Integration on my Mind

Lately, like a lot of other folks in this industry, I've had integration on my mind. Specifically tying together ambulatory and acute care visit data that resides in two or more different vendor's systems. It's not trivial. It depends on a lot of technical nuts and bolts with the most important being an enterprise master person identifier (EMPI, surprisingly the wikipedia entry isn't that robust) to crosswalk patient identifiers and records across the systems. Then a collection mechanism is needed. This could be collecting the information for a patient in a single view or the development of another repository that aggregates all of the pertinent information for display. All of this has to be done quickly and efficiently for the patient and/or provider.

Then we need to factor in the dynamic nature of these environments. Healthcare evolves faster and faster. So too is the technology used to support it so whatever the solution is needs to be capable of bobbing and weaving as software, requirements, processes and regulatory needs change. The current buzzword for this is agile. If we build something cumbersome and difficult to maintain then it will not survive. This is an important trait for all healthcare technologies but they don't often deliver even though it's the promise of nearly every new development environment.

As frustrating as this is it also makes the problem fascinating. I dream about it occasionally. I wonder how Software as a Service, Service Oriented Architecture, emerging standards and market forces will eventually drive towards (hopefully) sustainable solutions. There is a lot of work being done in this domain and a lot of opportunity for innovation even as our vendors struggle to align their product lines.

My advice for all healthcare IT vendors? Be the first and fastest to integrate your product with anyone else's and provide nothing but the best customer service. I think only the best are going to survive the next few years. May the best products win.