Innovative Companies | Health & Wellness
About 30 percent of the world’s data is stored in the health care industry, said Shannon Shallcross, co-founder and CEO of BetaXAnalytics.
Her company wants to use it to lower costs and improve quality.
Founded in 2016, BetaXAnalytics builds tools to collect and analyze health care data for employers, insurers and health care providers. Insights gleaned can help BetaXAnalytics’ clients identify inefficiencies, reduce costs and set more-effective strategies.
“The cost of health care in the United States is 18 percent of [gross domestic product],” Shallcross said. “If you compare that to countries with similarly developed health care systems, we have the most-expensive health care system, but the least-healthy people. We believe the solution to a lot of these problems lies in health data.”
Shallcross works with co-founders Chief Epidemiologist Mark Regine and Chief Technologist Phillip Murray to translate complicated data into meaningful insights. This can mean everything from using predictive analysis to target treatments at high-risk patients, to helping employers audit their health care expenses and identifying wasteful expenditures.
The team built a tool that uses artificial intelligence and natural-language processing technology to scan through millions of electronic medical records and identify areas in which patient coding is missing or incorrect. Medical coding affects patients’ risk scores, which Medicaid and other insurers use to determine reimbursements. Incorrect or missing codes can result in lower payouts to health care providers. One New York-based physician group discovered $1.3 million in coding errors by using BetaXAnalytics’ tool.
“Any health care provider system usually has a team of coding auditors looking through files and records,” Shallcross said. “Our tool shortcuts this process.”
Shallcross attributes BetaXAnalytics’ success to its experts (the company is affiliated with the University of Rhode Island) and its individualized approach.
