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Perspectives

Integrated health: Four ways IPaaS is revolutionizing the healthcare industry–part two

Deloitte on Cloud Blog

IPaaS provides robust solutions for each of the four areas mentioned and when implemented effectively, IPaaS could revolutionize the healthcare industry from FQHCs to federal agencies and every connection in-between.

February 7, 2019

A blog post by David LinthicumLogan Smith and Anil Bommakanti.

Interoperability

Interoperability is one system’s ability to communicate and exchange data with disparate external systems. In the current example scenario, a federal agency needs to collect data from FQHCs from across the country. Each FQHC may have its own unique electronic health record (EHR) system. In order to achieve interoperability using IPaaS, technicians can create connections by developing an API layer that utilizes pre-developed connectors, (for e.g. a HL-7 connector) to connect to the disparate EHR systems. This “universalizes” how systems communicate with each other.

Scalability

Increasing the scope of a system from a proof of concept (POC) that successfully addresses a problem to a full-scale application, supporting thousands of end users, is the process of scaling. Given our example, a federal health agency would host a sample API on an IPaaS. A FQHC and the federal agency could then create a simple POC and connect the two systems. Scaling this would consist of making additional APIs for the different EHR systems across the nations reusing as many APIs as possible. Think of stacking these reusable components like building blocks as the final solution evolves. This can greatly increase time-to-market for any development activity.

Reusability

As mentioned before, similar to building blocks, these APIs enable asset reusability. A legacy system’s challenging data structure and complicated interfaces are no longer the IT manager’s nightmare. Now, given the standardized design principles of interoperability, scalability, reusability, and cloud management, any system can easily retrieve the exposed data. At a later point in time when an organization develops another system that needs to connect to a particular system of record (SoR), it is streamlined. For example, multiple EHRs now could connect to a federal agency’s process API for data transformation tasks. One can easily see how reusable components can be stored up as assets and utilized as the enterprise evolves.

Cloud deployment and management

Until recently on-premises infrastructure has required enterprises to staff a fleet of resources to manage servers, databases, load balancers, and proxies. Not only routine infrastructure setup tasks but also application deployments, network traffic security and monitoring can now all be abstracted away from the enterprise and hosted in the cloud.

The federal agency or the FQHC is now able to host their APIs in a central, scalable location. In our example, they can host their APIs on an IPaaS-specific service, monitor it, and quickly provide mocking services (i.e. immediate examples of the product with test data present) for developers to interact with. The Federal agency can continue to utilize their own applications for connecting, retrieving, orchestrating and composing data into a specific format and add on the APIs built for specific purposes.

Wrapping this up, many leading organizations in the healthcare industry are successfully utilizing IPaaS. These successes have already driven the creation of many reusable components. There are HL7 v2 to FHIR mappings, FHIR definitions in RAML, and process APIs that support the core healthcare processes. Getting started with IPaaS can be as simple as a one API POC hosted in the cloud. IPaaS provides robust solutions for each of the four areas mentioned and when implemented effectively, IPaaS could revolutionize the healthcare industry from FQHCs to federal agencies and every connection in-between.

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