Welcome to HSR.Health, home of Health Solutions Research, Inc. (HSR). This platform uses data on the social determinants of health to identify who may be at risk of developing addictions or experiencing adverse outcomes – helping government agencies, health systems, clinicians, and others mitigate risk before it evolves into something real.
To be clear, you have not entered a scene from Minority Report. But the company’s mission is similar to the PreCrime department of that futurist world: stop would-be problems before they become problems. There are no cogs or rolling balls here – just a small company with global reach built upon a geospatial health analytics platform it developed in-house.
What Matters? Everything.
What determines whether you are healthy or not? Lots of things: where you live, where you work, the quality of the food you eat, the quality of your housing, the quality of the air and water, what transportation systems are available, your demographics, education level, income, employment – the list goes on. HSR puts these data through their geospatial health analytics platform, to understand which factors are leading to specific health outcomes.
“We can look at any social issue, any health issue in a specific region – state, county, city or ZIP code, and draw out specific interventions to improve that health issue,” said Ajay K. Gupta, HSR.Health CEO. “We can get granular or general – it’s very powerful.”
Once they’ve determined a means to identify those at-risk from within a population, the company works with partners to propose solutions. And the solutions take the form of whatever is needed to solve a problem.
“A solution for opioids would look wildly different than a solution to reduce cases of pediatric respiratory challenge,” explains Ajay. “Because to be effective, any health solution needs to account for specific social drivers that cause the problem and address them.”
Here are just a few areas the company is focused on:
The U.S. Opioid Crisis
Using their geospatial health analytics platform, HSR.Health is able to look at the location of overdoses, prescriptions, drug sales, drug deals, and a wealth of other data, and extract from it a sense of overall supply and demand. From there, they’re able to create an algorithm that helps them identify who may be at risk for opioid addiction, diversion, or overdose.
Soon, HSR will be conducting a validation trial taking historic data on addiction, overdoses, and treatment received, and running their process on it to identify high-risk individuals.
“When the data from those high-risk individuals correlates to individuals who in fact did have an overdose, that validates our technology’s approach,” said Ajay. “Then we can use the same approach to identify new patients who are at risk and may benefit from intervention.”
Barriers to Patient Transportation
To understand how access to transportation affects healthcare outcomes, HSR.Health created a geospatial system to analyze how people get from where they live and where they work to where they receive healthcare.
“We were able to identify transportation barriers and help the local counties, cities, community health systems develop transportation solutions for those problems,” said Ajay. “We also recommended potential changes to the current footprint of healthcare locations – moving services from one location to another or adding new service locations to improve overall accessibility for their patients.”
HSR.Health found that transportation systems had a role to play as well. “Making small changes to existing bus routes so patients and their families can get from population centers and employment centers to healthcare facilities, can have a transformative impact on the accessibility of care,” said Ajay. “That’s something that will help certainly help health outcomes as well – even if it’s outside of healthcare.”
Patient Diagnosis
HSR.Health believes that a patient’s social data could also be included in the basic information clinicians use to diagnose a patient. For instance, education, housing, status, employment, food security, and other data that are related to where the patient lives and works could be considered at diagnosis, giving clinicians a more complete picture.
Small Company, Global Presence
HSR.health may be a relatively small company and growing, but they’ve already been making a name for themselves both here and abroad. A member of their board is the executive director of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), an authority on open standards in geospatial technology.
In early 2019, the company’s home state of Maryland invited HSR to join its official delegation to the Arab Health Exhibition and Congress 2019. In the Middle East, the area’s national healthcare systems are in the process of transforming into world-leading health systems that more successfully meet its people’s needs now and in the future.
Our geospatial approach to analyzing the underlying issues that impact healthcare cost and outcomes is incredibly well-suited to their interests in advancing the state-of-the-art of healthcare delivery on a global basis,” said Ajay.
We can’t wait to see what HSR.Health comes up with, and how it will compare to our own system here in the US.
Why .Health?
The decision to go with a .health domain was simple, “We’re a healthcare company,” said Ajay. “We want everyone to know that we’re working to make everybody healthier while reducing costs.”
How to Get Involved
Every year, HSR sponsors an event to raise money to support its research efforts. This year, HSR is sponsoring The Virginia Wine Country half marathon to raise money to support programs to end infant and maternal mortality. Register today to lace up your running shoes with the team at HSR.Health on June 1, 2019 in beautiful Loudon county, right outside Washington, DC. And if you don’t run, don’t worry – there is a wine festival at the conclusion of the race as well!
Does HSR’s mission align with yours? The company is always looking for innovative companies in the geospatial and healthcare space to partner with. Visit HSR.health to learn more.