Innovaccer Health Cloud to Create Connective Fabric for Fragmented Healthcare Scene
Founded in 2014, Innovaccer is a healthcare technology company leading the Data Activation Platform that’s helping the industry realize the promise of value-based care. Its integration engine activates healthcare data, cleaning, aggregating, and delivering insights at the point of care. This ground-breaking solution streams analytics with unique insights and dashboards, automates workflows, and allows care teams to make real-time decisions. The name “Innovaccer” is a play on the words “innovation” and “accelerator”, which define what the company looks like.
At the time, there were some of the largest healthcare systems across the world asking for a unified cloud platform. After Innovaccer onboarded the first couple of customers in the space, it completely shut the rest of its business. Today, America’s largest healthcare organizations are connecting their care ecosystems on the Innovaccer Health Cloud. Its solutions have been deployed across more than 1,000 care settings across the country, enabling more than 37,000 providers to transform care delivery.
Innovaccer was established by three friends Abhinav Shashank, Kanav Hasija, and Sandeep Gupta. While Abhinav and Kanav were batchmates at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Sandeep and Abhinav met while working at a manufacturing company named Ingersoll Rand. The three soon realized the growing importance of data in developing smart strategies across industries. In mid-2015 and early-2016, they pivoted and started thinking about healthcare.
Tapping into the Siloed Healthcare Data
Over the last decade, the industry has spent billions of dollars in digitizing healthcare processes with great success. However, healthcare information remains disconnected for consumers, physicians, pharmacies, payers, and myriad other care providers. The data was distributed across multiple large silos. That data is distributed across data systems in various organizations that make the entire healthcare system unnecessarily complex, redundant, and prone to wastefulness.
As a result, combining, crunching, and analyzing this data efficiently and in real-time to deliver an in-depth understanding of the looming problems was a real challenge. This disconnected information has necessitated a unified patient record that is accessible across the care continuum. There’s a need to bring this information together using a cloud platform that not only unlocks the power of the data but also provides a platform on which new digital services and solutions can be built with native interoperability.
“Despite technology growing steadily, the deep-rooted inefficiencies in healthcare make it difficult to deliver patient-centered care. The fragmented nature of the current healthcare system is the biggest challenge we have to address in enabling healthcare to care as one and make care delivery substantially more efficient. Our work at Innovaccer has always been focused on creating innovative technology that can enable personalized care while reducing operational costs,” said Kanav Hasija, Co-founder and Chief Customer Success Officer at Innovaccer.
Healthcare still needs a lot of work to become patient-centered and connected by organizing information and making it more accessible. It’s important to make patient data seamlessly available to all providers along the patient’s care journey. Understanding that, Innovaccer combines its integrated Data Activation Platform and application suite with an extensive set of platform services and tools that allow its customers and third-party developers to leverage unified patient records to improve patient outcomes at lower costs.
“We have been fortunate to work with transformational healthcare initiatives that our amazing customers are engaged in. The vision of helping healthcare organizations care as one needs a connected and open technology framework. We are excited to be at the forefront of providing the tech platform for our customers to drive that change,” said Abhinav Shashank, Co-founder and CEO at Innovaccer.
From Gaining Insights to Bringing Data Activation Platform to Life
According to Sandeep Gupta, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer, when the three co-founders started Innovaccer, they initially wished to use our data activation platform to help any field or industry that needed it to explore big data to derive insight. However, once they looked at the US healthcare industry, they realized that Innovaccer’s Data Activation Platform could do so much more than just crunch data. That’s why in 2015, they left 70% of their revenue on the table to realign the company’s focus.
“There were hundreds of sleepless nights, and we spent thousands of hours developing our proprietary data activation platform, which was both robust and customizable. It helped us in developing tailor-made solutions for both large and small-size healthcare organizations and federal plans. We wanted to make using the solution a piece of cake for the people, and the platform is such that no one has to spend more than minutes trying to understand it. We have a dedicated clinical team of some of the world’s most renowned clinicians assisting us in our end-user approach,” he said.
When it comes to the roles that machine learning and data analytics play at Innovaccer, Gupta said that Innovaccer’s technology suite aims to assist care teams in the moment of care in a manner most suitable for them. The data is endless and we can always play with it. Throughout the data exercise, the company didn’t rely on just one type of insight. The founders strongly believe in the technology suite but they don’t do analysis based solely on their assumptions. They truly want to hear the voices of the people they serve, which sets Innovaccer apart.
The growth of any startup is heavily influenced by funding and leadership. Many young companies fail due to poor timing or choosing the incorrect market for their product or services, even if they have a brilliant team of founders and the right amount of early investors. Many companies may go from one market to the next in quest of expansion, but only a few have succeeded in acquiring or establishing themselves in the market. Let’s take a closer look at how Innovaccer manages to be so successful in such a short period of time.
#1. Set the Core Vision
At the time when Innovaccer was just founded, data was getting deconstructed on a global base and Big Data technologies had just started to gain traction as businesses were striving to gain accuracy and actionable statistics. Since those early days, the founders have set a very clear idea that their tech start-up would leverage data to empower enterprises. The vision was to develop something that would be remembered for years ahead, not merely a product with a flashy user interface.
