Healthcare Interoperability for Consumer Engagement

Interoperability will continue to spark innovation

The global healthcare industry faces significant contradictions like rising costs. The shift to value-based care addresses this challenge by redefining success with healthcare outcomes. In this scenario, FHIR empowers organizations to collaborate, foster innovation, and help co-create solutions to assist patients accessing their longitudinal records. The record compiles payers' and provider-generated health, wellness, financial, and social data.

FHIR, an organized concept of “resources,” defines the many types of resources that describe the healthcare space. It is an open license and a formal maturity process linked to implementation outcomes. Consisting of two main parts – content model (resources) and exchange specification— it contains both normative and standard for trial use (STU) resources.

FHIR makes it easy for implementers by using already familiar tools and an understandable format with an API style. From the interoperability perspective, it is a fixed set of resources offering several advantages such as standardization of APIs, content, and communication protocols like XML, JSON, REST, and OAuth.

Concept of an Open Innovation Platform in Healthcare

Cultivating a partner ecosystem

By creating an online solution marketplace, healthcare organizations can bring multiple vendors together on a shared platform. Organizations that partner with HealthTechs, medtechs, and payers, can build compelling, holistic service offerings that foster customer loyalty for the long term.

By harnessing partner offerings to complement their existing services, healthcare payers can significantly reduce care delivery costs with dramatic results. Marketplace models have rapidly become some of the world’s largest revenue engines. Tech companies, such as Amazon, Google, and Uber have established dominance by creating marketplaces that bring consumers and service providers together to enable multi-billion-dollar growth.

The partner ecosystem model better enables healthcare payers to support the customer journey. They can assist in buying Medicaid/ Medicare plans, build a digital channels engagement platform, and support the entire care journey and coordination process in partnerships with providers, primary care, and medical device companies.

Better quality care and patient engagement

Providers can engage with patients by allowing them to access updated, accurate, and personalized health information and secure access to health data and care plans. They must deliver value-added patient services like remote monitoring and alerts based on predictive healthcare analytics for long-term personal engagement. With the power of data, they can build a 360-degree view of patients across departments and caregivers to improve treatment. Gaining insights from complex data will allow pharmaceutical companies to develop precision medicine and treatments, thereby increasing trust and reliability with secure portals and mobile apps.

With advanced applications for information sharing and coordination, health organizations can be more productive. Care teams can spend less time on travel, logistics, and administrative tasks and spend more time on high-value work. They can:

• Share knowledge securely across health teams with advanced messaging features, including priority notifications, smart onboarding, and care delegation.
  
  
• Boost productivity and coordinate with colleagues, both inside the organization and across geographical and organizational boundaries, effectively.
  
  
• Increase delivery efficiency via quick and consistent data sharing while creating proactive treatment and wellness plans.
  
  
• Leverage automated tools to streamline operations, reduce costs, and deliver better health outcomes.
  
  
• Identify trends and patterns to determine best practices to increase throughput, reduce waste, and optimize resource allocation in the process of providing care and developing new offerings.

As data sharing becomes seamless, applying advanced analytics to massive amounts of data can help organizations gain deeper insights. For example, providers can recommend real-time medications through digital channels based on past health data shared between health plans and later between payers and providers.

In conclusion

With the CMS mandate for healthcare organizations, FHIR interoperability is no longer an option but a necessity. To stay agile in the face of rapid technological advancements, organizations must:

• Evaluate business intents
• Assess deployed technologies

The process will fulfill the CMS mandate requirements and pave a path for scalable, interoperable platforms that seamlessly exchange claims, clinical, and electronic health records (EMRs) with consumers across digital channels. FHIR will result in faster implementations of cost-effective solutions for external vendors and internal development capability. The standards-based interfaces will further reduce vendor lock-in risk, making it easier to replace a non-performing vendor with an alternative. Careful considerations of the right platform and tools, coupled with a correct mindset, will reduce cost, alleviate penalties, and improve compliance and productivity, thereby, boosting organizations’ star ratings in the marketplace. A fully digital data interoperability solution will help turn every customer journey into a revenue-generating opportunity that goes a long way to increase the customer's lifetime value.