New analytics platform aims to reduce the burden of data preparation and analytics development for rapid clinical, quality and financial improvements
PINC AI, a technology and services platform of Premier, Inc, announced the launch of INsights, a self-service healthcare solution for the creation of customized, on-demand analytics.
INsights is a vendor-agnostic analytics platform that accesses PINC AI’s cleansed, standardized, and risk-adjusted healthcare data, covering over 45 percent of all U.S. hospital inpatient discharges. INsights users can leverage pre-developed analytics developed by PINC AI, as well as conduct customized data queries and visualizations using PINC AI or their own data sources. The platform will also serve as a development community, where users can crowdsource and share information, measures, queries and more with others.
“INsights is a flexible platform that enables healthcare users to create their own analytics to measure what matters most to them,” said Leigh Anderson, Premier’s President of Performance Services. “We are providing a reliable framework with data that is organized, simplified and easy to consume using any business intelligence platform the user chooses. We are also enabling users to capture additional value from their existing benchmarking and analytics, surveillance and decision support, and regulatory reporting and compliance without having to learn any new tools or techniques. In other words, we are simplifying advanced analytics and performance improvement in healthcare.”
According to a report by Anaconda Inc., data scientists spend a significant portion of their time on data preparation tasks, such as loading and cleansing data. This inefficiency reduces their ability to be consultants and storytellers of their organizational data. INsights plans to reduce this burden by providing access to pre-loaded datasets that are cleansed, normalized and linked together, automating all the data preparation tasks.
INsights will be hosted on Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, providing users access to a cloud-based platform and next-generation tools to accelerate their use of analytics and AI. In a statement, Tom Lawry, national director for Articial Intelligence, Health and Life Sciences at Microsoft said, “Microsoft is pleased to enable PINC AI with our cloud services, including Azure Synapse Analytics to help organizations accelerate their digital transformation journey. By bringing together our technologies, organizations can have the confidence that a world-class cloud provider offers, along with tools to enable AI and achieve more actionable insight from data.”
According to Premier, Early pilot-testing organizations leveraging INsights have used the platform to create analytics that assess and measure a host of quality improvement efforts, including patient safety indicators, lab order turnaround times, length of stay by specific conditions and time to treatment metrics. “INsights’ value is that it can be utilized by any of our members, whether they are large, multi-facility health systems or smaller, rural hospitals and provider practices,” said Anderson. “Because PINC AI already has clean and standardized clinical, quality, financial and operational data from our members, we are able to rapidly stand up INsights and provide high-quality analytics services more economically.”
Premier does not expect the launch of INsights to materially impact the company’s current fiscal 2022 financial guidance that was provided on November 2, 2021 or its expected multi-year, compound annual growth targets, adjusted for the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on its business, of mid-to-high single-digits for total net revenue, adjusted EBITDA and adjusted earnings per share (as defined in Premier’s most recent Form 10-Q filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission).
