- EHR Interoperability Transformations Affect HIT Infrastructure
“Taking on risk is increasingly appealing to technology companies because it involves aggregating and analyzing a mass of health information but doesn't necessarily require buying or building a health insurance company,” CNBC’s Christina Farr explained.
Verily already has partnerships with health IT companies Sanofi and Dexcom, which involve those companies sharing technology to improve Verily’s larger health IT goals. Verily has also started hiring more employees to begin managing at-risk patient populations, work with health insurers to aggregate data, and manage the total cost of patient populations.
“To make a dent in health spending, experts say companies need to have the right blend of talent and resources or risk losing money if costs escalate,” said Farr. “And lower-income populations make sense as a first step, with more and more states getting permission to be more creative with how they develop and administer their Medicaid plans.”
The right resources for undertakings like this are rooted in IT infrastructure. If organizations are unable to consolidate tasks and use digital tools to improve patient care, other parts of the healthcare industry can’t be fully supported when it comes to advancements such as population health.
Digital tools like EHRs and patient monitoring devices need IT infrastructure support to communicate data securely and accurately so the data can be used for population health initiatives.
Healthcare organizations are finding that population health management solutions are enabling better disease management, reducing inpatient stays, and are decreasing observation hours.
Population health management helps clinicians diagnose and treat patients faster and more accurately, making it essential to healthcare organizations with value-based initiatives in their future.
Population health management aggregates patient data from different resources for analysis. With more patient data, clinicians can make more accurate diagnoses and provide quicker treatment. This speed and accuracy reduces hospitalizations and unnecessary revisits.
Population health management can be hard on IT infrastructure, particularly network connectivity for connected devices and data storage.
Organizations also need to make sure the network recognizes priority traffic over non-priority traffic. Mission critical devices such as monitors and clinician devices can then communicate with the network over guest devices or personal clinician devices.
Storage also needs to be assessed before advanced IT infrastructure solutions are introduced into the IT ecosystem. Many organizations are seeking cloud storage solutions as a way to expand their data storage without investing in on-premises servers.
Google Cloud has already expanded into the healthcare space by collaborating with several health IT vendors, including Change Healthcare and Dicom Systems, for medical images.
New ways to utilize the public cloud for interoperability and cost savings are becoming more important as organizations continue to add digital tools to their health IT infrastructure.
Medical image storage is one of the most data intensive parts of health IT infrastructure and many organizations are still using legacy methods, such as tapes, to store them.
Large public cloud platforms like Google can give organizations unlimited expansion potential for medical images and entities don’t need to worry about keeping track of maintaining tapes and servers.
Some organizations may still be skeptical but public cloud service providers are making efforts to accommodate the unique needs of the healthcare industry.
Google and other major vendors continue to expand their health IT tools catalogue by obtaining and collaborating with innovative health IT vendors. These collaborations can improve the interoperability and performance of health IT tools so organizations can focus more on patients and less on how to share and analyze the data they are collecting.
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