Active intelligence transforming future of healthcare industry: Qlik

A private SaaS company, Qlik offers an active intelligence platform, delivering end-to-end, real-time data integration and analytics cloud solutions to close the gaps between data, insights and action. Qlik’s vision is a data-literate world, where everyone can use data and analytics to improve decision-making and solve their most challenging problems.

By transforming data into active intelligence, businesses can drive better decisions, improve revenue and profitability, and optimize customer relationships. Qlik does business in more than 100 countries and serves over 50,000 customers around the world. Here, Varun Babbar, MD, Qlik, India, tells us more. Excerpts from an interview:

DQ: How have organizations been a catalyst for digital transformation and data analytics for the healthcare sector?

Varun Babbar: Technological innovations have played a major role in rapidly disrupting the healthcare sector over the past years. The e-health market is estimated to reach US$ 10.6 billion by 2025, signaling a major shift for healthcare specialists’ and patients’ experience. While, in the past, the industry has been slow to adopt digital toolsets, through the pandemic, it has transformed its services round the clock and implemented new technologies for the welfare of the country.

Healthcare providers are now extensively going big to foster accessible, faster, cheaper, and more effective solutions to treat patients. As we thrive in an era of value-based care, hospitals must leverage active intelligence, business intelligence, data visualization, big data analytics, and machine learning (ML) to maximize their medical efficiencies and to present accurate health-related findings.

We at Qlik, believe in integrating and streamlining all relevant data to make it easier for our customers to generate valuable insights and navigate the medical reports on a real-time basis. Crucial health-related data can now be collated from different sources and quickly visualized through analytics. Our focus is to deliver an enhanced and connected healthcare experience than ever by connecting people, resources and optimizing efficient medical operations.

DQ: How have data analytics solutions helped healthcare businesses during the pandemic?

Varun Babbar: In the battle against Covid-19, data analytics served to be the backbone with tracking the outbreak and curating data to predict outcomes. With the help of active intelligence, organizations can have better management of logistics by providing a real-time data dashboard. Real-time data for hospital beds and the availability of emergency medical services on any day in any city is only possible with data analytics and the intelligence it provides.

A case in point is that of Direct Relief, Qlik’s partner that had to scale up medical supplies unlike they have ever done in the past. Direct Relief started with improving access to personal protective equipment to front-line workers and then expanded their scope to providing essential medication for intensive care units and medical aid for health centres.  Starting with only the basics of case data, Direct Relief has had to bring dozens of different datasets together to forecast constantly changing needs for medical support.   

Similarly, during the onset of the pandemic in Australia, the Justice Health and Forensic Mental Health Network developed a Qlik-powered Covid-19 application to aid hospital management in managing staff, patients and stock levels of personal protective equipment (PPE). Updated frequently, and in combination, these three areas provided insight into the current healthcare environment.

The application allowed hospital staff and managers to identify stock levels of PPE by location — enabling them to relocate available stock to staff caring for patients that had fever or respiratory symptoms at other locations. This insight saved time as staff did not have to call a variety of locations to determine stock levels. Using the application, healthcare managers were also able to view absenteeism across locations and allocate staff to sites that most needed support. With waves of the pandemic still ongoing, this type of information remains relevant and useful today.

DQ: What is the future of active intelligence? How is active intelligence transforming the future of the healthcare industry?

Varun Babbar: To gain relevant, real-time insights for actionable decisions, healthcare organizations should keep these three important considerations in mind.

• Support for real-time and hyper-contextual data
  For data to reflect the “reality” of the business moment, it needs to be real-time and hyper-contextual, oriented with a correct business view and a use-case-centric focus. The pandemic pushed this requirement into overdrive. Every organization had analytics-ready data, but most of them struggled with answering urgent business questions to make necessary changes in a timely manner. The organizations needed access to and visibility into real-time changes while also defining new business logic. This requires real-time data integration with fast, iterative transformation and continuous ingestion capabilities.

• Create extended collaboration
  This type of collaboration covers all type of users and personas across the full spectrum of data, from ingestion to insights. In traditional analytics and BI platforms, collaboration has only been thought of for analytics consumers. Most of today’s passive intelligence products support some form of collaboration, providing capabilities that support the sharing of and communication about the output from the analytical pipelines. The need to move fast, as well as merge and use new data sources, however, requires new thinking about collaboration, where the circle of collaboration extends beyond analytics consumers.
• Move analytics from “Surveillance Mode” to “Decision Mode”
  Data and analytics don’t change the organization, decisions do. Active Intelligence delivers decision makers relevant, personalized insights in context, in the moment, for every moment, automating and scaling the decisions with powerful, trusted, and embedded analytics.

As we emerge out of the pandemic, we can use Active intelligence to further improve utilization of critical resources by initiating automated, trigger-based alerts and actions based dynamic data insights. It can also help to ensure more consistent patient care across cities.

Technology aside, access to data will continue to be key. Open data on vaccination rates will be critical to India being able to stay open in the long term, even with fresh outbreaks of the virus. We applaud initiatives like the Aryoga setu app which shows all the data related to vaccination including when you are due for your next vaccine and where you can take it. Opening vaccination data to the public also means better planning and predictability.

DQ: What are the strategies to advance Qlik’s data analytics for their customers in healthcare?

Varun Babbar: The world of analytics is shifting towards active intelligence. In the digital economy, real-time agility is necessary as customers have a ‘right-now’ mindset to expect real-time decision-making and taking immediate actions. Active intelligence has therefore unlocked the true potential of dynamic data insights with its automated trigger-based alerts and action-based analytics.

For example, a smart, real-time data dashboard for essential supplies can identify the dynamic demand for different items across regions to automatically prioritise sourcing and distribution to fulfil urgent requirements. The growth prospects of the healthcare industry have expanded beyond the point of care, with its virtualization-based treatment comprising both pre-diagnosis and post-treatments across the value chain.

The revamped healthcare reality in India has laid greater emphasis on the patient experience by introducing new models for community-based care. Upgraded and improved telehealth services will boost the current need for medical infrastructure for patients, end-users, governments, and enterprises.

As we thrive in the era of value-based care, there is a great need to balance better patient outcomes with a healthier bottom line. By combining all data and making it easy to explore, Qlik delivers the valuable insights that the healthcare sector needs to navigate that complex balance and make smarter decisions more quickly. The healthcare industry facilitated by technology will be a game-changer even in a life beyond the pandemic.