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Humana Enhances its Healthcare Data Usage with Power BI and Azure

Headshot of article author Debraj Ghosh

Humana is a leading healthcare provider which makes continuous enhancements in both healthcare service and accessibility for its customers.  To achieve these enhancements, Humana relies on a wealth of customer data.  This data serves as the foundation of the business intelligence which then empowers Humana employees to provide the best possible healthcare options for its customers.  Humana has recently used the versatile and combined capabilities of Power BI and Microsoft Azure, to go beyond just offering healthcare coverage to actually designing healthcare programs that proactively reduce the health risks of their customers.  With the rich capabilities of Power BI and Azure, Humana was able to create a self-service reporting platform which provides a unified profile of their members.

Sean Chandler, a Senior Business Intelligence Engineer at Humana, met with the Microsoft Mechanics team to discuss how Humana is leveraging Power BI and Azure to analyze and view the healthcare profiles of its large customer base and design healthcare programs which reduce their health risks.  In the video, Sean talks about how Humana uses ‘social determinants of health’, which include categories such customer’s living conditions, communities, and social interactions, to inform metrics that can help forecast the health outcomes of their patients.  To gain deeper insight, Humana then correlates the data from these categories with other information such as pre-existing health conditions, age, ethnicity, gender, and many other social factors.  Once Humana correlates this data, it can intervene to address any gaps seen in a customer’s healthcare requirements and improve that customer’s healthcare experience and reduce risk factors.

Humana’s customers gain tremendous benefits from this data-driven approach but the challenge for Humana has been how to efficiently analyze data which comes from a variety of different sources and from multiple internal and external teams.  In fact, Humana’s Social Determinants of Health screenings data is created from 7-9 different sources.  Humana’s journey to create this enhanced healthcare experience for its customers from millions of data points is an inspiring story that Sean covers in this Mechanics show.  Remarkably, the visuals and analysis that Humana was able to assess across all this data took only three months to create.  Check out the show and get the details on how Human utilizes Power BI and Azure as Sean covers:

  • Modeling and business logic applied to create a rich, unified self-service reporting platform on member data
  • Applying the Power Query Editor to streamline processing of large volume data sets
  • Using the Power BI Visuals marketplace to customize and enhance data reports
  • Treemap filtering in the data report
  • The future with Azure Databricks

 

Humana’s Sean Chandler discusses the novel Self-service Reporting Platform of customer profiles built with Power BI and Azure

 

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Also, check out these other great Microsoft Mechanics videos featuring the Power Platform: