Healthcare organizations (HCOs) around the world are looking to innovative digital technology to streamline clinical workflows, improve patient care, and boost business performance. But legacy IT systems and practices often stand in the way. Deploying new digital healthcare solutions across the enterprise is a daunting proposition for many IT organizations.
Today’s healthcare IT environments are notoriously fragmented. Until recently there were no widely adopted, universal standards for formatting and exchanging healthcare data.¹ Each healthcare application vendor and system provider took a different approach.
Historically, most healthcare IT organizations implemented point-to-point connections or deployed on-premises data integration engines to transform and route dissimilar data from disparate sources. Today, many organizations rely on aging on-premises integration platforms that impair application performance and are difficult and expensive to scale and maintain.
To make matters worse, many healthcare IT organizations are plagued by staffing shortages. Hiring and retaining IT talent is a challenge. Over 50 million people in the US quit their jobs in 2022 as part of the “great resignation” and HCOs were hit particularly hard. Today, many healthcare IT teams are struggling to do more with less, and don’t have the time and resources to administer and extend their legacy data integration systems.
Fortunately, help is on the way. Forward-looking health IT leaders are turning to a new generation of cloud-based data integration platforms to simplify operations, overcome staffing challenges, and accelerate the pace of innovation.
What is a Healthcare Cloud Integration Platform?
A healthcare cloud integration platform is a state-of-the-art data integration solution, delivered as a remotely hosted, fully managed service for ultimate operational simplicity, agility, and economics. It helps you streamline integration efforts and address new business, technology, and regulatory requirements—quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively.
Specifically conceived as a platform as a service (PaaS) offering, a cloud integration platform is built from the ground up with speed, resiliency, and scalability in mind. A cloud integration platform is:
- Architected to deliver high performance and availability
- Designed to protect data privacy
- Equipped with easy-to-use tools for interface analysts and app developers
- Engineered and priced to provide cost-effective, pay-as-you-grow scalability
- Backed up by service-level assurances for peace of mind
Why a Cloud Integration Platform?
Cloud integration platforms offer a variety of economic and operational advantages compared to traditional on-premises data integration solutions. A cloud platform can help you accelerate time-to-value and avoid lopsided business models with long payback periods. With a cloud platform, you can eliminate capital outlays and tightly align ongoing operations expenses with evolving business requirements.
A cloud platform can also help you simplify IT operations and speed up innovation. With a cloud platform, the service provider takes care of the underlying infrastructure. Your internal resources stay focused on core business imperatives like writing interfaces or rolling out new clinical applications.
Economic Benefits
- No capital equipment expenses. With a cloud platform, the service provider owns the underlying compute, storage, networking, and security infrastructure.
- Lower ongoing operations expenses. The service provider is responsible for all infrastructure administration, support, and maintenance as well as all physical space, power, and HVAC costs.
- No idle resources or squandered capacity. A cloud platform provides pay-as-you-grow scalability. With an on-premises approach, you have to over provision compute and storage capacity to support future requirements.
Operational Benefits
- Greater IT productivity. A cloud platform can help alleviate IT staffing challenges and reallocate personnel and budget for more strategic tasks.
- Inherent extensibility. Cloud platforms are adaptable and future-proof. Service providers deliver new features and functions, and perform software upgrades and updates directly in the cloud, without disrupting service.
- Economical geo-redundancy. Cloud platforms support cost-effective failover across data centers (availability zones), ensuring continuous service in the event of a catastrophe.
Explore the full guide and learn more about cloud-based options with InterSystems.