The digitization of healthcare data governed most of the last decade, but now the industry has reached a turning point. In the coming years, there will be a concerted effort toward bending costs and better understanding patients’ needs.
As a result, provider organizations, clinicians, and other stakeholders will need to do a better job of interacting with one another in order to manage the care of patients across the entire healthcare ecosystem — and that ecosystem is about to get a lot more complex.
Today, the landscape of healthcare data sharing is EHR-centric and looks something like this:
Over the next five years, we’re predicting a drastic shift to distributed data sources that will look like this:
In the next five years, data will flow at a higher volume from both traditional sources and new sources entering the market, including:
• Providers — EHR derived, other clinical applications
• Foreign providers — received from other providers, typically segregated in EHR
• Patients — home health devices, apps, wearables, etc.
• Payers — claims data, member health improvement programs
• Employers — employee health improvement programs
The way data is encoded, deployed, and secured will also evolve. It likely comes as no surprise that HL7 FHIR will play a big role in the future workflows, enabling integration both inside and across the firewall.
While on-premise implementation won’t disappear anytime soon, there will be an increasing need for robust and flexible cloud capabilities to deliver seamless integration. And if you haven’t considered migrating to the cloud, and are asking yourself why so many healthcare providers choose to, here are a few reasons:
• Flexibility — add resources (servers, more RAM, additional storage) as needed, and use only what you pay for
• Configurable Security Options — encrypt data at rest, data in motion, and firewall settings
• Disaster Recovery — DR is built into the cloud application and prevents lost data and helps restore your resources quickly
• Automatic Software Updates — any updates are automatically handled in the cloud
• Capital-Expenditure Free — the cloud is based on operational expenditures (pay as you go)
• Works from Anywhere — an internet connection is all that’s required to access the cloud
• Increased Collaboration — because the cloud allows you to work from anywhere, there are few boundaries when it comes to collaboration
• Document Control — centralized document management, rather than having documentation scattered all across a network
• Environmentally Friendly — because servers are more highly utilized across all cloud users, less heat is lost due to underutilized servers
Future changes to healthcare IT are not limited to technological advancements alone. More complexity means a premium will be placed on the time and effort required to integrate systems and trading partners, so leadership needs to evaluate the skillset and competencies of the employee within their organization.
With such a spike in generated data, integration teams will need to move beyond the tactical implementation alone and become savvier to consider how clinicians will use this data to produce relevant and meaningful insights that drive action.
The foundation for meaningful interoperability has been laid, and now organizations need to prepare themselves to keep the pace of rapid changes in order to thrive. Ready to partner with a team that helps you face future challenges? Discover Corepoint as a Service and Rhapsody as a Service.
Want to learn what it takes to migrate to the cloud? Check out these resources:
