Reimagining Healthcare Analytics

The mission of THB is to transform the healthcare industry from gut-based to data-driven, evidence-based treatment and decisions. The startup is dedicated to providing the tools and the team to identify and reverse potential health risks long before symptoms appear, and thereby, optimise the health of its consumers.

Technology|Healthcare|Big Data Analytics, THB is a clinical intelligence company that unlocks the power of healthcare data and leverages real-world evidence to empower healthcare organisations, drive smarter patient care and improve patient outcomes. THB is working with a network of 3000+ partner centres (HCPs, hospitals, research centres, and diagnostic labs) and generates real-world evidence across 20+ therapy areas from de-identified clinical datasets of 30mn+ patients.

THB is the brainchild of Akansh Khurana, Rohit Kumar, and Rajesh Pachar. Before that, Khurana was a management consultant at Bain & Company, Rohit was a manager (analytics) at American Express, and Rajesh was a software development engineer at Microsoft. THB was established in September 2015.

The Light Bulb Moment

Khurana is a Type-1 Diabetes Mellitus patient. He has been giving blood samples since he was young. The trouble was, he did not have access to his clinical data. He realised that applying the right analytics to such data can help to derive insights to improve his health and others with a similar medical condition.

So, What is the problem that THB is trying to solve?

THB is India's largest healthcare data exchange, according to the founders. It partners with healthcare providers to generate full-potential value from their clinical datasets. Their offerings include creating data lakes, driving personalised care/medicine for patients, generating real-world evidence research, and developing real-time surveillance platforms.

One of the leading applications of analytics in healthcare is offering support to medical practitioners in assessing and analysing health data with algorithms while calculating clinical risk in the general population.

Clinical Decision Support (CDS) services are one such offering, which is used in various healthcare providers to evaluate medical data in real-time, thereby influencing treatment, diagnosis and prescriptive decisions.

THB is automating clinical analytics, by building a client-agnostic analytical platform, with a simple plug-n-play data structuring engine, and a range of analytical modules to deliver insights.

"We believe that delivering analytical insights has to be a consistent and seamless process. It cannot and should not depend on individuals and manual interventions. Our starting point is India, given the market access and our relationships, but the platform we are building is globally relevant and scalable,” says Khurana.

Real-world evidence (RWE), the evidence generated by analysing data gathered from routine clinical practice, is being increasingly used by stakeholders in healthcare to make informed decisions. This evidence can be used across the product lifecycle, providing insights in areas like disease epidemiology, treatment effectiveness, safety, health economic value, and impact.

Team THB

Analytics and Big Data Market

Khurana points out that healthcare analytics can allow illnesses to be discovered at an earlier onset.

"Consequently, treatment might be more effective, and the disease better treatable. Secondly, treatment failures could be traced sooner and efficiently. Thirdly, it enables researchers and physicians to analyse historical data including the length of stay, patients having surgery, patients vulnerable to medical complications, patients susceptible to antibiotic resistance, sepsis, or other hospital-acquired diseases, potential causal factors of illness progression, complication rates, and co-morbidities."

The Indian healthcare analytics market is billed at $1 billion. Increasing penetration of healthcare technology system directly leads to new data streams and therefore spawns new opportunities for analytics. "We estimate that most of these are outsourced analytics from the US and developed markets to India. Our internal assessment says that the healthcare analytics market serving India providers and ecosystem is to the tune of $150-200mn. Most of this today is captured by consulting / advisory companies, and not necessarily pure-play analytics providers," Khurana adds.

Can analytics then be a game-changer for the healthcare industry?

Several limiting factors prevent the full potential of data analytics for pharma and healthcare industry in India.

1. Inconsistent data sources: A lot of data in India still moves on paper, and the breadth of data availability is limited. Pharma industry still relies on the traditional data streams, i.e. internal sales, operations, and external data from sales audit and prescription audit companies. Detailed clinical datasets on patient journeys and patient funnels are seldom available.

2. Fragmented and unstructured data: Fragmented data in various regions of the country play a huge role in the unavailability of relevant data streams in the pharma/healthcare ecosystem. Pharma company continue to operate with data silos created within one organisation. This data is unstructured to enable seamless and meaningful use.

3. Ambiguity in transition: The Indian healthcare ecosystem is still evolving, and the adoption of technology is slow and restricted. The new-age/affordable health tech systems like practice management, HIS / LIS, EMR this limitation are addressing this issue, but the point of departure is still weak. There is also an inherent ambiguity on the actual adoption and success of these systems, and the implied quality and accuracy of data.

Khurana believes that it's an exciting phase of evolution for pharma analytics in India, and the next five years will generate incredible value across the entire value chain – right from the adoption of technology to creation of new data streams to creating analytical models and establishing the importance of data analytics. The early adopters will have an added advantage of riding the steep learning curve that this industry is going to go through in the coming years.

Key Milestones

The reach is expanding and rising every day. The growth story has been remarkable since the last few years. The anonymised big data repository increased 2.5 times from ~1Cr to >2.5Cr unique patients. Their 2500+ data partners now span 65+ cities in India.

THB also launched DMR (Digital MR) to engage digitally with doctors. It enabled engagement with >50k doctors.

“We developed AI-powered predictive algorithms, launched multiple predictive platforms, risk calculators, and interactive platforms - including CKD prediction algorithm, diabetes risk assessment (DROP), breast cancer awareness wheel (BRAW)," adds Khurana.

THB also drove personalised patient education and engagement through our healthcare provider partners and demonstrated a definite improvement in patient outcomes, e.g., Improved average Hba1c by up to 40 basis points within six months.

"We kick-started registry programmes across a range of therapy areas, including critical illnesses such as cancer. For example, we track, review and analyse insights from across 200+ new breast cancer patients every month. We launched diabetes intelligence platform which tracks real-time longitudinal data from across 1000+ centres -- if you ever have a question associated with diabetes, rest assured, we have the correct quantitative answer," Khurana adds.

Tools and Technology

THB uses Machine Learning, AI, Natural Language Processing and Deep Learning to enable faster and better mining of clinical data. These technologies combined Big Data Analytics, and powerful parallel computing offers the potential to create a revolutionary way of practising evidence-based, personalised medicine. THB's current presence spans across five countries — India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Bahrain and UAE, with SE Asia expansion on the near horizon.

The Road Forward

THB, with the help of its big proprietary datasets on the Indian population, has engineered an RWE-backed platform to promote clinical research and studies in India. These RWE-backed insights have been published on breast cancer patients, diabetes control, allergic rhinitis, osteoporosis, antimicrobial resistance.

It also empowers the stakeholders in healthcare (providers, pharma, insurance, public health organisations) to leverage real-world evidence clinical datasets to generate clinical and commercial insights on Indian population across a variety of areas: disease epidemiology, disease prediction and clinical diagnosis, treatment pathways and outcomes, patient and doctor behaviors, clinical decision support, algorithms and clinical risk calculators.