Are Healthcare Integration Engines Needed?

In a perfect world, we might ask why health systems need to purchase an integration engine. The standards used by integration engines are pretty widespread and every EHR and Healthcare IT vendor uses that standard. Why then do we need an integration engine in the middle? I’m sure there are a lot of reasons, but two reasons stand out the most to me are: integration costs and flavors of standards. Integration Costs It’s amazing how expensive it is to build integrations with EHR and other healthcare IT software. I still look back on the first lab interface integration I did. I couldn’t believe how expensive it was to do the integration and how the vendors were happy to nickle and dime you all along the way. Many of them look at it as a secondary business model. While an integration engine can’t solve all these costs, if you have a large number of integrations, the integration engine can save you a lot of money. This includes the integration engine’s experience integrating with multiple vendors, but it also means you can often only pay your EHR vendor one time instead of getting charged for every integration. Flavors of Standards If you’ve ever managed an integration, you know how miserable it can be. Each side of the integration implements their own “flavor” of the standard (which makes no sense, but is reality) and that flavor can often change as the various software gets updated. It’s no fun to manage and often leads to int...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: EHR Electronic Health Record Electronic Medical Record EMR Healthcare Healthcare Interoperability HealthCare IT EHR Integration Engines HIMSS HIMSS 2017 HIMSS17 Summit Healthcare Source Type: blogs