HIE Integration: The Future Lies in the Past (and the Present)
Guest Post by Dave Bennett, Chief Technology Officer and Board Member of Axway NA. Dave regularly blogs on topics related to B2B integration, Cloud Computing, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), and Health Information Exchange (HIE).
When it comes to how the Health information exchange (HIE) market is integrating into their customers’ and partners’ systems (providers, patients, states and regions), the market has yet to catch up with its supply chain, high tech, manufacturing/CPG and financial services peers. Yet it is fielding the very same challenges these markets faced decades ago when faced with the problem of handling a host of varying semantics (information structure, meaning, and purpose, not just syntax) across critical value chains. And it’s doing it with new, supplemental innovations on hand.
HIEs and their customers and partners use different semantics in different ways, generating the very same security and privacy challenges the aforementioned markets once had to solve - but with undeniably greater urgency, since now we’re talking about the exchange of sensitive data contained in patient records. Today, providers are spending too much time looking at detailed medical records that don’t summarize the information the provider wants to see.
How do we make this data align semantically and make it useful at the same time? How can HIEs successfully and securely communicate a range of small to high-volume bursts of sensitive information despite the wide range of structures, patterns and protocols required to align providers, patients, provider networks and hospitals?
Well, the federal government has been investing a lot of money - digitizing health records and creating a fluent exchange forum - in an effort to answer these questions.
What this investment ought to be honing in on is the challenges that traditional value chains have always had to solve: processes, structures, semantics, security and trust.
Federal government efforts don’t directly address the hardest integration challenges, which center on the demands of semantic alignment, protocol alignment and trust alignment. In fact, most HIE-focused technologies seem to ignore these three patterns completely.
That’s a mistake. Because it’s these same patterns that have successfully been solved and deployed across very large value chain environments for quite some time.
And supplementing this legacy are new technologies - for instance, content-based routing, community management, and problem notification. Content routing enables routing of messages based on key elements you define. Yet, one of the problems of classic information exchange is that when a message errors out, the error message simply gets sent back. The sender isn’t engaged to correct it and it could take months for the error to receive human attention. But if you combine community management tools with the ability to receive notifications from registry services when there’s a problem with a particular data element, then you can alert community members, fix problems quickly and work to increase the overall value of the information moving through the hub.
Doesn’t it make sense that this approach - older, successful technologies supplemented by new technologies - should be deployed across HIE environments? Doesn’t it make sense to solve problems in a classic way when you can, and at the same time leverage new innovations?
