Launching in the United States is the Vantage Health Technologies firm, which has its roots in South Africa and offers cloud-based solutions for addressing issues related to health inequalities.
Vantage employs artificial intelligence to transform health data into useful insights for payers, clinicians, and government health organisations serving marginalised populations. The company works in partnership with Microsoft to accomplish this goal.
The health-equity-focused dashboards that were being replaced by Vantage’s platform are the ones that required healthcare staff to run analytics and interpret the relevant action steps on their own. Vantage’s platform connects with Microsoft Teams and Outlook, and it is hosted on Azure.
According to Sargent, Vantage already has “half a dozen” partners in the United States, and the debut in the United States will make it possible for the firm to provide its solutions to a greater number of enterprises.
Since the company’s founding about 20 years ago, BroadReach Group has been active in promoting health equality in more than 30 nations all over the globe.
Sargent and Ernest Darkoh, M.D., the other co-founder of the organisation, first met each other when they were both students in medical school. They immediately began working together to combat the HIV epidemic in South Africa.
The first iteration of the corporation provided consultancy services in the field of public health. However, as Sargent put it, “around ten years into it, we learned that it is really difficult to operate a health system without data.”
In order to offer measurements on socioeconomic determinants of health and other important elements to healthcare access in a specific community, several groups have built health equality dashboards. However, Sargent and Darkoh came to the realisation that many providers, particularly those operating in less developed neighbourhoods, were unable to grasp the data that was presented by the dashboards.
Consider the treatment of diabetes as an example. According to Sargent, if a health plan wants to ensure that the outcomes they produce for blood sugar control are consistent across all of their member segments, Vantage will consider which actors within the company are involved in producing that result, what questions those actors need answered, and what actions those actors need to take on a daily and weekly basis.
Darkoh and Sargent’s work has garnered them international acclaim, earning them honours such as being recognised as one of the Social Entrepreneurs of the Year by the Schwab Foundation in 2015 and being featured by Microsoft in the documentary Humans and AI.
According to Sargent, the company’s goal in the United States is to integrate Vantage behind the scenes at institutions all around the nation so that more may be done with patient data in an effort to reduce health inequalities.
