Dr. Nick van Terheyden, host of HealthcareNOW Radio show The Incrementalist, recently sat down with HealthEC CIO and Chief Data Scientist, Sita Kapoor, to discuss high-volume data processing in healthcare and the role of artificial intelligence in delivering clinically actionable insights to caregivers.

The radio show seeks to highlight incremental changes being used to advance other industries and consider how they can be applied to healthcare. Mrs. Kapoor’s background as a data scientist and mathematician managing satellite telemetry data in real time certainly yielded lessons that she brought to her 20+ year career in healthcare. From her work with NASA to helping build the healthcare industry’s first data clearinghouse, her goal has always been to quickly identify data anomalies and present that information to stakeholders in a way that prompts people to take action. In her interview with Dr. van Terheyden, Mrs. Kapoor charts the work that brought her and the HealthEC team to where they are today. The company’s mastery of integrating claims, beneficiary, practice provider, and lab data predates EHRs, HIEs, and Meaningful Use. HealthEC continues to focus its efforts on creating a clean, comprehensive master patient index, using algorithms that yield an 89% match rate.

In the interview, Mrs. Kapoor goes on to share insight into:

· Data quality best practices, including determining the source of truth

· Using ADT data and quality measures to drive actionable interventions

· Risk stratification’s role in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic

She champions reliable data sets as a foundational element in successfully layering AI and machine learning into healthcare delivery models. “As a technologist, I feel we have the technology solutions we need to advance care. We just need the business rules and the economics to be put into place now,” says Mrs. Kapoor.

“I do believe we must come closer as an industry. Data sharing has to become second nature in healthcare. To truly make an impact on us—because we’re all patients—we need to be able to give these actionable analytics tools to the right people who can create interventions and new care pathways.”

Listen to the full radio interview here: The Incrementalist: Sita Kapoor, CIO and Chief Data Scientist for HealthEC