Working with healthcare data requires sharing information across many divergent standards and formats. Interoperability that makes these different forms compatible for wide sharing and use. Whatever you do with digital health data—transform, store, or query it; expose it for clinical and decision support; prepare it for analytics and AI; send it elsewhere—interoperability is essential.
Health information has always been a unique class of data, requiring specialized solutions for reasons of its wide variety, complexity, depth, and mission-critical nature. Privacy, security, and regulatory compliance (such as HIPAA and GDPR) also heavily drive the requirements for health data management. Timely and reliable application and solution development focused on health data cannot succeed except in an environment tailored specifically to health care and founded on interoperability.
Yet even after decades of standardization, healthcare interoperability is hard. The saying goes “If you have seen one HL7 interface, you’ve seen one HL7 interface,” meaning that no two are alike. Each institution has its own customizations, and many vendors make non-standard changes to their interfaces. Even FHIR, the newest standard, has many extensions and significant variation in how it is used.
Health Data Integration: Threading the Maze of Build, Rent, or Buy
When deploying healthcare IT, companies often face a “build versus buy” or “rent versus own” decision. Organizations today need the flexibility to react quickly to changing demands such as frequent unplanned customer acquisitions and changes in interoperability standards. Not all integration engines are the same: some grant full control over integration, while others are ready-made, inflexible, and hard to adapt.
Major advantages accrue over time to those who retain control over their health data and integration, working with a trusted partner to deploy a modern engine. Under the right conditions, such an engine is the right choice if it also allows you to take advantage of additional services, features, and resources on top of an economical, extensible platform where you retain control.
Avoiding Health Data Integration Traps and Loss of Control of Your Data and Interfaces
Any platform should allow you to shape your integration with custom and new interfaces, and external code and applications. Such add-on applications range from end-user-facing interfaces to medical devices to efficient solutions for storage and analytics to legacy system interfaces.
If you build an engine from scratch, however, you face the limitations of generic components, reinventing the integration wheel at considerable expense and wasted time. Cobbling together web services with APIs is difficult once you require interoperability, reliability, security, and privacy. Applications will be hard to scale, get to market, and bring into compliance with HL7, FHIR, and other standards without significant architecture work. Reproducing this functionality becomes a distraction from engaging with your users.
Renting an integration service rewards you with quick standup and low price. But this immediate price and speed are unlikely to reflect the total cost and time needed, as holistic planning shows. Even a health IT rental vendor will soon present limitations, with pre-made, inflexible integrations and interfaces. Non-healthcare IT vendors do not usually share your healthcare-driven priorities: cost, features, reliability, security, and privacy; nor are they typically expert with health data.
An immediate rental integration replaces later adaptability, scalability, and resilience with a loss of ownership and control. Essential basics such as traceability and auditing are usually limited. Such solutions typically come with consumption-based pricing as well. As you scale operations, your system will hit a wall of restrictive constraints, typically accompanied by sharply rising costs as your connections and complexity grow.
Customize Without Building From Scratch
The limitations of open-source DIY become apparent after a honeymoon with cheap modular approaches. The tempting choice of rental integration leads companies to not invest and acquire expertise that will be needed later, and to loss of control over engine and data. Both choices threaten vendor lock-in.
Avoiding these traps requires greater immediate expense and effort that pays off later with growing size and complexity. Investment in an integration engine allows your operation to grow easily, where you own your interfaces and data. In the face of an unknown future, over time, such an initial investment embodies value, flexibility, and resilience, virtues proven, for example, during the COVID pandemic. Learn more about different offerings that meet these preceding challenges.