Chilmark Research - 2021 Integration Infrastructure Market Trends Report
Executive Summary
While much attention has been focused on how the 21st Century Cures Act will expand data availability across healthcare, the new rules are just one of the reasons that the industry is looking to leverage data across applications and organizations in new ways. Faster and less costly alternatives to existing integration techniques and approaches have also emerged in response to several factors: the maturation of FHIR, broader acceptance of API-based development and integration, changing payment models, new pressures to deliver quality care at lower cost, and the long-term effects of the pandemic. The current market is transitioning to new approaches to development and integration, enabling more effective access to data across organizations and applications.
The full 2021 Integration Infrastructure Market Trends Report describes and evaluates the available offerings from 14 vendors (this excerpt only contains InterSystems’ profile and specific takeaways from the report). The report reviews the current state of the market, categorizes the different kinds of vendors and solutions, and describes in some detail vendors’ capabilities for meeting the needs of their customers.
Traditional EHR integrations, built as one-off interfaces that require ongoing and expensive maintenance, are giving way to API-based access to data and transactions for new projects. While the usage of modern APIs is still in its infancy, many vendors are significantly enhancing their API-related services and tools in addition to expanding their API catalogs. Building the data stores behind APIs, creating cohort-level data on demand, and supporting analytics on demand are examples of growing market needs.
Finally, integrating data and functionality directly into clinical and administrative workflows is the most promising way to address clinician burden. Organizations and vendors need ways to experiment and iterate to have a realistic chance of delivering improved workflows.
This report also looks closely at some of the offerings of the public cloud vendors. These companies are already well established in healthcare as providers of hosted computer and storage services. Their general-purpose development and integration capabilities are also used in healthcare. Increasingly, they are touting their healthcare-specific development and integration capabilities, a leading indicator of their larger ambitions to contribute to healthcare.
The report includes a forecast of total spending by healthcare enterprises (providers, payers, and healthcare-oriented ISVs) on integration products and services over the next five years. It has a separate forecast of potential spending by non-traditional users of these tools such as life sciences, clinical research, and digital health vendors.