Jolly Nanda, Founder and CEO/COO of Altheia loves to learn,and has been deemedcurious about both the strategic and tactical side of the industry. She has chosen to play multiple roles within it so that she can get an end to end perspective of healthcare. According to Jolly, technology can’t solve everything, so one has to figure out how to integrate new technology with existing workflows, and what the ability of an organization is to embrace the technology. “People forget that the health care industry is a service industry, and it is a slow moving one. It has multiple constituents that adopt technology at different paces, which needs to be taken into account,” adds one of the most innovative woman leader.

Jolly has been pushing the envelope of healthcare data solutions to reduce costs and improve outcomes for member populations. “What we have learned by being in this industry and because it’s a service industry the technology and data is highly variable,” explains Jolly. “The adoption of industry standards is variable which causes an issue for the industry; without common standards the resulting analytics is also variable.” Altheia’s purpose and goal is to make a solution that is accessible to all levels of the market, consumers, providers and insurers. They want to fill the gap for all the stakeholders and ensure value is there for all stakeholders. “We believe that only when everyone is winning does the whole system work better and produce savings for the entire ecosystem,” adds Jolly.

Addressing Variability

“We believe that variability will be there for some time. What makes us unique is that we address the variability head on by absorbing that complexity in our solution allowing us to be much more predictive and reduce costs in healthcare,” says Jolly. “Basically, we decided you can’t move a mountain, but you can tunnel through it!”

Altheia leverages the power of big data and artificial intelligence to bring true visibility, leverage, and control over the imminent and longer-term health risks within the member population. They are using AI to address the variability of the data and are trying to understand patterns in the incoming data stream adapting to the variability. Jolly and her team also wants to focus on portability for the patient so their entire medical history can truly travel with them. The results of using AI and big data frees up the data so consumers are empowered to have more meaningful conversations with their providers. “We are providing disease prediction to all parties while making sure we are remaining HIPPA compliant,” she adds.

Becoming Efficient

An Entrepreneur must exercise good judgement in solving complex problems related to all aspects of the business. Similarly, being an early stage startup, the company’s entire sales plans have been disrupted owing to the Covid-19 pandemic. “Everyone we need to talk to is busy on the front line or working to realign their workforce,” says Jolly. “We want to support the industry none the less, so we pivoted to analyzing data to predict hospital bed utilization at a county/parish level. This data can help the industry see where they have needs and gives them the time to adjust their plans. In addition, we have to adjust our plans to a longer runway. We need to use this time to improve our product and enhance our value proposition which given our new economic landscape is even more critical.”

In addition to producing data at a local level,the company has plans to produce a predictive model for antibody tests. “We need to wait until more test data is available to produce a predictive model for risk by locality,” says Jolly. “We will also be able to use that data to predict who is more susceptible to getting the more aggressive forms of Covid-19 with that testing.”

Altheia plans to add more models beyond their current disease states to help push the needle on cost. They also want to use their platform to release new functionality for automation in clinical settings that will reduce the administrative cost of care. “For example, if you have diabetes care managers send out appointment reminders, script reminders etc. we can find the patterns and automate the whole process. Doing this will remove the need for human interaction and outreach,” elucidates Jolly.