The following is a guest article by Loyd Bittle, CEO and Founder at Innovar Healthcare.
One of the things that stood out to me in a recent healthcare CIO event was when John Glaser said that “Dealing with the vendor community is a fact of life and essential.” This is true whether you’re a provider organization, an HIE, a vendor, or pretty much anyone in healthcare. We cannot do this alone. We need to work with partners. One area where we have seen this front and center is when it comes to how healthcare organizations approach interoperability and integration.
In the past, interoperability and integration were kind of an afterthought. We had a few point to point integrations and maybe a lab interface and we called it good. Now, every healthcare organization has hundreds of points of integration that they have to manage effectively. There literal business is dependent on those integrations working properly and even more important, the patients they serve.
This dependency on good integration and interoperability is only going to get more challenging as healthcare organizations embrace value based care. While some health systems are trying to buy up the entire spectrum of care, anti trust laws and other barriers mean that every healthcare organization is going to have to share information with their peers to effectively care for their patient population where they are at risk. This is just one of many reasons why interoperability and integration are important in healthcare.
The problem is that integration and sharing information has gotten harder. The industry has made huge progress in being able to share data between organizations, but what that now means is that there are hundreds of innovators out there that your organization needs to share data with effectively. Plus, now that you’re sharing with hundreds of organizations, it is even more important that you ensure you are using a well thought out approach to securing that information at rest, in transit, and at the receiving organization. Every healthcare organization should be asking how they can solve this problem at scale.
Making this even more challenging for healthcare leaders is that you can’t find integration staff. This was true before COVID and the great resignation. Now it is even harder. It’s always great to see a healthcare organization that wants to embrace integration and interoperability, but this is not plug and play work. These integrations take someone who understands the integration requirements on both sides of the integration to do this effectively. Plus, there is no better way to discourage your staff who is excited about a project than to tell them that they cannot use that software because you don’t have the staff required to do the integration. Or that it will be months before they can benefit from the new product they are excited about because the integration is going to take a long time.
Even if staffing is not an issue for your organization, there is still a learning curve for on site staff to be able to scale their integration work to hundreds of companies. This is a big reason why many are looking to outsource their integration capabilities since the outsourced integration provider has often already done the integration and knows the people on the other side. This will also mean (or should mean) that the integration company already has refined libraries that allow organizations to benefit from other people’s prior integration experience. This helps organizations do the integrations quicker and usually results in a higher quality integration.
Another question CIOs will be facing soon if they have not heard it already is can my integration technology scale to the size of the problem? I already shared about the need to scale to hundreds of companies, but does your current tech stack have the ability to scale to the volume of data sharing that is coming? You would think this would not be a challenge these days. The good news is that it should not be a problem if you are using the right technology. However, many organizations are still using technology that is not designed to scale to the problem.
The reality is that interoperability and integration in healthcare has gotten so much better that the demand for it is much greater which provides its own challenges. Plus, being able to do it effectively has become essential for an organization to care for patients effectively and run their business properly. Choosing the right partner for integration and interoperability will be an important driver of your organization’s success.
Want to learn more about what it takes to do an integration project successfully, check out our eBook on the “10 Best Practices for a Successful Integration Project.”
About Loyd Bittle
Loyd has had a successful career in the Healthcare software industry, starting as a Systems Engineer and advancing his career to Vice President (Mirth™ Group) at NextGen Healthcare before starting Innovar Healthcare.
Loyd has worked in the “trenches”, managed teams and departments, interacted with organizational leadership, and faced the challenges of the healthcare industry from top to bottom.
As his career has advanced, Loyd has been drawn specifically to the integration and interoperability challenges healthcare providers and software companies must address. His experiences leading many of the largest Health Information Exchange deployments in the country have enabled a unique understanding of how to scale large integration projects.
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