Opportunities and Considerations for Healthcare IT Leaders and Planners
Healthcare organizations (HCOs), Reference Labs, and Imaging Centers around the world are looking to innovative digital technology to streamline clinical workflows, improve patient care, and boost business performance. But legacy IT systems and practices often stand in the way. Deploying new digital healthcare solutions across the enterprise is a daunting proposition for many IT organizations.
Today’s healthcare IT environments are notoriously fragmented. Until recently there were no widely adopted, universal standards for formatting and exchanging healthcare data.1 Each healthcare application vendor and system provider took a different approach.
Historically, most healthcare IT organizations implemented point-to-point connections or deployed on-premises data integration engines to transform and route dissimilar data from disparate sources. Today, many organizations rely on aging on-premises integration platforms that impair application performance and are difficult and expensive to scale and maintain.
To make matters worse, many healthcare IT organizations are plagued by staffing shortages. Hiring and retaining IT talent is a challenge. Over 50 million people in the US quit their jobs in 2022 as part of the “great resignation” and healthcare is an industry that was hit particularly hard. Today, many healthcare IT teams are struggling to do more with less, and don’t have the time and resources to administer and extend their legacy data integration systems.
Fortunately, help is on the way. Forward-looking health IT leaders are turning to a new generation of cloud-based data integration platforms to simplify operations, overcome staffing challenges, and accelerate the pace of innovation. This guide reviews the operational and financial benefits of a cloud-based healthcare data integration engine and provides tips for building a business case, evaluating a platform, and ensuring a successful outcome.
What is a Healthcare Cloud Integration Platform?
A healthcare cloud integration platform is a state-of-the-art data integration solution, delivered as a remotely hosted, fully managed service for ultimate operational simplicity, agility, and economics. It helps you streamline integration efforts and address new business, technology, and regulatory requirements—quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively.
Specifically conceived as a platform as a service (PaaS) offering, a cloud integration platform is built from the ground up with speed, resiliency, and scalability in mind. A cloud integration platform is:
- Architected to deliver high performance and availability
- Designed to protect data privacy
- Equipped with easy-to-use tools for interface analysts and app developers
- Engineered and priced to provide cost-effective, pay-as-you grow scalability
- Backed up by service level assurances for peace-of-mind
Download the Decision Guide
Download the The Business Case for a Healthcare Cloud Integration Platform decision guide to learn more about:
- What is a Healthcare Cloud Integration Platform?
- What are the Key Features and attributes of a Healthcare Cloud Integration Platform?
- Why a Cloud Integration Platform?
- Healthcare Cloud Integration Platform Benefits
- Common Cloud Service Myths
- Building a Business Case for a Cloud Integration Platform
- Healthcare Integration Platform Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
- Selecting a Healthcare Cloud Integration Platform
- InterSystems Healthshare® Health Connect Cloud™
1- Regulations like CMS-9115-F and the 21st Century Cures Act are driving HL7® FHIR® adoption. HL7 FHIR is quickly emerging as an industry-standard data exchange format for healthcare APIs.