Interoperability requirements will underpin key health industry and health consumer trends
As the global healthcare industry grapples with tremendous challenges on both cost and quality fronts; the healthcare consumer is simultaneously undergoing an equally dramatic change in behavior, attitude and awareness. This new-age healthcare consumer will soon demand a significantly more active role in managing his/her own health needs as well as filtering and monitoring the relevant services that would be provided by the health industry.
At the foundation of these simultaneous yet converging trends of industry moving to patient centric care and the consumer moving towards demanding and receiving personalized and holistic attention; will be the demand for comprehensive, transparent yet secure flow of healthcare data, information and knowledge.
Currently the entire healthcare industry, globally across all sectors; is in the process of putting into place the basic transactional systems required to capture individual sector specific data needs for serving the healthcare customer through sector specific views. This process itself has been long, tortuous and has evolved over the last 20 years. Particularly in the US, this has resulted in an environment of extreme heterogeneity of systems that hold healthcare customer data – even within each individual sector such as payer, provider, pharmaceuticals, government, medical devices industry and retail health.
This rampant proliferation of niche systems has resulted in extraordinary obstacles to free flow of healthcare data; not least because of security and privacy concerns. HIPAA and related legislation was an important step towards enabling / mandating true interoperability of health systems.
Moving forward there will be a tremendously accelerating demand for the following types of interoperability requirements
a) Interoperability within individual sectors within the industry – as a basic requisite to view and analyze sector specific healthcare customer data
b) Cross sector interoperability will soon begin to demand extraordinary attention as the health industry moves towards true patient centric and personalized / holistic care.
Both these types of interoperability requirements need to be handled very differently even from a technology perspective
As I continue with these blog posts on interoperability, will delve deeply into various aspects of these, including key problems, trends, solutions and market demands in subsequent blog posts.
Suffice to say for now, that in the reality of the current technology landscape of the healthcare industry – interoperability needs and initiatives will form the basis of a significant portion of technology support in the move towards patient centric care.
