Thought Leader: Think About Broader HIT Integration Architectures

Simultaneously, the industry is seeing unprecedented clinician burnout in the wake of COVID-19, an aging population that is increasing pressure on the system, and a generational reconfiguration of healthcare companies driven by the shift in payment models from long-established, fee-for-service models to value-based arrangements.

It’s safe to say every enterprise is aware of these disrupters and many have strategies in place to address these challenges. Most organizations have centered these strategies on reconfiguring their operating platforms. However, few enterprises are firing on all cylinders and activating the necessary capabilities within their operating platforms to overcome these obstacles and sharpen their competitive edge.

To successfully scale a truly modern operating platform, healthcare leaders will need to include, and improve, these three tactics in their transformation strategies:

Patient engagement and care team orchestration

In today’s reconfigured health ecosystem, the emerging care team will be comprised of more than your primary-care physician and the surrounding hospital services and specialists. Instead, the care team could also include a care manager, care navigator, pharmacist, nutritionist, home-health aide, fitness coach, social worker, care giver, and even some semi-automated digital assistants—all from a variety of organizations.

Each of these people have distinct parts to play in a patient’s healthcare journey and understanding how they can make the biggest impact at the most appropriate cost at the right time and place for the patient is critical. To do so, healthcare organizations must develop a collaborative care team orchestration plan leveraging an omnichannel approach

Reconceiving the patient and care team experience is about creating new systems of care which fully leverage this emerging, extended care team, such that it can influence patient decisions and behaviors while also delivering care. Creating a seamlessly integrated omnichannel approach in an industry that was not always meant to work in such a coordinated way is posing distinct challenges. Many legacy systems and engagement channels are locked down to the four walls of specific organizations and are not meant for supporting collaboration across organizational boundaries. Simple data sharing commonly done today, is not sufficient for the type of collaboration needed.

Journey design can help companies overcome these hurdles by identifying the most important points impacting the patient journey. This will include identification of the behavior or decision to be impacted, the preferred communication channel for the patient, and which member of the care team will be most impactful at this point in the patient journey. The net result is both improved customer satisfaction and better medical outcomes thanks to a holistic journey design blueprint that formally illustrates the relative impact of each interaction.

Data management and insight

Patient engagement and cross-organizational collaboration is only possible if you have the intelligence to steer it and the data management strategy to realize it. Currently, healthcare entities are struggling to collect, integrate, and derive insights from the ever-increasing amount of patient data. Many enterprises are running into classic data challenges—inconsistent semantics, lack of master patient and provider indexes, the need to aggregate and cleanse data to create a longitudinal patient record, and the need to make data available for various analytic processes to identify the gaps in care, population risks, and overall trends which will provide the insights to power engagement, collaboration, and overall population health management.

Although modernizing a legacy data environment may seem like a “boil the ocean” problem, it is possible—and necessary to stay ahead in today’s competitive and increasingly digitally driven market. Companies must focus first on their ability to deliver incremental value throughout the entire modernization process.

It’s tempting to focus on deploying the latest and greatest technology (while important), it is even more essential to improve architecture, program leadership, and a roadmap informed by prioritized business use cases to truly modernize your data management strategy.

Integration architecture  

In support of the industry’s focus on value-based care, payors, providers, pharmacies, digital health companies, and variety of other healthcare organizations are creating partner ecosystems that can more effectively and efficiently engage with patients within their areas of specialty or innovation. As most of these stakeholders may not sit within the same organization, they also typically do not share the same technology systems. That means organizations of the future must enable integrations which span multiple companies and offerings. Such integration architectures must support integration at multiple levels - data, process, and end-user experience.

Organizations can start by establishing integration architectures with defined application programming interfaces (APIs) to connect businesses processes, technology services, and data services. But an API-based service layer is merely a starting point. Legacy data repositories and applications are likely not connected to such a service layer or data hub. Connecting them completely can be a daunting task. Careful assessment and prioritization are critical to decide which integrations are worth building out versus deciding it’s time to replace a legacy system with a modern system better able to support desired integrations and cross organization stakeholder collaborations. The critical need for insightful prioritization emphasizes the importance of journey mapping to identify the most important experiences (and its dependence on which data or processes) and then let that drive focused solutioning and prioritization. 

Leaders are already aware of the complex landscape of today’s healthcare industry. And while they have established strategies to deal with the onslaught of disruptions, there is always room for improvement—for the organizations and patients alike. These improvements begin with deploying a modern operating platform driven by new approaches to care team orchestration, data management, and integration architecture. If enterprises fail to revamp their operating platforms, they will potentially face significant disadvantages for years to come.  

Kevin Benner, Ph.D., is the National Healthcare Solution Leader at Sogeti, a Capgemini company. He operates at the intersection of healthcare and technology, partnering with business leaders to translate strategy into reality by designing and implementing products, processes, and organizational solutions. Before joining Sogeti, Kevin worked in several large, mid-sized, and start-up companies where he held IT positions in strategy, program management, enterprise architecture, development, operations, and cybersecurity.