With the number of mission-critical medical applications and information systems increasing each day, the need for healthcare centers to integrate them has risen. Integration solutions connect disparate healthcare applications to create healthcare ecosystems that unlock the true potential of healthcare data and move toward faster diagnosis, accurate health outcome prediction, and generally, a healthier world.
Healthcare data is growing at a monstrous rate. As per a report by IDC, the projected volume of healthcare data by 2020 is 2,314 exabytes. The complexity in terms of variety of healthcare data is also surging due to rise of myriad data sources, like patient, clinical, financial, R&D, claim, and pharmacy.
Such enormously diversified data has to be integrated to extract meaningful insights that allow healthcare units improve patient care and diagnosis.
5 Reasons Why You Need Healthcare Integration
Healthcare data integration platforms allow healthcare organizations integrate their teams, concepts, and technology to create the infrastructure capable of housing big data and using it in a meaningful way while addressing ownership, data accessibility, connectivity, and data privacy.
Here are 5 reasons you need healthcare integration:
Gives a Clear Picture of Patient’s EHR
Clinicians with data integration can gain access to patient’s individual EHR that includes information about:
- Allergies
- End-of-life decisions
- Medications
- Medical history
Such detailed information helps paramedics make decisions in critical conditions without delaying the treatment process any further. This data can be simultaneously shared with the patient’s healthcare provider and ER to ensure that the caregivers are adequately prepared to deliver time-dependent care.
Streamlines Clinical Automation with Business Processes
Healthcare organizations can increase the value of clinical automation systems to deliver tangible operational benefits by integrating their information-rich data stores with their respective clinical and operational processes. Healthcare integration solutions can:
- Enhance patient flow models as well as monitoring metrics
- Enable benchmark and track performance against similar healthcare facilities
- Simplify patient administration, compliance reporting, and transitions to Electronic Health Records
- Streamline clinical care optimizations methodologies at reduced costs
Increases Access to Mission-Critical Information for Improved Patient Care
The process of searching and accessing evidence data is extremely challenging. Healthcare data integration supports medical staff and physicians to:
- Enhance decision support service for patient record systems
- Keep a track on the effectiveness of business processes
- Evaluate and monitor patient safety along with patient-care quality metrics
Optimizes Resources to Improve Planning and Utilization
Fluctuating capacity can pose challenges for healthcare providers. By not paying enough heed to appointments and procedures, centers can introduce delays, making their patients wait, leading to reduced satisfaction and perceptions of care. Overestimating decreases the efficiency of clinical staff, thus increasing costs. Data integration platforms improve resource and planning on the basis of demand by:
- Properly using facilities such as OR, ER, testing rooms, ICU, patient rooms etc.
- Shifting and carefully allocating resources such as clinicians and support staff
- Allowing staffing adjustments owing to variations of the patient census.
- Preparing the organization to schedule equipment and patient tests
Manages Revenue cycle
Due to the emergence of insurance models such as P4P, DRG and CDHP, the healthcare costs and fear of lower reimbursements have sky-rocketed. Managing revenue cycles becomes an issue. Healthcare data integration solutions play a central role in helping organizations streamline their revenue cycle management. Incorporating revenue management processes helps healthcare units to operate more efficiently, and in turn, offers superior-quality medical services based on priority when they outsource or partner with a reliable billing company. Apart from that, health integration can help healthcare centers:
- Enhance the quality of processes involved during patient admissions, claims administration, fraud detection, denial management, and insurer contract management.
- Increase cost capture while offering supreme care services to patients
- Alleviate pressure posed by P4P and DRG tracking, reporting and cost accounting
- Get access to visibility over other important processes such as cash flow, net cash, bad debt and cost-to-collect.
Healthcare integration is essential for handling large streams of data and extract insights to make better decisions and deliver high-quality care to patients. However, not every integration platform is equipped for dealing with such divergent data. To use healthcare data proactively with an aim to expedite patient outcomes, one must pick the right integration vendor.