 2.1bn people. More than half of these people will have a long-term chronic disease which accounts for 70 per cent of health expenditure. Healthcare budgets continue to rise representing $10 trillion, yet life expectancy gains have not kept pace, which is particularly true for those countries with the highest spending.
These trends are shared across the healthcare models – from single payor systems like the NHS to self-pay and hybrid segments in the USA, Middle East in high, medium and low-income economies.
We are all patients, friends of patients, relatives of patients. More than a health issue, or an economic issue, this is a long-term trend rightly worrying many people, so how do we reverse course?
The importance of clinical data
At university, I briefly trained in Ju-jitsu. The art of defeating a much bigger opponent is finding the pivot point. Once you do, you can use the opponent’s strength to your advantage. In healthcare, this pivot point is electronic health record data.
We believe electronic health record data can be used to ‘industrialise’ medicine. Doctors today work as artisans, trained after a decade as an apprentice, acting as the central conductor for most decision loops. Healthcare delivery is the product of a $10 trillion artisanal industry that payors find unsustainably expensive, patients find inconsistent in quality and staff find repetitive and exhausting. Electronic health record data is the raw material that healthcare needs to make decisions, allocate resources and measure outcomes. Doctors will need to move from artisans to data driven actors.
For us, health systems can, will and must embrace automation and data-driven care at scale to free up time to focus on the communicating with the patient. This can only be achieved by software, grounded in existing clinical workflow, powered by granular clinical data, and fully integrated into existing electronic health records (EHR).
Primary care first
Primary care can shift to provide proactive, predictive, preventative clinical care. Hospital-based care can be seen as the result of a healthcare system failing to keep the patient healthy. Care has progressed from bricks and mortar to virtual telehealth providers, but even these virtual solutions are reactive and do not remove the need and expense of staff. Patient records should be continuous as proactive monitoring will allow predictive earlier detection of disease and avoidance of preventable conditions.
The Abtrace approach
Abtrace has built software that integrates into multiple electronic health record systems and wearable devices to run AI algorithms on clinical data. Covering 3m patients in the NHS, the software identifies patients who need interventions, contacts them for information, arranges consultation with appropriate clinicians, ensures all interventions are done and calculates the efficiency and quality of care in real-time, for every patient, every day.
Digital health 3.0
1. The first generation of digital health providers focused on solutions and investments in teleconsultation, the triage and appointment booking space
2. More recent interest has been in technology enabled service providers who focus on specific disease verticals in mental health and diabetes care
3. The third generation of providers is cleaning and automatically processing electronic and patient-generated healthcare data to give existing providers the tools to improve care, thus reducing costs and demonstrating value to payors and providers.
Aligning providers, payors and regulators
Traditionally, startups have focused on the real-world evidence and billing use cases for electronic health records focused on the pharmaceutical or medical insurance industry. In contrast, Abtrace focuses on delivering value from EHR data in transforming healthcare delivery.
Healthcare is sometimes seen as a commercial zero-sum game – competing insurers optimising value from providers trying to meet the demand of regulators who struggle to get a real time view of on the ground processes and delivery. A single view of the data that encodes payor priorities will give providers a solution that reduces their costs and allows regulators to design and monitor policies and incentives based on real-time insight. Better alignment through technology builds value, regardless of the healthcare model.
Overcoming integration and regulation
Making healthcare providers our target customer requires understanding of, and engagement with, the complexity of health systems. Abtrace has focused on a regulation-first approach by building deep integrations before bringing a product to market, supported by extensive internal expertise and user feedback to optimise the initial product. Our focus has been on applications where the triple bottom line can be delivered at scale to allow healthier patients and happier clinicians, all the while reducing health costs.
Abtrace has built healthcare system integrations that cover 96 per cent of the UK population, extracting real-time comprehensive, longitudinal patient health records every day, trained on a unique primary care dataset from cradle to grave. This approach allows the delivery of AI models using structured and unstructured data (including clinical Large Language Models), all underpinned by medical device certification with UKCA marked Software as a Medical Device.
The experience of delivering value in the NHS for 3m people in the UK has allowed our team of doctors, machine learning specialists and regulatory experts to develop the expertise in overcoming technical challenges and to build a device that meets the regulatory and clinical bar.
A different healthcare future
Our vision is an automated, self-learning care system where we can provide personalised care, delivered at population scale, where predictive, preventative and proactive approaches keep people healthy and out of hospital to deliver a global impact for patients and healthcare systems. It’s a vision that has been proven in the NHS and our ambition is to scale it globally, to partner and to reach as many people around the world as possible.