Influence Health, Inc. provides the healthcare industry's only integrated digital consumer engagement and activation platform. It enables providers, employers, and payers to positively influence consumer decision making and health behaviors well beyond the physical care setting through personalized and interactive multichannel engagement. Since 1996, the Birmingham, Alabama-based company has helped more than 1,100 provider organizations influence consumers in a way that transforms financial and quality outcomes.
Healthcare is a personal business. Each patient's needs are different and require an individual response. On the other hand-as the cost of providing healthcare services continues to rise- hospitals and health systems increasingly need to harness economies of scale by catering to larger and larger populations. The challenge then becomes to provide a personalized approach while operating on a large scale. Influence Health specializes in helping its healthcare sector clients solve this challenge by getting to know their existing and potential patients better and targeting each individual with the appropriate health services at the right time.
Advanced predictive analytics technology from IBM allows Influence Health to help its clients discover the factors that have the most influence on patients' healthcare decisions. By assessing the propensity of hundreds of millions of prospects to require specific healthcare services, Influence Health is able to boost revenues and response rates for healthcare campaigns, improving outcomes for its clients and their patients alike.
Targeting the Savvy Consumer
Today's healthcare industry is becoming more competitive than ever before. If the use of an organization's services drops, so do its profits. Rather than simply seeking out the nearest hospital or clinic, consumers are now more likely to make positive choices among healthcare providers. Paralleling efforts that are common in other industries, healthcare organizations must make increased efforts to market themselves effectively to both existing and potential patients, building long-term engagement and loyalty.
The keys to successful healthcare marketing are timeliness and relevance. If you can predict what kind of health services an individual prospect might need, you can engage and influence her or him much more effectively for wellness care.
Venky Ravirala, chief analytics officer at Influence Health, explains, "Healthcare organizations risk losing people's attention if they bombard them with irrelevant messaging. We help our clients avoid this risk by using analytics to segment their existing and potential prospects and market to them in a much more personal and relevant way."
Faster and More Flexible Analytics
As its client base has expanded, the total volume of data in Influence Health's analytics systems has grown to include over 195 million patient records with a detailed disease encounter history for several million patients. Ravirala comments, "With so much data to analyze, our existing method of scoring data was becoming too complex and time-consuming.
We wanted to be able to extract insights at greater speed and accuracy."

Questions for Case 4.5
1. What does Influence Health do?
2. What were the company’s challenges, proposed
solutions, and obtained results?
3. How can data mining help companies in the healthcare industry (in ways other than the ones  mentioned in this case)?