Supernova Award Category
The Problem
The business problem Cardinal Health faced was around improving how patient care is delivered by simplifying a complex environment, reducing costs and improving healthcare.
Changes in healthcare regulations and mandates around population health only increase the pressure on healthcare entities to control costs. Much of that cost resides in the medical supply chain and with labor costs, and a lack of detailed, reliable, real-time data is a major obstacle to reducing those costs.
Jeff Graham, Principal, Data Analytics at Fuse by Cardinal Health said, “We were running out of tricks on how could make larger data sets work together, and we kept asking ourselves: What’s the next thing?”
Specific opportunities included the need to:
- Improve cost effectiveness of how healthcare is delivered
- Create predictive analytics to control supply chain and labor costs with large data sets
- Manage predictive analytics to help anticipate the path of medicine delivery to multiple locations
The Solution
Cardinal Health focused on analytics innovation by deploying both Teradata and the Hadoop Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) to make changes in distribution changes. This leveraging big data to improve outcomes and reduce costs through predictive analytics.
HDP allows enterprises to capture, process and share data in any format and includes the necessary components to manage a cluster at scale and uncover business insights from existing and new data sources. “We didn't want to be locked into proprietary software and Hortonworks provided us with a 100 percent open source solution,” Graham said.
The team is able to leverage the power of big data with not only internal data sources, but with freely accessible external data sources like data.gov. Cardinal Health merges the data with its own logistics info and helps provide better insights for providers.
The results
Cardinal Health addressed analytics innovation, they were unable to accurately assess supply chain distribution. Given Healthcare is one of the biggest areas of opportunity for big data initiatives, it was a perfect opportunity to capitalize on massive amounts of information to streamline processes and improve patient care.
With the 100-percent open source Hortonworks Data Platform, Cardinal Health can leverage existing data assets and extend existing investments in applications, tools and processes.
“If we had any questions or challenges, they were always there to support us and we are able to get to the people who actually helped developed Hadoop.”
“With a unified strategy and leveraging the right technology, it changes how people operate and makes them more efficient and innovative,” said Graham.” By using predictive analytics, business leaders are able to make decisions and connecting suppliers with providers for better patient care.
Metrics
The results and metrics around leveraging big data are not only in cost reduction, but have also enabled data-driven decision making across the company. For example, Cardinal Health is now able to:
- 50 percent time savings in massaging data – enabling workers to be more efficient and work on research versus reporting
- Anticipate the path of flu epidemics and deliver medicine to the most appropriate locations
- Work with suppliers to be more effective in what drugs are being used, and for which patients
- Drug cost optimization capability that allows pharmacies to evaluate their options
“There’s a lot of open data on how drugs are used and what their efficacy is and what are issues when using one drug versus another,” said Graham. “By using external data to enrich our more traditional data sets, we’re helping provide better insights that bring suppliers, providers and patients together with real value.”
Disruptive Factor
Analytic innovation, improved business processes and a talented workforce is the true disrupter. Because end users get secure, self-service access to Hadoop through the interfaces – this allows access for insights impacting supply chain and patient care.
This gives Cardinal Health a huge competitive advantage to have predictive analytics in healthcare – particularly when you can see a flu outbreak on the west coast and understand where vaccines need to be distributed to be effective.
Shining Moment
Cardinal Health retained the No. 1 spot in the 2014 Healthcare Supply Chain Top 25 for the fourth consecutive year. The 2014 ranking identifies organizations across the value chain that are focused on reducing supply chain inefficiencies, while improving the quality of healthcare. These leaders optimize their capabilities, while preparing for changes that population health models will drive through the supply chain.