Joanna Gorovoy, senior director product and solutions marketing, Axway.
Joanna Gorovoy
To accelerate the shift toward value-based care – organizations across the healthcare ecosystem must find new ways to unlock value from an ever-expanding array of data sources to create data-rich digital services and experiences that improve patient engagement, enable delivery of more personalized healthcare services, and increase clinical collaboration and care coordination across the patient journey. Developers play a key role in accelerating innovation that will shape the future of healthcare and positively impact patient outcomes. But innovating at the speed of digital is challenging in an industry that has long been plagued by interoperability challenges, a prevalence of legacy, siloed systems and applications, and heightened data privacy and security requirements which hinder digital projects. As a result, there are a few key things developers should keep in mind when designing for today’s healthcare market.
You can’t spell interoperability without A-P-I
The frustrations associated with sharing information have burdened the healthcare industry’s digitization efforts for many years. With application programming interfaces (APIs) taking hold, however, data exchange is now easier to accomplish. APIs are revolutionizing data sharing by making it possible to bridge legacy IT systems of record, such as electronic heath records (EHRs), with modern systems of digital engagement, such as mobile apps. Healthcare developers must take an API-first approach and will need to gain knowledge of the latest healthcare interoperability standards – such as FHIR. FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) is an HL7 standard that simplifies the exchange of healthcare information and promotes the use of APIs to support light-weight integration, facilitating secure data access and interoperability. As healthcare developers increasingly leverage APIs to move beyond some of the challenges associated with secure data sharing and opening up proprietary EHR systems, this will result in faster time to market for innovative digital services and experiences.
Create a sound security strategy
Security must always be top of mind for healthcare developers. Before writing a single line of code, healthcare developers should familiarize themselves with HIPAA regulations that protect all personal health data transactions and impose hefty penalties for violations. As developers design apps that leverage patient health data from a variety of sources, they need to take the time to understand how this law works and must be mindful of how to mitigate security concerns. Adopting a full lifecycle API management solution enables developers to secure and manage FHIR and other healthcare APIs in a unified way across projects and communities, ensure data security and streamline compliance and help reduce the data security burden by using built in, configurable audit trails and reporting.
Inviting external innovation
Healthcare organizations are increasingly looking to invite open innovation into their organizations as they struggle to keep pace with digital transformation. Organizations such as Kaiser Permanente, Johnson and Johnson and Stanford, for example, have hosted developer challenges and hackathons to stimulate innovation and bring in fresh perspectives from developers outside of their organization/industry to help tackle big problems such as healthcare access and affordability. As the industry struggles with IT modernization challenges, developers who have experience working across multiple industries can provide a fresh point of view and can contribute skills and approaches they have gained developing applications for other industries/use cases to provide value to healthcare.
Guest post by Joanna Gorovoy, senior director product and solutions marketing, Axway.
Joanna Gorovoy
Healthcare organizations need to unlock the value of their data
In 2018, the healthcare industry will accelerate its shift toward value-based healthcare as the industry struggles to address challenges associated with rising cost burdens, an explosion of data and increased mobility. Along with evolving government policy, organizations across the healthcare ecosystem will face a rise in healthcare consumerism as patients bear more risk, face higher out of pocket costs, and demand more value.
Unlocking the value of a wealth of patient data will be key to improving patient engagement, delivering more personalized healthcare products and services, and improving collaboration and care coordination across the patient journey – all critical to enabling value-based care delivery and improving outcomes.
In 2018 AI goes from science fiction to reality in healthcare
Population health and precision medicine are among the initiatives where AI is expected to have the greatest impact. Based on a recent HIMSS study: About 35 percent of healthcare organizations plan to leverage artificial intelligence within two years — and more than half intend to do so within five. Focusing AI investments on population health, clinical decision support, patient diagnosis and precision medicine supports the industry shift toward value-based, personalized care models and reinforces the use of AI to augment intelligence and skills of physicians and drive efficiency in diagnosis and treatment.
Some current use cases include: Enhancing speed and accuracy of diagnosis medical imaging, supporting surgeon workflow and decision-making during (e.g. spine implants), virtual assistants to enhance interactions between patients and caregivers to improve the customer experience and reduce physician burnout, and digital verification of insurance and claims information.
