A message delivered by Dr. Steven A. Schroeder, M.D. in an article in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2007 turns out to have broad implications, both therapeutic and financial, for the healthcare industry today.
The message is this: While the healthcare industry devotes itself to improving patient outcomes, it turns out that providers influence only about 10 percent of the factors contributing to patients’ health and longevity. The other 90 percent is outside the healthcare industry’s control.
According to studies, these are the factors that contribute to longevity (or premature death):
- Behavioral patterns: 40%
- Genetic predisposition: 30%
- Social circumstances: 15%
- Healthcare: 10%
- Environmental exposure: 5%
Generally speaking, what occurs in a patient’s life outside a clinic or hospital is far more influential than any interaction with care providers.
It’s now known that behavior (e.g., smoking, lack of exercise, excessive drinking), genetic predispositions (e.g., a family history of heart attacks or diabetes) social circumstances (e.g., high-pressure work environments, violent households) and environmental exposures (e.g., air and water pollution, other types of toxic exposures) trump doctor visits, dental checkups and flu shots.
Therapeutic and Financial Implications
The breadth of these influences has two important implications for both payers and providers in the healthcare market.
First, it means that to advance the cause of improving outcomes, healthcare delivery organizations should be thinking about connecting into the social and environmental worlds of their patients.
This outreach could involve mobile apps for patient monitoring. It could involve monitoring local water supplies or collecting data from an organization that does. It could mean other interventions that aim to shape behavior patterns, such as improving sleep cycles, diet or exercise.
Second, it means that health delivery organizations will be judged by their results in the community, and the metrics used to form this judgment will include data that resides outside healthcare delivery organizations themselves.
Case in point: state regulators might require a hospital group to demonstrate improved outcomes in the community — even outcomes as seemingly removed from hospital operations as improved reading and math scores in local schools.
The Need for Data Integration
To collect and monitor the new information required, healthcare organizations need a way of collecting data from target applications they have never interacted with before, over protocols they have never used.
School results, for example, are not tracked using the same protocols used for electronic health records (EHRs). As complex as healthcare is, community-based data collection and analysis is even tougher.
In all cases, speed matters. Whether deploying mobile apps or connecting to external data repositories and APIs, healthcare organizations need to be able to integrate quickly and efficiently. It’s simply not practical to attempt these integrations with ten-year-old enterprise server bus (ESB) middleware technology that requires months-long coding projects to an already growing IT backlog.
The world today, including regulatory bodies and digital native patients, expects payers and providers to connect quickly and efficiently to any data they need to get a job done. It doesn’t matter what application or data store the data resides in, or whether it’s on-premise or in the cloud.
Cumbersome, time-consuming integration is no longer merely an awkward technological choice. Now it’s an outright obstacle to advances in digital medicine, as well as to business initiatives such as hospital expansions and mergers and acquisitions.
See Boomi and DevCool together in action in our HIMSS 2019 Interoperability Showcase use case presentation.
Boomi, DevCool and HiPaaS
With its low-code development environment, ready-to-use connectors and community-powered intelligence for configuring integrations and transformations, the Boomi platform gives payers and providers the ability to build integrations quickly and efficiently.
And to help healthcare organizations achieve even faster time-to-value, Boomi partner DevCool has extended the Boomi platform with ready-to-use process libraries designed specifically for the healthcare market. DevCool calls its Boomi-powered healthcare offering HiPaaS.
DevCool HiPaaS is a HIPAA-compliant microservices-based healthcare platform that supports data integration, resolves interoperability issues, simplifies working with healthcare standards and reconciles data. Because it’s built on Boomi, the platform seamlessly supports all integration patterns: real-time, event-based, batch, ETL, asynchronous processes and more.
Using HiPaaS, payers and providers can quickly and efficiently connect to whatever data they need, wherever it resides. Organizations can rapidly build EDI and HL7 Integrations using APIs. And the same platform that can be used for traditional X12 transactions also supports new integration technologies, such as microservices.
DevCool offers HiPaaS as a Boomi accelerator, complete with ready-to-use process libraries and professional services consulting that gets organizations up and running with data integration projects far more quickly.
The HiPaaS accelerator draws on DevCool’s expertise in healthcare IT and its experience with consulting for leading healthcare organizations around the world.
HiPaaS helps healthcare IT teams meet their integration goals quickly and efficiently so that IT becomes a business enabler rather than an operational expense.