In a survey of technology decision-makers from more than 100 large academic medical centers and health systems, EHR interoperability solutions company Redox identified issues still blocking some cloud technology use cases.
In the survey, conducted in partnership with Sage Growth Partners, 97 percent of provider executives stated that ingesting real-time clinical data is crucial to their enablement, but only 3 percent said they haven't encountered any challenges when attempting to move clinical data into the cloud.
Redox noted that major cloud clinical data repositories store data in the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard, making it easier to build and connect to an ecosystem of analytics, AI, and apps. Yet most legacy systems do not yet use FHIR, requiring organizations to transform data from multiple legacy systems into FHIR to prepare for cloud ingestion. As a result, these projects can become mired in technical complexity, leading to delayed implementation and a critical lack of understanding of clinical workflows.
Survey respondents shared that their top three challenges to execute on cloud ingestion projects are:
• Human capital (68 percent). Lack of in-house expertise and/or human resources to map legacy standards to FHIR and maintain integrations.
• Financial capital (52 percent). Lack of budget for data translation and ingestion.
• Technical capital (44 percent). Lack of technology to facilitate translation and ingestion at scale.
Cloud ingestion projects can often be slow and painful to execute, with 40 percent taking longer than initially budgeted. The survey report found that 86 percent of cloud integration projects take longer than 6 months to complete, while 34 percent take longer than 12 months.
"Clinical data ingestion is critical to enabling cloud projects, and the complexity of translating legacy data from multiple sources into FHIR is a barrier that many organizations don't anticipate," said Devin Soelberg, Redox's vice president of strategic partnerships, in a statement. "The survey results illuminate the nuanced challenges that result when undergoing these projects. This report serves to surface those challenges so that these organizations are well-prepared and don't waste scarce time, budget, and human resources."
