Grimag

  • iNTERFACEWAREiNTERFACEWARE Inc – Integration made easy

Anyone Who Doesn’t Do this Will be FHIRed. Thank You; Have a Nice Day!

In my post about FHIR + Iguana = Profit I made a passing mention of an important event in Amazon’s history from back in 2002 – give or take a year or so.

Jeff Bezos issued a mandate:

  • All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.
  • Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.
  • There will be no other form of inter-process communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team’s data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.
  • It doesn’t matter what technology they use.
  • All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.

He finished his mandate with:

Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired. Thank you; have a nice day!

It was an extremely smart business decision. With this mandate Jeff Bezos set the foundation for transforming Amazon from a bookseller into a multi billion-dollar cloud-computing powerhouse. This is where is it all started.

Why You Need A Modern Integration EngineIt’s an exquisite business lesson in teaching us what every Fortune 500 company in healthcare needs to do. We dobusiness with just about all of you. And you all have exactly the same business problem.

You grew your businesses by acquisition.  Your products have different data models, are built on different technologies, at different times by different teams. You have too many products and not enough engineers. You are all spinning your wheels with your internal integration pain.

I have talked to generations of interoperability teams at practically all the big vendors in healthcare. It’s funny how much faith seems to be placed in standards and centralizing interoperability. The first hope was that somehow Version 3.0 and the RIM was going to solve the pain. That was never going to be the case.  There was no way that any of you would have the resources required to rewrite all your products to be compliant with any single data model; even if it was a great model.

The new faith is that somehow that the IHE profiles will sort things out.  Sorry, that’s not going to work either.

Somewhere, somehow, someone important in one of these companies is going to read this blog. Synapses will spark and one of these giants will awaken. The right edict will go out. And for all the competitors? Watch out; you are about to be out-evolved.  It will take a couple of years but the first large healthcare IT player to get their internal API-house together will have an overwhelming competitive advantage.

(And with a bit of luck your competitors won’t read this blog and will try and implement FHIR)

(Oh and to talk to all those legacy systems using HL7 from your competitors that you will be replacing: Use Iguana!)


Why You Need A Modern Integration Engine


 

May 14, 2013Eliot
FHIR in the Hole!Leadership
Comments: 1
  1. emuir
    May 14, 2013 at 8:26 pm

    Anyway just got some exciting confirmation that Dominic Green from Slainte Healthcare, one our partners in Europe has gotten the go ahead to come and speak our user conference in September:

    http://www.interfaceware.com/conference.html

    Dominic is real integration engineer that managed to reduce the *real* cost of their integration by implementing a solid real world RESTful API around their Vitro product:

    http://www.slaintehealthcare.com/paperlesshospital/vitro/

    Dominic will be sharing the real design challenges they found with implementing this API. He’ll contrast it with previous approaches that his company used a more traditional staging table, triggers and stored procedure logical approach to integration.

    Even if you don’t use Iguana for your application it will be a valuable opportunity to learn about how you can solve your organizations own integration challenges.

    Welcome to a brave new world of integration!

    ReplyCancel

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Eliot
May 14, 2013 1 Comment FHIR, HL7, NewsFHIR, HL71,287
Enjoying the blog?

Sign up to receive healthcare integration news, just like this, from iNTERFACEWARE.

Let's get in touch

Is your company in need of integration solutions?
iNTERFACEWARE's experts are available to guide you through our integration products.

© - iNTERFACEWARE Inc.