Healthcare professionals work under immense pressure and are pressed with time. They need to manage healthcare workers and different units, and deliver the value and care promised to patients on time. Administrative operations and advanced paper works become time-consuming and cumbersome for all healthcare providers. What’s more, healthcare professionals struggle with managing unstructured, highly sensitive, and bi-directional data. That is why a healthcare integration solution is needed to bring efficiency to the managed care continuum. A healthcare data integration consolidates EHRs and other information and delivers actionable insights that can be used to make decisions and deliver the value promised to patients. Integrated health primarily seeks to address a patient’s disparate health concerns at one point source and provide the best care plan. There are multiple benefits of healthcare data integration:
- Integrated healthcare streamlines the workflow, reduces errors, and enhances medical records management.
- It enables healthcare units to gather data and insights from disparate sources.
- Integrated healthcare systems promote fast communication and facilitate interactions via electronic data exchange.
- Data integration reduces waiting times to improve the quality of patient engagement systems.
- Healthcare integration facilitates collaboration between healthcare centres as well as stakeholders.
- Integrated care management increases profit and helps healthcare units stand out among competitors.
Challenges in Healthcare Data Integration
Healthcare data integration enables healthcare units to provide quality care services to patients. However, there are a few challenges:
- EHR Interoperability Issues: To integrate, new technology pulls structured data into a data lake. Now, to compile and integrate data, one needs to abide by standards set by HIPPA compliance. A lot of healthcare units rely on healthcare integration. This is one of the reasons why data is diverse. However, while doing so, healthcare units are subjected to interoperability issues. These issues can give rise to data silos.
- Healthcare Data Privacy: One of the major concerns in healthcare is privacy and compliance. Data sharing can cause security breaches and allow access to unauthorized personnel.
- Inconsistent Data: Data must be consistent while implementing an integrated healthcare system. However, oftentimes, healthcare units may differ while picking user applications. This can make the data inconsistent which, in turn, affects the data quality and integrated care delivery model.
- Lack of Expertise: No doubt, all healthcare professionals, including patients and doctors, benefit from healthcare data. Data can be used to make an efficient diagnosis, enhance medical devices, evaluate patient behavior, and measure pharmaceutical success. Even though healthcare data can be extremely powerful, it becomes easier to misinterpret raw data without guidance from adept data analysts and data scientists. Besides, data can get misused if it ends up in the wrong hands. Owing to these risks, IT mostly manages healthcare database access and integration. However, as a result, IT fails to focus on other more high-value tasks.
Resolve Challenges Using Self-service Data Integration
Healthcare organizations can rely on self-service data integration solutions to overcome these challenges and deliver the best care possible. These solutions give power to non-technical users to integrate healthcare data while freeing up IT to focus on other strategic tasks. Users can rely on features such as pre-built application connectors, shared templates, AI-data mapping, and dashboards to consolidate healthcare data in different sizes and formats, thus managing interoperability and inconsistency-related issues. Self-service data integration also provides an end-to-end encrypted environment to allow data access to authorized personnel only. This resolves the problem of data privacy.
In short, self-service data integration can empower healthcare organizations to overcome common issues and ultimately deliver patient care of top-notch quality.