#2. Explore the Market Fit
The co-founders soon foresee that data management’s slow growth was a gap that would persist for the next ten years. This gap made them realize their product-market fit in various sectors in the enterprise world. They started exploring the market fit early on, which allowed them to obtain insights from a variety of public and private data sources. They entered the corporate world to work with many big customers, which was where the growth of Innovaccer actually started.
#3. Foster a Data-Based Culture
Innovaccer’s main goal was to not only fix customers’ problems but also to acknowledge them as heroes. The company focuses on developing its platform in such a way that its consumers are recognized as heroes on a regular basis. With empathy and transparency going hand in hand, its key mission was to create a data-driven culture. As a team, Innovaccer has grown over the years with all employees working towards the well-being of its customers by fostering a targeted data-driven culture.
Sticking to the Company’s Culture Practices
Organizational culture is defined as the values, ideas, attitudes, and goals that characterize an organization. A company’s culture consists of the important intangibles that dictate how your team operates and does business. In many ways, the culture of one organization becomes part of its identity. As a healthcare technology company, Innovaccer has been successful in building a winning company culture which has been shown to improve levels of employee engagement, productivity, and performance. Let’s see what core elements the company builds its typical customer-centered culture on!
Element #1: Define Basic Values
When starting a business, there are a lot of factors to bear in mind. The establishment’s personnel, vision, and culture are the most important of them. The top rung of this ladder, however, is the latter-most. Your staff is a well-oiled machine working toward your goal, but your company culture is the engine that drives it. An organization is usually made up of people from many walks of life. Creating a culture that encourages Innovaccer to grow as individuals and provides them with a common goal to strive towards because they want to.
Element #2: Create Transparency
Transparency is one of Innovaccer’s five key values. The company does not believe in keeping secrets from its clients or staff. When employees are trusted, they are more likely to trust their supervisors, resulting in increased workplace confidence and consequently higher performance. Innovaccer’s attitude is to deliver the bad news first and foremost, giving everyone adequate time to address the problem and win. As a result, the company has been able to avoid situations that may have grown into full-blown disasters, allowing it to seize some of its best opportunities.
Element #3: Win as One
Businesses grow when they have a diverse group of people contributing to their brainstorming sessions. An effective organization not only attracts new ideas but also finds ways around establishing a culture of working together to solve a variety of challenges. Innovaccer’s philosophy is to enter a room and strongly dispute, then emerge with a commitment to one way. Once a decision has been made, there’s a need to stick to it even if others disagree, which is one of the best things about Innovaccer.
Element #4: Trust Your Employees
Employees who believe they are trusted tend to perform better and go beyond their job responsibilities. There is a very clear way of thinking within Innovaccer, which is “Don’t just work hard, don’t just be smart. Get stuff done!”. As a result, the company’s employees collaborate to determine which risks must be taken. Even if they fail, their failure will just serve as a lesson in what not to do in the future. At Innovaccer, employees are motivated to strive for more as a result of this cognitive process.
Element #5: Make Customers Heroes
Innovaccer believes in equal connections, which is why its personnel follow the “learn and collaborate” philosophy when dealing with customers. Even if there are differences, the corporation will not dismiss the opinions of its customers. Instead, it focuses on how to assist them to recognize any flaws in their strategy, and then the two parties collaborate to figure out how to attain the same goals in a more efficient manner. This way of thinking has aided the organization in acquiring new customers as well as retaining existing ones. Constructive criticism not only helps you comprehend some of your problems but also allows a company to grow in the long run.
Element #6: Learn about Empathy
One cannot be on the winning side at all times, and preparing for the bad times also includes imbibing a sense of gratitude when you win. Success is nothing but one mistake less than failure. Mistakes will always happen so just embrace them, correct them quickly, and move on. This is what makes Innovaccer unique. From so many different domains and lifestyles, all of them come together under the single umbrella of these five core values.
Lessons from Fighting against the Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the definition of value-based care. Taking this approach further, Innovaccer is collaborating with leading healthcare organizations across the nation to create a holistic virtual care network to deliver care directly to patients in their homes. With its entire suite of virtual care solutions, Innovaccer will assist healthcare providers in conducting virtual visits and connecting with their patients online with the same ease as an in-office visit.
One of the most valuable lessons learned is to feel free to provide actual testimony from a user regarding the product and how it has solved a problem, created efficiency, or improved processes at the point of care. Besides, through its collaboration with different healthcare organizations, the company realizes that the “one size fits all” approach is a myth because every patient is different. Simply put, people don’t perceive themselves as a collection of conditions.
Health is personal, intertwined with people’s perceptions and mindsets, with the environments in which they live and work, and the people with whom they interact. This personal approach is the key to Innovaccer’s relationship with its customers. The company helps them care for every single patient to suit their health needs. Not only is this a part of its core values, but also widely accepted by its customers.
The Bottom Lines
By making continuous efforts from the early days, Innovaccer has successfully organized the world’s healthcare information and helped healthcare organizations care as one. In many ways, the company’s success journey offers healthpreneurs important lessons to take away.
