- Interest in Healthcare Blockchain Increases for Interoperability
- Interoperable Health IT Infrastructure Key to Advancing Care
Seventy-three percent of the IT leaders polled said that they had a roadmap on how they were planning to integrate new health IT tools with legacy ones. However, only 48 percent of respondents said that they had completed an audit to understand their environment. Thirty-seven percent stated they have a clear understanding of what parts of their IT infrastructure they can move to cloud.
Although upgrading health IT infrastructure is a priority to adopt new tools, only 20 percent of respondents said they are encouraged to take risks when considering new technology to implement. Approximately three-quarters of those surveyed said that they are encouraged to take a phased approach to more carefully integrate tools.
Instead of ripping and replacing certain parts of the IT infrastructure, most organizations are taking a more controlled approach.
“Unlocking data from legacy applications is critical to supporting efforts around shared services and broader government reform,” said report authors. “Respondents say improved data sharing is the number one opportunity to accelerate modernization, followed by a clear vision of success, having agency leadership champion the efforts, and better access to the best commercial technology available.”
Eighty-six percent of respondents said application programming interfaces (APIs) are a key tool for organizations to modernize their IT infrastructures.
An API is an interface that allows unrelated software programs to communicate with one another. They act as bridges between two applications, allowing data to flow regardless of how each application was originally designed.
Half of the respondents already have a formal integration strategy for connecting their tools and applications using APIs.
“Organizations are thinking about modernization differently than in the past,” Red Hat Chief Technologist of the North American Public Sector Dave Egts said in a statement. “While improving security has long been a top priority, improving data sharing between new and legacy applications using APIs, DevOps, microservices, and more speaks to how government IT is evolving. They are preparing for a cloud future and the need to connect data between clouds.”
The report found that organizations will benefit from using open source development and APIs to help bring more innovative tools into their IT infrastructure.
Open source means that the source code is freely accessible to anyone. This encourages the creation and development of multiple platforms using the same standard.
Open source is vital to fast health IT innovation to help healthcare defeat some of its biggest technological challenges, such as interoperability and security. It also gives organizations the opportunity to implement new technology while still using legacy systems.
Open source also cuts back on costs because it lets healthcare organizations use proprietary solutions where needed and supplement that technology with flexible open source software. This is why carefully considering roadmaps for IT infrastructure planning is so important.
Lack of interoperability among IT systems can cause digital tools to malfunction and data to be lost. Healthcare organizations need to plan for the advancement and expansion of their IT infrastructure to make sure all the tools work together correctly.