How to Introduce Microservices in a Legacy Healthcare Environment

The following is a guest blog post by Nick Vennaro, Co-founder of Capto Consulting. Healthcare as a whole is finding new ways to use technology to improve population health and patient experience. Population health is looking for a spectrum of precision in patient and provider data as well as clinical cost metrics and matching that data to patient communication, metrics and clinical outcomes. Patient experience requires streamlining information that is both timely and personalized, which is hard to accomplish with monolithic systems. A monolithic system is usually one that has grown over many years and performs numerous functions that are not architecturally separated. These systems tend to be brittle and not easily changed.  The proliferation of mergers and acquisitions in healthcare further exacerbates the complexity of operating multiple monolithic systems within a healthcare network. It is not unheard of to operate 5, 8 or even 12 billing systems in parallel, because combining them would take so much more time, and it is more cost effective to let them operate individually. An increasingly popular architectural style known as microservices are much better equipped to help healthcare organizations move forward rapidly than are the current monolithic, unstructured and difficult to maintain systems. While currently, no consensus exists on how to define microservices, it’s generally agreed that they are an architectural pattern that is composed of loosely coupled, autonomo...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: Health Care Healthcare HealthCare IT Astro Teller Capto Consulting Healthcare Legacy Software Healthcare Microservices Legacy Healthcare IT Michael Feathers Nick Vennaro Source Type: blogs