Microsoft : How Narayana Health uses data analytics and AI to provide affordable, high-quality healthcare

Making healthcare affordable for patients

The ability to visualize data from across the group opened new avenues to ensure patients get the best care possible at the most affordable prices. The team at Narayana Health is now unlocking insights from historic data as well as data generated in real-time to optimize costs from the perspective of both patients and business goals.

Faster lab turn-around times: One team looked at how they could minimize the visits a patient has to make to the hospital by ensuring they get their lab test reports on the same day. Using Power BI, they were able to compare the performance of different labs across the network and identify roadblocks as well as best practices. They implemented changes in the clinical processes at one of the units and noticed a 60 percent improvement and close to 95 percent of lab tests were turned around in less than two hours. In many cases, this meant that a patient could consult a doctor, get tests done, and get diagnosis done by the doctor on the same day.

Monitoring consumables and antibiotic use: A Power BI dashboard provides insights about the consumables used by doctors for different surgeries. Thanks to this, the management team has been able to establish an average of consumables used for any kind of surgery and can quickly identify trends and cases of even slightly higher usage, which can impact the cost incurred to the patient.

Another parameter monitored is the administration of antibiotics by doctors. This is an important aspect of patient care to ensure that the antibiotics usage is within the limits prescribed by the internal policy at the hospital, which in turn is aligned to WHO standard recommendations. With this, they can quickly identify any aberration and rectify it across the group.

Predicting blood requirement: Thanks to data being available in the system in real-time, hospitals are now able to predict blood requirements on any given day. This has led to optimal stocking and reducing wastage of blood, which is a critical and scarce component.

Reducing the time spent by patients in the ICU: Narayana Health runs one of the world's busiest cardiac programs and the world's largest pediatric cardiac care facility. A constant challenge at the organization is to optimize throughput to match the demand of patients with the limited manpower, assets, and capacity available. With real-time analytics they can monitor patients in the ICU and are able to identify any outliers, who have a longer than average duration of stay for any given surgery. This also allows them to identify any bottlenecks and reduce the patient wait time and stay at the hospital.

Better prediction of surgery costs: All this data analysis eventually circles back to Narayana Health's core mission of providing affordable, high-tech healthcare. Before the implementation of data analytics, the quotes were updated periodically. Now, they can formulate a very narrow band of the expected cost of a treatment, based on multi-year data of the relevant procedures and costs.