The following is a guest blog post by Stephane Vigot, President of Caristix, a leading provider of healthcare integration products and services. This post is part of the Optimize Healthcare Integration series.
The push for interoperability is on. What’s at the core of interoperability that truly supports next generation analytics, real patient engagement, true care coordination, and high value population health? Data exchange through interfacing. And that means HL7.
HL7 represents 95% of interfacing in hospital environments for clinical systems and many other information systems in healthcare. Many people make the error of thinking HL7 is just simple strings, but it’s a lot more than that. It’s a system of data organization, a dynamic framework that establishes the base of data exchange through its specifics, syntax and structure. But, despite standards, if you take two identical systems, same vendor, deployed in two different environments, you’ll find discrepancies 100% of the time when it comes to data management.
What’s the result? It takes too long to take systems live. And that means time, money, resource drain, and headaches for integrators, maintenance and quality teams. The most critical impact is on essential clinical care. Beyond that, this negatively impacts your short and long term business goals over time. This impact will grow with the increasing demands of interoperability, particularly with the drive for automation and easy data access and analytics.
There are three primary challenges that feed into this problem of getting a system live. These are:
Aligning the integration goals for business and technology users – This step alone will differentiate success or failure. Without a clear picture of your goals and environment from day one, you can’t measure the required investment and resources. Project planning becomes a wild guess. How do you get everyone involved on deck with a common understanding of the overall project? Is it crystal clear how your new system fits into your existing ecosystem in the context of your data flow and structure? Do you know what information you need from whom, when? Is all documentation readily available? Are the business impacts of the interface understood?
Complete and clear data transformation requirements – It’s common to manually compare outdated specs, list the differences and jump into the code. This makes it virtually impossible to quickly come up with a complete list. Complete requirements are not identified until too late in the project, sometimes not until it’s in production. Are all data flows and system workflows identified? Are the system’s data semantics clear? Are documented system specs accurate? Has customized data been included? Are all the transformations and mappings defined? Have you automated the processes that define requirements?
Testing/Verification – Your QA team knows this is about a lot more than making sure all the dots are connected. You want to get this right before your go live and avoid handling data related emergencies in production with constant break-fix repairs. Are you doing enough testing before go live so your caregivers can count on applications being completely functional for their critical patient care? Are your test cases based on your requirements? Are you testing against your clinical workflows? Do you include edge cases and performance in your testing? Are you testing with de-identified production data that accurately represents your system’s data flow and needs? Is your testing HIPAA compliant? Are you prepared for ongoing maintenance and updating with reusable test cases backed by reliable and repeatable quality measures? Is your testing automated?
What’s the most efficient solution to these three challenges? Productivity software that supports your integration and workflow process from start to finish. With the right solution, you understand the big picture before you start with complete requirements built upon your specifications that set you up for robust system testing and maintenance. The right solution will cut your project timelines in half, reduce your resource drain and costs, and guarantee predictable results while streamlining the repetitive tasks of your teams. In addition, gap analysis, automatic specification management, HL7 message comparison and editing, debugging tools, PHI de-identification, documentation building, and team collaborative depositories should be included. As seen in the charts below, savings of up to 52% can be realized through optimization with productivity software.
Do these healthcare integration challenges resonate with you? What is your organization experiencing? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Caristix, a leading healthcare integration company, is the sponsor of the Optimize Healthcare Integration blog post series. If you’d like to learn more about how you can simplify your healthcare integration process, download this Free Whitepaper.
About Stéphane Vigot
Stéphane Vigot, President of Caristix, has over 20 years of experience in product management and business development leadership roles in technology and healthcare IT. Formerly with CareFusion and Cardinal Health, his experience spans from major enterprises to startups. Caristix is one of the few companies in the health IT ecosystem that is uniquely focused on integrating, connecting, and exchanging data between systems. He can be reached at stephane.vigot@caristix.com