Guest post by Joanna Gorovoy, senior director product and solutions marketing, Axway.
Joanna Gorovoy, MBA
The healthcare industry is in the midst of digital transformation. At the same time, heightened government regulation, evolving healthcare policies and a rise in healthcare consumerism are driving a shift toward value-based, outcome-driven care models.
The focus on maximizing value and outcomes requires organizations across the healthcare ecosystem to work together, especially across a variety of different, and often unaffiliated organizations, including hospitals, health insurance companies, pharmacies and wearable health tech companies. Additionally, data silos and interoperability issues make it difficult to derive value from health data across ecosystems, provide quality patient care and optimize health outcomes.
Healthcare IT leaders in today’s digital era face a great opportunity and a daunting challenge: deriving value from massive volumes of healthcare data while meeting heightened demands for data privacy and security. In 2016 alone there were 106 major healthcare data breaches, exposing 13.5 million individuals’ records. As healthcare data breaches continue to rise in numbers, healthcare IT leaders must reevaluate how they approach key initiatives across patient engagement, population health management and care coordination.
They need to provide secure and innovative digital experiences by implementing application program interfaces (APIs), which are a set of routines, protocols and tools for building software applications, and increase awareness of industry standards, such as Health Level Seven International’s (HL7) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR). Doing these two things will provide assistance in addressing interoperability issues and simplify the exchange of health information across the ecosystem.
But it doesn’t stop there. Moving toward a future where healthcare data is more widely accessible will require greater security management across all organizations that have access to patient data. To create a more secure and scalable foundation for digital innovation in healthcare you must follow these three steps:
Healthcare IT professionals’ greatest concern around mobile health technologies is the potential of a breach of patient data, according to a recent survey of HIMSS14 attendees conducted by Axway, a market leader in governing the flow of data.
Conducted at the HIMSS annual conference in Orlando, the poll found that 45 percent of individuals surveyed believe the greatest barrier to mobile health adoption is the risk of a data breach, followed by meeting regulatory and compliance requirements for the privacy and security of patient data.
Other key findings include:
44 percent of those surveyed believe the integration of disparate health IT systems is the most challenging IT issue facing healthcare organizations;
53 percent believe that improved access to healthcare information is the most important benefit driving mobile health adoption;
38 percent believe that the widespread adoption of mobile health services is one to three years away, and nearly 90 percent believe it will occur within five years.
The results demonstrate the rising trend of mobile health services and reflect growing concerns of healthcare professionals on the risks associated with new services.
“Mobile health is not only helping improve clinical outcomes and lower medical costs, it is also becoming a way to differentiate services and win over new customers as they are given more choices for insurance and providers,” said Rob Meyer, vice president of solutions, vertical marketing and management, Axway. “The risk of data breaches, HIPAA compliance, and reliability have been some of the biggest issues for the hundreds of payers and providers we’ve worked with. But they do not have to be a barrier. Together we have repeatedly been able to put in place the technology and processes needed to avoid breaches and ensure compliance in major mobile health initiatives.
The Axway poll was conducted at HIMSS14 Annual Conference & Exhibition in Orlando, Florida and includes responses from 39 healthcare IT and business professionals. Axway healthcare solutions enable organizations to securely integrate and exchange private healthcare, administrative and financial information across disparate platforms. For more information, visit: http://www.axway.com/industries-customers/industry/healthcare
About Axway
Axway (NYSE Euronext:AXW.PA), a market leader in governing the flow of data, is a global software company with more than 11,000 public- and private-sector customers in 100 countries. For more than a decade, Axway has empowered leading organizations around the world with proven solutions that help manage business-critical interactions through the exchange of data flowing across the enterprise, among B2B communities, cloud and mobile devices. Our award-winning solutions span business-to-business integration, managed file transfer, API and identity management, and email security– offered on premise and in the Cloud with professional and managed services.Axway is registered in France with headquarters in the United States and offices in 19 countries. www.axway.com
Healthcare IT professionals’ greatest concern around mobile health technologies is the potential of a breach of patient data, according to a recent survey of HIMSS14 attendees conducted by