The Benefits of One Comprehensive Data Exchange Platform for Advancing Healthcare Interoperability
Instead of one-off interfaces, an integration platform is a more efficient solution for the exchange of clinical, financial, and operational data between healthcare IT systems.
By integrating information from various sources like electronic health records (EHRs) and medical devices, healthcare providers will have a complete overview of a patient’s health records. Having an integration engine that is capable of seamlessly exchanging data between any healthcare applications, from unstructured PDF images to HL7 and FHIR messages, and even X12 message standards is critical for improving interoperability.
What is healthcare interoperability?
True healthcare interoperability is the secure, timely exchange of electronic patient data across the care spectrum. It refers to simplifying the most complicated and critical data exchange initiatives and enabling hospitals, health systems, ACOs, practices, clinics, and vendors to successfully connect disparate systems, gather and normalize data, and streamline connectivity.
Interoperability enables more efficient patient data access and helps health systems improve coordination, communication, and integration across a variety of care settings.
Why is health system
integration important?
The need to manage complex data has never been greater yet at the same time, implementing and integrating data exchange standards has never been more challenging. The centralized, secure, and automated transfer of medical records and patient data is vital to ensure high-quality care, and provide cost savings through efficient, standardized processes.
Insufficient access to real-time patient data can result in higher costs and the increased risk of negative healthcare outcomes.
What are the benefits
of a fully-interoperable health system?
Better care coordination
Fast, easy access to a patient’s complete medical history ensures the patient is being treated accurately, effectively, and safely. When clinicians have real-time data and a complete picture of a patient’s information at their fingertips, they can more accurately perform treatments, develop care plans, and support smoother transitions of care.
Increased efficiencies
Interoperability solutions significantly reduce the amount of time spent on repetitive administrative tasks associated with patient communication, and allows clinicians to spend more time actually treating patients. Availability of the holistic view of patient information including medications, procedures, and tests can reduce errors, duplication of work, and miscommunication.
Improved patient experience
Today’s patients don’t want to have to fill out the same paperwork before every visit, nor do they want to explain their medical history over and over. Complete access to a patient’s care history reduces errors, and eliminates duplicate effort and tests, improving both employee and patient satisfaction.
What are the challenges
of interoperability?
System integration can present a formidable and costly challenge for today’s IT department and there is a broad spectrum of integration requirements hospitals need to be able to address. As the industry continues to evolve, hospitals are being tasked with ensuring their internal systems are communicating effectively, while also expanding how they’re connecting to physician offices, HIE’s, and pushing pertinent data for public health reporting.
Managing an entire hospital IT infrastructure, its integration systems, and the accompanying workflows is a complicated, time consuming and labor-intensive task. Many hospitals and health systems simply don’t have the resources – people, time, and budget – to take on these increasingly complex interoperability projects.
What healthcare challenges
are solved with an integration engine?
As hospitals look to cost-effectively architect accurate, real-time interoperability between systems, integration engines effectively leverage healthcare formats and messaging standards to meet immediate integration goals, while laying the foundation for future data exchange initiatives.
However, as care coordination advances and reimbursement models evolve with a heightened focus on value and quality, data exchange needs extend much further than inside the hospital’s four walls. Integration engines empower healthcare IT departments to share patient data securely and seamlessly with stakeholders across the continuum of care for improved coordination, communication and interoperability between health systems, clinics, and the entire care team.
What are the benefits
of Consensus Conductor?
Conductor is a comprehensive data exchange platform for seamless integration that supports all of the latest standards for connectivity and data formats (API, FHIR, Web Service), addressing a wide range of interoperability challenges from the simple to the extremely complex.
Conductor incorporates all types of data and modalities to connect care teams – from hospitals and nursing facilities to labs, specialists, and home health facilities. Conductor can be fully integrated with other Consensus solutions like cloud faxing and eSignature. Health systems can take their interoperability capabilities even further by integrating with our natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI) tools to convert unstructured documents to structured data. For instances where integrations are too complex, our robotic process automation (RPA) platform can be utilized to streamline application connectivity.
- Tackle any data exchange challenges
- Communicate via API, FHIR, and Direct Message
- Maximize ROI with unlimited connection points
- Scale easily and cost-effectively
- Customize alerts for reliable monitoring/troubleshooting
- Increase security with single sign-on support
One vendor, one platform, for all data exchange initiatives
What other Consensus solutions can
be bundled with Conductor
Backed by our powerful integration engine, the exchange and management of eFax Corporate documents can be automated, transformed, and processed in a variety of different ways: Direct, Secure FTP, Email, FHIR, or integrated into EHRs via APIs or HL7.
Apply the natural language processing and artificial intelligence from Consensus Clarity to convert unstructured data from faxes or digital PDFs, to structured, searchable data. Supports fax to FHIR, enabling hospitals to participate in the TEFCA framework.
Automated workflows developed with SST, Consensus’ robotic process automation (RPA) platform, can provide application connectivity where traditional HL7 interfaces are not an option, or are too expensive. RPA integrations are quick to deploy and can achieve an accelerated, (near real-time) data exchange between systems.