The pandemic has had a cataclysmic effect on the healthcare industry. The need for the healthcare providers to share overnight information on contracted cases with the government and for the payers to proactively process innumerable insurance requests from frenetic patients was never more urgent. There was tremendous pressure on healthcare providers, insurers, and government administrators to act fast, efficiently, and faultlessly. Lives were at stake. The traditional healthcare ecosystem that had disparate provider, payer, and state systems operating in siloes with low interconnectivity resulted in fudged, erroneous, and unrealistic numbers of patients, deaths, and pandemic trends.
What the healthcare industry requires is a light weight and seamless way to exchange data and information that enables healthcare consumers, providers, payers, and third-party services to interact in an open and easy manner. Such an open healthcare marketplace will enable true data transparency for healthcare consumers. But the sheer disjointedness of the system landscape makes this open system look like a pipe dream.
API integration is the bridge which facilitates this open healthcare aspiration to crossover the banks of improbability to the shores of reality.
APIs: The secret sauce for the open healthcare system
Open Healthcare is the API-first approach within healthcare technology. It’s driven by the new global fast healthcare interoperability resources (FHIR) protocol. Open healthcare enables increased interoperability of data exchange with information providers, users, and applications. It opens a whole new realm of improvements within the medical industry. It is highly necessitated in a world where, as the pandemic showed us, people lost their liberty to physically meet, talk and mingle. Therefore, it is imperative that the electronic health records must be available, discoverable, and understandable on demand.
Application programming interfaces (APIs) act as data tunnels and enable interoperability by passing on valuable patient health data to the electronic health systems of the healthcare provider. This, in turn, triggers notifications for the healthcare professionals and helps them recommend the right prescription. It is possible the physicians may also order some tests too. The prescriptions and tests so ordered will reflect onthe telemedicine application of the patient, who by staying at home can consume the doctor’s advice. The patient can then send a request to a nearby diagnostic laboratory who can come home to collect the samples. The test results can be seamlessly sent to both the customer’s healthcare app and also the healthcare provider using APIs who, after diagnosing the patient and studying the severity of the ailment, can order for an admission in the hospital or advise at home medication.
In the event of a hospital admission, the patient can check eligibility and at once activate the payer using the payer’s mobile app. The customer can also request for cashless treatment by sending over the payer coverage to the healthcare provider. All the above events can take place seamlessly without the stakeholders having to meet physically, courtesy of the APIs.
The global healthcare market is poised to reach $665.37 billion by 2028 and much of this growth will be attributed to seamless services, hyper-patient care, remote health diagnosis and agility in payer response. These are verily the product of the open healthcare system.
How Boomi IPaaS helps with open healthcare
The Boomi unified platform aids the healthcare ecosystem to connect people, data, and systems to make patient activation a reality. It does so within a single intelligent, flexible, and scalable platform.
Boomi offers:
- Accelerated integration of healthcare systems and services through a drag-and-drop UI, data mapping tools, and a comprehensive library of connectors. This is coupled with support for various integration patterns that enable the building of any number of integrations with exceptional speed
- Low code development environment helps improve the integration velocity by 3 to 4 times, thereby helping healthcare providers (HCPs) connect more system in an agile and cost-effective manner. Owing to the host of ready-to-use connectors from Boomi, most of the use cases are readily serviced and custom-development is only needed for features and systems that are truly unique to their environment
- Holistic API lifecycle management services allows systems across stakeholders (provider, payer, patient) to securely access, publish, and manage APIs. The Boomi platform makes that easy, again with low-code tools that simplify and streamline API management.
- Using Boomi Flow’s drag-and-drop interface, the HCP can easily build workflows that support open healthcare interaction. For example, they can collect lab results and later can share them securely with patients and providers. They can accelerate billing processes by automatically routing documents to the payers. They can automate intake processes for patients, as well as onboarding processes for staff – especially important for home-nursing teams with regular turnover while replacing any paper-based process with something faster, more reliable, and more efficient
Illustration: How Boomi iPaaS is a one stop shop intermediary for Open Healthcare
By leveraging Boomi, healthcare organizations can evolve their IT architectures from the static, siloed data sources, and lagging web portals of the responsive patient engagement era to the connected, agile, and mobile-centric world of proactive healthcare. The benefits of this evolution include improved health outcomes, better patient care, and lower costs.
The healthcare ecosystem must embrace this evolution. They must look at FHIR adoption positively, setting up integrations and connections in a methodical manner, one system after another, using Boomi API management to develop and manage APIs and Boomi Flow to automate processes along the way.
Conclusion
The healthcare industry is undergoing a major transformation, thanks to forces of the market, changing customer preferences, and mostly under the pressure of the pandemic. The industry is compelled to shift from a transactional and reactive view of healthcare to a strategic, and proactive view of healthcare.
Like a true IPaaS, the Boomi platform offers a comprehensive and flexible technology for connecting people, data, and devices, thereby reaching patients. It can help providers, payers, and patients transform the healthcare experience from an occasional transactional event to a continuous and guided way of care consumption, in the true spirit of open healthcare.
