STRATEGY: A step towards a true SAAS based platform

Introduction:

With increasing acceptance for risk-based contracts, a robust care management system is one of the biggest assets for any healthcare organization. An ideal care management system should be designed to increase the efficiency of care providers so that they can provide quality care at the right time to all the patients.

One of the critical components for any care management solution is the workflow automation system that based on business requirements identifies the patients and assigns them to the right set of care managers. The criticality of the correct assignment can be gauged from the fact that the entire operation of a care provider is impacted if the patient cohort is assigned to an incorrect set of care managers.

Amongst Innovaccer’s key offerings, Care management application, InCare is powered up by an automation system known as STRATEGY to provide the best quality of care to millions of lives across 20+ customers.

Product evolution

“Strategy” is defined as a unique set of business configurations for patient selection and patient allocation. Typically a care provider can have multiple strategies executing daily to manage day-to-day business operations.

Over the last 2 years, STRATEGY has evolved vastly to automate workflows for InCare. Product has matured from a separate service application for every customer to a common product capable of supporting over 14,000 business configurations based on which a patient cohort can be assigned to a set of care managers. Complete execution of patient selection to patient assignment is completed within 2 minutes even for a data set as large as 15,000 patients. Turn around time for introducing any business rule change has reduced from over 2 months to days.

Very recently, module played a critical role for one of our key customers to manage the COVID-19 pandemic by effectively allocating over 12,000 patients to the intended care providers on a daily basis.

Challenges

Despite being a great success story in terms of efficiency and scalability, STRATEGY remained an enigma for customers as well as internal stakeholders. Complete product was managed and monitored by the product engineering team through back end services. Care managers were dependent on the customer success team and customer success team was further dependent on product engineering for making any minor tweaks in the deployed configurations. Average ETA for any configuration change in the system is around 3 days due to the number of stakeholders involved and the inter-dependencies.

The new product avatar

To address this challenge, a focused team was formed with one goal to make the customer engineering self-reliant. With this vision, the product has evolved through which the customer success team can create, manage and monitor the deployed strategies without any dependencies. By leveraging the new avatar of the product, the customer success team can configure the business changes on the fly. The SLA of 3 days is further expected to reduce to minutes. Dependency on the product team for an average of 30 SD tickets in a week is expected to be reduced to 3.

Road ahead

Long term vision for the product is to build an entirely configurable solution for the care providers who can leverage our platform-level capabilities for automating different workflows through an intuitive UI. With the absence of any such offerings from competitors, STRATEGY can emerge as a key differentiator and strong USP.

The envisioned product will unlock unique business value at an organization level and takes us a step closer to a true SAAS based platform.

More self-serve functionalities are part of our road map for enabling different stakeholders.