Band-aid solutions no substitute for holistic data integration strategy

Interoperability remains one of the top buzzwords in healthcare. In today’s digital world, true systematic interoperability for a health system provides unfettered access to health data. Actionable data provides support for decision making, guides preventative care, provides analytics, ensures quality measures are met, and enables quality risk management. But when access to health data creates inefficiencies to workflows, various stakeholders/users are forced to use band-aid solutions and workarounds to gain quick access to the information needed for providing quality, informed patient care.  

As healthcare technology continues to advance at its current rapid pace, healthcare organizations need to ensure their data interoperability is guided under one holistic, uniform strategy for the entire organization. Not only does a uniform strategy ensure efficiency through consistent connectivity between data applications, but it makes healthcare data more manageable and reduces the operational costs of supporting data integrations and workflows.

For example, most health systems have multiple interface engines and multiple third-party applications that span their population health, analytics, digital health, patient engagement solutions, and so on. The integration strategies for the interfaces and third-party applications are often not well thought through and have high operational overheads. 

Where there is a patchwork of products for data management and interoperability solutions, inefficiencies lead to significant operational and management overheads. There is a need for a simple, uniform platform strategy for integrating all the systems, whether they are EHRs, practice management systems, devices, third party applications, or CRM/ERP tools. 

One of our partners, Dr. Paramjit Chopra, CEO of MIMIT Health, said, “Interoperability is about getting the right information to the right people at the right time to make the right decisions for the right rewards.” 

A data interoperability platform strategy should always be about enabling data to seamlessly flow across the healthcare eco-system to help providers deliver the “care” in healthcare with ready access to data required to make better clinical decisions. Simple and scalable setup and support of this type of an interoperability platform is important to cut down operational overheads and costs while supporting improved efficiencies.

Healthcare applications and organizations burdened with creating a scalable and uniform data management strategy around data aggregation and seamless connectivity to disparate data sources may feel short-term band-aid solutions can fit the bill. But partnering with an experienced data aggregation and connectivity expert to handle the complex back-end interoperability solutions allows HIT vendors and healthcare organizations to connect with disparate healthcare data faster and at scale, while keeping their internal resources focused on their core business. 

An experienced data connectivity partner can enable speed to market which can be the most important differentiator for HIT vendors and healthcare organizations.