A Strategic Guide for Health Tech Firms Facing the Interoperability Trilemma
Working with healthcare data requires sharing information across many divergent standards and formats, and a myriad of implementations that often vary from those standards. Implemented by an integration engine, it is interoperability that makes these different forms compatible for wide sharing and use. Whatever you do with digital health data—transform, store, or query it; expose it for clinical and decision support; prepare it for analytics and AI; send it elsewhere—interoperability is the essential prerequisite that all digital healthcare systems must satisfy to routinely share and use it.
Health information has always been a unique class of data, requiring specialised solutions for reasons of its wide variety, complexity, depth, and mission-critical nature. Privacy, security, and regulatory compliance (such as HIPAA and GDPR) also heavily drive the requirements for health data management. Timely and reliable application and solution development focused on health data cannot succeed except in an environment tailored specifically to health care and founded on interoperability.
Yet even after decades of standardisation, healthcare interoperability is hard. The saying goes “If you have seen one HL7 interface, you’ve seen one HL7 interface,” meaning that no two are alike. Each institution has its own customizations, and many vendors make non-standard changes to their interfaces. Even FHIR, the newest standard, has many extensions and significant variation in how it is used.
InterSystems has been providing healthcare interoperability solutions for many years and knows how to address these challenges. This paper focuses on InterSystems general approach to interoperability and on two solutions in particular. InterSystems Health Connect is a proven foundational integration engine and provides all the interoperability, performance, and flexibility you need to connect to health data services. InterSystems IRIS for Health includes those same capabilities but also includes facilities for development of health data solutions and applications that require more than interoperability. It is a data platform designed for the unique nature and needs of this complex space, with analytics and AI support built in. Both offerings include a full set of FHIR capabilities as well as many other healthcare standards.
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