The accelerating pace of technological change in healthcare impacts more than medical procedures: just as healthcare units are making attempts to provide the best quality patient care and experiences, so, too, are healthcare leaders striving to unlock opportunities presented by big data and data integration to garner actionable insights, and spur growth. But only some organizations are able to tap into the power of healthcare data.
Statistics indicate that only 56 percent of healthcare organizations use their available data, which means nearly half of the industry is missing out. These issues are costing the healthcare industry approximately $342 billion. By transforming data integration capabilities, healthcare providers can not only save a whopping amount of money but also deliver top-notch quality patient care and experiences.
Data Integration Challenges in Healthcare
- 1.Inconsistent Data: The lack of a standard data format is one of the most common challenges healthcare organizations are facing today. Over the years, healthcare organizations have accumulated multiple data formats, some incompatible with systems and other data. Also, healthcare organizations may differ when choosing user applications. It triggers inconsistency in the data, thereby negatively impacting the data quality and integrated care delivery model. The data amongst these applications should be consistent to ensure precise data-driven insights.
2. Overburdened IT Teams: When traditional data integration methods are used, it’s the responsibility of IT to implement data connections from scratch. It takes IT almost six to 12 weeks of calendar time to integrate data streams. That’s complex and time-consuming. And while IT is busy building integrations, the patient or the end-user waits to receive the promised value. Also, IT finds it difficult to focus on other priority projects as, for the most part, they are busy onboarding and executing subsequent data integration steps.
3. Lack of Healthcare Data Privacy: One of the major concerns faced by healthcare organizations is a lack of privacy and compliance. As organizations share and exchange data, security gets compromised as the risk of unauthorized access surges. Some healthcare organizations do not have an incomplete understanding of laws regarding data privacy and confidentiality. They must protect data from illegal access and tampering and share data under particular circumstances. Balancing these two concerns can be tricky.
4. Slower Data Onboarding: IT takes weeks or months of calendar time to onboard healthcare data. When so much time is spent, the patient or end-user waits to connect with the system. So much waiting creates frustration in them. Healthcare organizations must speed up their data onboarding processes to provide high-quality experiences and care to patients.
Healthcare organizations need to reimagine their data integration approach to overcome the challenges and deliver the best quality patient care. Self-service integration plays a vital role here.
Self-service integration enables non-technical users to onboard and integrate complex, bi-directional data streams – at speed and scale. In fact, users can implement onboarding connections by up to 80 percent faster. That is to say, data is onboarded in minutes instead of weeks or months. While non-technical users create connections with patients, IT is freed to focus on more important tasks – thereby enabling innovation and growth. These modern data integration solutions leverage AI and machine learning to enable non-technical users to consolidate data (with multiple formats) with ease and precision. In addition, they have an end-to-end encrypted environment that enables only authenticated users to access and analyze data, thus minimizing the risk of breaches or thefts.
The healthcare landscape is changing. And organizations that use a modern data integration approach will easily manage healthcare data and deliver the promised value to patients.