Three Key Questions for Evaluating Healthcare Integration Engine Performance

By exchanging information between critical healthcare applications, integration engines help IT teams tackle complex interoperability challenges, ensuring that vital healthcare data is easily accessible for all stakeholders. However, alongside advancing digital transformation, the demands of interoperability have also increased — prompting health organizations to re-evaluate their integration solutions.

To assess the effectiveness of your integration engine across your NextGen, athenahealth, eClinicalWorks or Epic integration, consider the following three questions:

1. Does your integration engine have the capacity to handle healthcare expanding data demands?

As patients seek greater access to their health data, the volume and variety of this information — from sources like medical devices, EHR systems, or alternative applications — are also on the rise. Contending with vast amounts of healthcare data, it is important to consider whether your integration solution can maintain compatible and consistent exchange across systems.

When assessing healthcare integration engine performance, consider its ability to quickly scale and expand to support a multitude of data formats. Successful engines should integrate clinical, financial, patient and cloud data from a single location. This will allow your organization to stay ahead of evolving demands while delivering the seamless access end user’s desire.

2. Are clinical workflows negatively impacted by your integration engine?

If faced with inadequate data integration, providers may find themselves logging into multiple systems, struggling to access and utilize patient data effectively. Workflow disruptions not only hinder a clinical team’s ability to make care decisions, but also pose risks to patient safety.

Effective integration engines should combine patient data from various disparate systems into a unified view of the patient, for maximum care quality. A robust integration engine should also streamline workflows and reduce downtime, allowing healthcare providers to focus on delivering direct patient care and improving patient outcomes.

3. Does maintaining your integration engine require extensive work from your IT team(s)?

Although most integration engines offer varying degrees of flexibility for IT users, healthcare organizations should focus on evaluating the IT user experience throughout the support and maintenance processes. If an integration solution is lackluster, staff may not be able to complete projects — such as new technology implementations — in a timely manner.

To better automate the information exchange process, consider selecting an EHR integration engine with efficient programming options in a convenient web-based management dashboard — allowing users to add simple or complex logic to manipulate data based on actual data values and transmit or receive data on a schedule. Simplifying integration tasks and maintenance will reduce IT workload, freeing staff to focus on alternative priority projects. Ultimately, a successful integration engine should reduce the time and effort required to transfer data between systems, while ensuring that data is transferred accurately and efficiently.

Facing increasing interoperability and data demands, it is important for integration engines to keep up. By evaluating your current system — and determining whether to make a switch — your organization can secure a connected health IT ecosystem and deliver more positive patient outcomes.

Seeking a healthcare integration engine? Contact us today to get started with CareBridge.