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

February 5, 2019

A blog post by David Linthicum, Logan Smith and Anil Bommakanti.

Let’s face it, managing medical records is tedious, time-consuming, and expensive. The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act passed in 2009¹ stimulated significant health information technology (IT) adoption. While digital adoption has increased², the health care system is far from achieving a vision where individual needs are elevated, and providers have a seamless way to share health information between sources. The healthcare industry still needs data structure uniformity, interoperability and process automation. In fact, a recent Consumer Connectivity Insights survey indicates poor data sharing can lead to delays in care³. Federal health agencies need increased visibility into health care data from delivery centers at shorter intervals. This can help develop and drive health policies better suited to the underprivileged and underserved populations across the nation.

One potential solution to this problem is an Integration Platform as a Service (IPaaS). This cloud-hosted platform is used to manage interfaces and other essential IT services. With IPaaS relative maturity, the opportunity for reshaping the healthcare industry is ripe and achieving the goals of HITECH and other similar needs of federal health agencies are within grasp. The need to accomplish these goals is a societal, governmental and human need. Digital medical data should be accessible across cities, states and federal agencies to help cut costs, determine impact, drive policy, integrate with emerging technologies and enable improved outcomes.

As an example, let’s look at a scenario in which the federal government could utilize IPaaS. We will examine the need of the federal government to integrate with Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHC) and then discuss four areas where IPaaS can address the challenges faced on their digital transformation journey.

“Federally Qualified Health Centers are community-based health care providers that receive funds from the HRSA Health Center Program to provide primary care services in underserved areas⁴.” For the Federal grant-giving agency, it is important to get a true picture of the public health characteristics of the local demographic to provide the right amount of funding. Frequently, due to budgetary constraints, many FQHCs lack the IT infrastructure to integrate effectively with the federal agency–because of this, data sharing is a challenge.

Offering many benefits, IPaaS is up to the task of resolving this challenge. The four capabilities we will touch on are interoperability (connecting various systems and data types), scalability (increasing size and scope of use), reusability (leveraging previously created components), and cloud management (outsourcing infrastructure maintenance and monitoring).

In part two of this post, we will discuss these four areas…

Endnotes

¹“HITECH Act Enforcement Interim Final Rule,” HHS online, last reviewed June 16th, 2017, https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/special-topics/hitech-act-enforcement-interim-final-rule/index.html.
²Julia Adler-Milstein and Ashish K. Jha, “HITECH Act Drove Large Gains in Hospital Electronic Health Record Adoption,” last modified August 2017, https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/full/10.1377/hlthaff.2016.1651.
³Rajiv Leventhal, “Poor Data Sharing Leads to Delays in Care, Global Survey Finds” last modified June 25, 2018, https://www.healthcare-informatics.com/news-item/interoperability/poor-data-sharing-leads-delays-care-global-survey-finds.
⁴“Federally Qualified Health Centers,” on HRSA online, last reviewed May 2018, https://www.hrsa.gov/opa/eligibility-and-registration/health-centers/fqhc/index.html.