Interoperability Trends within the Healthcare Provider Sector
To begin diving deeper into interoperability within healthcare, let’s talk about interoperability within the healthcare provider sector. The healthcare provider industry is suffering from, what a colleague has very eloquently described as, ‘extreme heterogeneity’ of IT systems even within a single provider.
While I was working with a marquee healthcare provider – we had over 30 different applications, 10 different databases, 8 different server operating systems and more than 40 vendors supporting this ecosystem!! This is an extremely common scenario in this industry and is part of the great difficulty healthcare faces in managing it’s operations efficiently through technology.
The provider industry is approaching this problem through two different and competing paradigms
a) Rip out all these diverse applications and replace with a single monolithic end to end Hospital Information System / EMR / ERP.
This would work well for small organization with little investment in a few systems that have been recently (less than 5 years) implemented.
For those organizations which are large, complex, with long standing ingrained behavior patterns and processes – it becomes an absolute nightmare. Almost none has succeeded in successfully implementing such a strategy with a semblance of achieving the goal at reasonable cost, within reasonable timeframes and without impacting their businesses negatively.
b) Continue to work with disparate systems, optimize the number of applications through selective, prioritized consolidation, work with world class integration engine implementation and reach the most optimal mix of applications and systems necessary to provide the organization with an efficient and interoperable data flow.
This is the approach that most organization who wish to achieve true integration and seamless data flow with minimal costs and impact to the business, are moving towards.
It is thus becoming increasingly apparent that interoperability projects will very soon become the cornerstone of a provider’s IT strategy in supporting it’s business needs. With ARRA and the funding conditions that accompany it – meaningful use would be impossible without seamless data flow and therefore impossible without creating true interoperability.
The necessary products, solutions, platforms, skills and capabilities will very soon move from being a commoditized service currently delivered to low end IT players, to true value adds for the provider industry in it’s move towards automation and electronic data capture. This is very different from what will happen to HIS/EMR products and services – which will purely be associated with transaction data capture and delivered by a vast landscape of vendors and products.
