Health Data and Interoperability Infrastructure Needs

We reached out to the Healthcare IT Today community to get their thoughts on the IT infrastructure needs in healthcare.  The responses we got were quite interesting.  Tomorrow we’ll share some of the responses to the more classic definition of IT infrastructure.  However, amidst the IT infrastructure responses we received a number of health IT experts talking about the importance of health data and interoperability infrastructure.

If the future of healthcare is built on the back of data, then it makes sense why health data infrastructure would be such an important topic.  Here’s a look at the insights our community shared when it comes to health data and interoperability infrastructure.

Parth Shah, Head of Product at AssureCare
In today’s healthcare landscape, data is accumulating and flowing from numerous digital sources. IT Infrastructure must be robust, reliable, and scalable to securely house and distribute large volumes of data.

One area that can make the most impact and often gets overlooked is data growth. We need to build a system that is resilient and reliable to accommodate the needs of petabytes of data. Through this we can achieve true digitization of healthcare.

Paulo B. Pinho, MD, Vice President & Medical Director of Innovation at Diameter Health
With over 1 billion annual US medical visits and a tenfold increase in data in the last 5 years, volume and velocity of ingestion pose challenges to interoperability. Additional obstacles stem from variability in completeness and syntax of multisource and multiformat data.

Despite existing data standards, upstream adherence by EHR vendors and providers has been inconsistent, obscuring downstream insights. Addressing clinical data quality uncovers solutions, improves efficiency and cost and optimizes care delivery.

Elizabeth Delahoussaye, Chief Privacy Officer at Ciox
Based on conversations with health IT colleagues across the country, a lot of healthcare providers are not ready for the 21st Century Cures Act’s October deadline to provide access to patients for all of their electronic health information. Providers are concerned about the siloed systems that they have within their own organizations and how to provide access. We know it’s possible, with the right systems, to provide patients with near real-time access to their medical records.

Rob Cohen, CEO at Bamboo Health
Care collaboration-facilitated by technology-between healthcare institutions is vital. Healthcare organizations should prioritize technology solutions for interoperable care collaboration within their IT infrastructure.

These solutions can plug into EHR and care management systems to provide proactive and real-time patient insights, delivering care teams the information they need when they need it. Patients then benefit from better health outcomes and institutions realize value-based care initiatives to meet their operational and financial goals.

Bill Miller, CEO at WellSky
The future of healthcare is in the home. Patients overwhelmingly prefer to receive care at home, and providers and payers also support this shift because at-home care models improve outcomes and patient satisfaction, shorten lengths of stay, and lower the cost of care.

In order to meet these goals and make at-home care successful, it will require seamless coordination between payers and providers. Using predictive analytics and effective care coordination, healthcare stakeholders can ensure all parties have the data-driven insights needed to provide the most appropriate type and level of care.

Neel Butala, MD, MBA, Chief Medical Officer at HiLabs
Healthcare organizations must have an IT infrastructure that can Adapt to changing data types and formats and Deal with noise (i.e. dirty data). Healthcare data is constantly changing, whether it is due to organic growth of enterprises or through new standards imposed from government agencies. As a result, organizations continually see different types of data in dynamic formats through exchange of data with other organizations. Furthermore, healthcare data is ubiquitously messy. Through working with many large healthcare payer organizations, HiLabs has consistently seen how the inability to deal with these changing data inputs or identify the signal from the noise in healthcare data can cripple an otherwise high-performing organization in its attempt to leverage its data for business intelligence.

Jon Kimerle, Head of Epic Solutions at Pure Storage
Data is the lifeblood of healthcare, yet organizations fall along a spectrum of how effectively they’re managing and using that data. Regardless of where an organization is in its transformation journey, however, one thing is certain: healthcare data must be protected and accessible.

As healthcare CIOs continue to modernize their organizations and drive agility, it’s critical that they:

  • Ensure healthcare data is centralized and interoperable. While centralized data storage is critical to keeping information integrated, accurate, and accessible, allowing data to flow quickly and ensuring reporting will be accurate and reliable, interoperability is just as important as shared data grows in scope and strategic value.
  • Invest in technologies that increase the ability to deliver strategic value. Reliable and scalable technology platforms not only help expand an organization’s value proposition and digital-first business models, but they drive true enterprise agility and support the alignment of desired outcomes and evolving customer expectations.
  • Prioritize security and compliance. Avoid breaches and noncompliance fines by staying up on regulations, and researching and investing in systems that keep sensitive healthcare data well protected and accessible. To both complement and fill any gaps present across trained staff, building a network of strong technology partners is becoming increasingly important to security.

It’s clear to me that many of the infrastructure challenges we will face in healthcare have to do with storing, securing, and sharing data.  Ensuring your strategy effectively plans for these needs is going to be important for every healthcare organization.

What do you think?  Are there other health data infrastructure efforts that health IT leaders should be thinking about?

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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