Vantage Health Technologies, a South Africa-based company that provides cloud-based solutions for health equity challenges, is launching in the U.S.
Partnering with Microsoft, Vantage uses artificial intelligence to translate health data into actionable insights for payers, providers and government health organizations serving underserved populations.
Vantage’s platform integrates with Microsoft Teams and Outlook and is hosted on Azure, replacing health-equity-focused dashboards that require healthcare workers to run analytics and interpret the appropriate action steps themselves.
“The whole idea is, in the future, you won’t be logging into a dashboard—Teams will just pop up in a chat and say, good morning, here are the three issues you need to worry about today,” said co-founder John Sargent, M.D.
Vantage already has “half a dozen” partners in the U.S., according to Sargent, and the U.S. launch will allow the company to offer its solutions to more organizations.
RELATED: Providers are putting more focus than ever on health equity. Here's how payers can support them
BroadReach Group has been working in health equity in more than 30 countries across the world since its start nearly 20 years ago.
After meeting in medical school, Sargent and co-founder Ernest Darkoh, M.D., set out to address the HIV crisis in South Africa.
The company started as a public health consulting business. But, “about 10 years into it, we realized it’s very hard to run a health system without data,” Sargent said.
Many organizations have developed health equity dashboards to present metrics on social determinants of health and other relevant factors to healthcare access in a given community. But Sargent and Darkoh realized many providers—especially in less developed communities—weren’t able to interpret the data the dashboards provided.
“The dashboard, in our experience, doesn’t really change behavior. There’s this gap between the dashboard and actually empowering somebody to make better decisions,” he said. “We use AI to fill that gap—how do you take all of these analyses and indicators and turn them into concrete, prescriptive recommendations.”
Take diabetes management, for example. If a health plan wants to make sure their outcomes for blood sugar control are consistent across their member segments, Sargent said, Vantage would consider which actors at the company are involved in producing that result, what questions they need answered and what actions they need to take on a daily and weekly basis.
Then, Vantage brings in data to produce action steps.
“Our whole philosophy is that if you can empower each individual person to do better, to do more, you shift the performance of that entire organization so that ultimately you help more people,” he said.
Darkoh and Sargent have won global recognition for their work, from being named among the Schwab Foundation’s Social Entrepreneurs of the Year in 2015 and spotlighted by Microsoft in Humans and AI.
In the U.S., Sargent said the company hopes to integrate Vantage behind the scenes at organizations across the country to do more with patient data to address health disparities.
“We believe firmly that data and analysis can really shift the dial, but it has to be processed and presented in the right way,” he said.