Overcoming Data Silos Within The Health Care Ecosystem

The following is a guest blog post by Dave Corbin, CEO of HULFT.

While there’s a barely an industry or sector that hasn’t been heavily influenced or redefined by the onslaught of data, in healthcare the impact is especially acute. Health care industry players are now having to negotiate a delicate balance between exploiting the opportunities that come with the deeper insights and actionable intelligence, with managing the growing technical complexities that arise.

Let’s face it – the health care sector is renowned for the depth of its silos. It’s a significant and wide-ranging challenge. It starts in the closed world of drug R&D to a generation of providers still using fax machines (remember those?) to share patient medical records. In theory, we’d all agree that improved health data exchange is a win-win for everyone involved (providers, policymakers, patients, etc.) In reality, before we can even begin to leverage the vast troves of data from electronic medical records (EMRs), we need to overcome two key issues.

The first is data security. According to the 2018 HIMSS Cybersecurity survey, the majority of respondents, 75 percent, experienced a significant security incident in the last 12 months. The threat landscape has grown in complexity and volume and it’s critical for health care organizations to invest in privacy-by-design defense mechanisms such as encryption, security analytics, and multi-factor authentication to protect valuable patient data. For seamless data sharing to become the norm, everyone in the ecosystem must be vigilant about data protection and online privacy.

The second is interoperability – the extent to which different IT systems, software applications, and devices can exchange data and interpret that shared data. Or, to be more specific, making EMRs more “portable” so they follow a patient’s journey. After all, care is happening at multiple venues – it’s happening in hospitals, rehab facilities, long term care facilities, hospices, and more.

My own knee surgery started with the orthopaedic surgeon, who referred me to external providers that would supply me with MRIs, blood tests, and EKGs. The day of surgery included not just the surgeon, but an outside surgery center and an anaesthesiologist, all requiring separate contracts. The net result was that my medical information for a relatively routine surgery was spread over five locations and many data types.

Without an enforced standard of interoperability, data exchanges can get complicated and time-consuming, which then hinders not just the flow of information but patient care. We can do better by reducing data complexity for the patient, doctor and service providers.

Speed, security, and accessibility when it comes to health data management and sharing don’t have to elude us. A holistic approach to health data security and ecosystem interoperability can be achieved in partnership with an intuitive data logistics platform that scales to evolving data complexities and cuts development time. This can help lead your organization to transcend healthcare’s many silos often without the need for a major overhaul of existing IT system. And that’s a powerful prescription.

Dave Corbin is CEO of HULFT, a comprehensive data logistics platform that provides both the secure back-end data transfer and integration technologies to help health care organizations form a foundation for an overall enterprise data strategy that makes data more accessible and useful. HULFT is a proud sponsor of Health IT Expo, a practical innovation conference organized by Healthcare Scene. Learn more here: hulftinc.com.    

   

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