The Healthcare Hub
Integrating Disparate Systems in Healthcare
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Steve Cochran, Chief Technology Officer
As healthcare pushes to become a data-driven industry, we must ensure that we can connect the data from every system to make continued improvements in cost reduction, performance, efficiency and above all else, patient care. After years of automation, healthcare faces a familiar dilemma: disparate systems with similar, yet different data. Back-end and clinical systems are unable to “talk” to each other, and when they do, they aren’t speaking the same language because the data doesn’t necessarily match.
Without question, the industry is in the midst of a major technological transformation. In my most recent blog post for InfoWorld, “Connecting Healthcare’s Data Dots,” I outlined the importance of continuing the work to remove data silos between clinical, financial, and supply chain systems. Imagine the power when we can connect EHR, supply chain and finance systems. Integrated systems will also be critical as the industry increasingly relies on mobile devices in the delivery of care.
Technology should be knocking down obstacles to efficiency, not creating new areas for inefficiency and errors. Healthcare CIOs today can be leaders in working with supply chain teams in cleansing and standardizing data to help ensure that there is true interoperability between systems.
We know that true interoperability will not happen over night but it’s encouraging to see the industry demonstrating that this is a priority.
Connecting the healthcare’s disparate systems is critical if we hope to make data work for us whether that is answering critical questions about the total cost of care, conducting in depth outcomes analysis, and/or investigating adverse event reporting. GHX is working to help ensure that the data with Clinical ConneXion, the first cloud-based clinical item master that serves as a single source of truth for clinical products, integrates with data stored in different systems.
Learn more about our data management solutions for healthcare providers that deliver more accurate, up-to-date via the supplier populated GHX Catalog.