An AI-based clinical decision-making support software designed to generate dynamic clinical assessments that save physicians time was looking to grow its business after successfully implementing its solution with a regional health system. Through the AI software company’s experience with their first customer, the CIO recognized that integrating her platform with her clients’ EHR platforms was going to be a challenging, but necessary, requirement for their future clients, as providers want their insights to be accessed directly from their respective EHRs. With that obstacle in mind, she evaluated a few different interoperability strategies, eventually settling on working with Healthcare Integrations as a cost-effective solution to help the business grow. Her partnership with Healthcare Integrations enabled the AI software company to leverage Healthcare Integrations’ expertise and knowledge to fill the gaps in her own team and successfully position themselves to more easily implement their solution with their clients, regardless of which EHR platform they used.
The Story of an Ambitious CIO
The CIO at an AI-based clinical decision-making support software company had spent a year implementing and integrating their solution at a regional health system, which was also their first customer. Through long hours, and countless meetings with the EHR’s integration team, the health system’s IT team, and her own developer team, they had successfully gone from proof of concept, to fully realized workflow, allowing providers to access clinical assessments through their EHR after pulling data from the EHR into the AI-based platform for processing. It had been a long journey, but the CIO knew that it was just a start, as their implementation and integration with the health system revealed a serious flaw in their plan to grow.
The Challenge of Choosing an Interoperability Strategy
The CIO began evaluating methods to more easily integrate and implement their software solution with their clients. In her research, she identified a few common options: Build, Buy, or Rent. To build integrations, she would need to hire at least one full-time employee to manage and maintain their integrations. It would be expensive and time-consuming, but they would keep control over the integrations, and it could be tailored to the data their software needed. To buy an integration, she could find an integration vendor to build and manage them for her. She wouldn’t need to worry about the hiring/salary/retention costs of an FTE, but she would be reliant on the vendor. Finally, to rent an integration, she could select an interoperability platform that was already connected with her potential clients. This could save a lot of time upfront, but it came with high subscription costs, and there would be serious risks if she ever needed to change interoperability platforms.
Why the CIO Chose Healthcare Integrations
The CIO met the CRO of Healthcare Integrations at an HLTH conference, learning about how Healthcare Integrations helps software companies not only build integrations but fully design and implement an interoperability strategy for scalable, sustainable growth in the future. The CIO liked the flexibility that Healthcare Integrations offered as an interoperability partner, particularly the ability to build integrations within the software company’s infrastructure and the willingness to train their employees on Mirth Connect as part of their service offering. This model that Healthcare Integrations presented gave the CIO control and ownership of their integrations, while leveraging the expertise and experience of veteran developers at a fraction of the cost, and on an as-needed basis. Overall, the AI software company found it was more cost-effective to use Healthcare Integrations as a long-term solution rather than hiring a full-time team or renting a solution from an interoperability platform.
How Healthcare Integrations Responded
To help the AI Software company achieve its goals, the CIO leveraged a few of Healthcare Integrations’ services, starting with using Healthcare Integration’s team to begin building and managing their integrations through an open-source integration engine called Mirth Connect. This created the framework for their integrations to import and export data from any EHR in any format, including common standards like HL7, FHIR, CDA, or a proprietary JSON or CSV file. Healthcare Integrations also gave the AI Software company access to Interface Monitor, a dashboard tool to monitor the status of their integrations to ensure they were working properly and quickly alert the team if something failed. Finally, Healthcare Integrations helped the Software AI company in building a direct integration with a large EHR platform, opening up easier implementations for future clients that were already using that EHR platform.
The Results
Four months after the AI Software company partnered with Healthcare Integrations, they had gone live with seven new clients, with an average implementation time of two months, with many others on the way. According to the AI Software company’s CIO, “Healthcare Integration’s team is an extension of our own. Not only are they flexible in a dynamic environment, but their deep knowledge and expertise have been invaluable in allowing our company to scale.”
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