HBI Solutions
Clinical-Based, Real-time Predictive Analytics for Better Patient Outcomes

Having spent most of his career serving diverse stratums of healthcare, Eric Widen was enthusiastic to embark on his next journey—an altruistic vision he and his company’s other two co-founders conceived to improve healthcare. It began over hallway conversations with then Stanford colleagues Bruce Ling and Karl Sylvester. “The vision was to identify patient risk and inform the care team of those risks to guide treatment and proactively improve patient health,” begins Widen, Co-founder and CEO, HBI Solutions. “The company was founded around the concept of using data to keep people healthy and specifically identify high-risk patients to enroll them into a proactive care management program.”

Widen points out that while value-based contracting is being touted as the next big advance in healthcare, most healthcare organizations are unprepared. Addressing this trend, HBI solutions offers a portfolio of easy to use solutions that include predictive risk models, reports, dashboards, and scorecards for driving improvement in readmission management, population health, and risk management. “We have built a very specific engine empowering existing platforms and intelligently automate care management processes with existing solutions. The engine easily integrates into existing platforms including enterprise data warehouses, electronic health records, and interoperability solutions,” explains Widen. The Spotlight Risk Model Engine is the foundation of the predictive analytics and performance analyses the firm offers to healthcare organizations. It takes in any dataset, including EHR, claims, billing and unstructured data, and provides a series of real-time risk models that continually update as new patient data enters the environment.

In identifying patients most at risk, the firm’s precision health application assigns each patient a risk score showing the probability of a disease or care event. “For example, if someone has a score of 60 for an emergency room visit, it means they are 60 percent likely to visit in a 12-month period. We also give the 12-month clinical and encounter history of a patient to help identify the modifiable risk factors so that the care team can quickly apply those interventions,” illustrates Widen. The firm offers over 30 different risk models, which help in analyzing patients to predict diverse chronic diseases and high-cost disease events like heart attack, stroke and more.

We have built a very specific engine empowering existing platforms and can turbo-charge care management processes with existing solutions

HBI’s customer base includes health systems, federally qualified health centers, accountable care organizations, payers, health information exchanges, and technology vendors helping them proactively identify patients at risk and improve care at a lower cost. Bangor Maine based St. Joseph Healthcare was one of HBI’s early adopters. The region is home to some of the oldest and poorest patients in the state, driving a lot of utilization. When the health system first started to focus on care management, they struggled to identify high-risk patients and lacked the right tools to identify and intervene with patients before they showed up for care or suffered a serious medical event.

They began working with HBI through the state’s healthcare information exchange, HealthInfoNet. “They were doing risk gratification manually. We completely automated their workflow and saved nursing time, reduced readmissions and emergency use, and helped them avoid readmission penalties,” states Widen.

The core value of the firm lies in its proprietary algorithms that update in real-time and continuously learn from the client data. “The risk algorithms that we provide are not generic and static, and a patent’s risk score links directly to the evidence based interventions required to mitigate that risk,” extols Widen. With experience across patient care, machine learning, research, and operations management, HBI solutions looks forward to global expansion bringing their innovative solutions to customers worldwide.