Better Data Management Holds the Cure to Healthcare Data Frustration
This second in a series focusing on the challenges and changes facing healthcare payers and providers focuses on how data management holds the promise of a cure for what ails the healthcare industry.
Every transformational healthcare initiative today has a significant reliance on the availability of accessible, trusted and secure data. In my previous post, I explored the variety of data frustrations that healthcare technology professionals from both provider and payer organizations have contended with over the years.
Enter 2020: It’s a new year—a new decade—and we can now say goodbye to the data frustrations of the past. It’s time to celebrate and say hello to our newfound data freedom that current trends, best practices, and modern technologies afford us.
Let’s walk through the same healthcare data management challenges discussed in my last post, and I will share why we’re now in a position to say hello to data freedom for each scenario.
The first step for most health data management initiatives is to provide access to and integrate all the necessary and relevant data. And standards accelerate this step, making access and integration even more effective and efficient. We’re on the path to saying goodbye to data that is inaccessible in data silos and the gaps in data insights that have persisted for so long across both provider and payer environments.
Instead, thanks to the proliferation of electronic health records, we have access to more valuable data than ever before. Thanks to the innovative interoperability initiatives led by HL7, which is bringing the FHIR standard to fruition with modern, API integrations to healthcare, and mandated by CMS (The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) as well as the ONC (Office of the National Coordinator for Healthcare Information Technology), the road to accessing and bridging healthcare’s data siloes has finally opened.
From a technology perspective, the availability of virtually unlimited compute capacity and storage in the cloud is a game-changer. We’ve seen the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)– driven automation and scale, along with cloud, SaaS apps and new capabilities to enable self-service analytics by business consumers. These trends have driven innovation leading to today’s rich landscape of data integration and interoperability. Modern APIs are the most effective way to optimize integration and make it easier than ever before.
We’ve also seen the emergence of theiPaaS (integration platform as a service) market category that is leading integration innovation. iPaaS solutions offer multi-tenant cloud managed integration services which incorporate both traditional and modern techniques, and include API management, data integration, application integration, B2B exchange and more, along with a new focus on business self-service and user-friendly access to these techniques. In other words, iPaaS services finally enable citizen integrators.
Data freedom means faster onboarding of new data sources, the ability to scale with the speed and agility of the cloud, faster and easier API integration, and greater ease of use. Because a larger number of business and clinical users can now access their data without waiting for IT, this new data freedom results in faster time to value on every data-driven initiative. (Which of course is every business initiative!)
So now that we can integrate and access our data better than ever before, the next question is: can we trust it?
As discussed in my last post, data quality in healthcare has always been a challenge, in large part because in the past it was easier to be reactive and clean it up only when data quality problems became obvious and unavoidable.
