Over the course of 20+ years in healthcare integration, we’ve seen a lot of trends in the industry and also within our own customer base. One veritable trend we’ve noticed is that more and more healthcare organizations are using Iguana in an enterprise capacity.
What does that mean? Well, specifically we are seeing Iguana used to:
- Handle all integration across entire organizations, both internally and externally
- Rapidly develop and deploy large amounts of interfaces with less effort
- Process high volumes of data – quickly and with ease
- Manage an array of data formats and applications
- Experience little to no downtime with their interfaces
As a result, we are kicking off a brand new blog series, “Enterprise Integration: Considerations for Healthcare Organizations”. We’ve talked to several customers and, based on their feedback, have compiled a list of their top considerations when it comes to large-scale, high volume deployments.
It should be noted that the following list is not an exhaustive one. Rather, it is a collection of the most commonly raised topics of consideration from our discussions with customers. These considerations can apply to all organizations, however in the case of enterprise usage, they really must be addressed.
Here’s the list we compiled:
- High Performance – The ability to process high volumes of messages in a rapid, reliable way. Large-scale implementations must be able to handle very large volumes of data without any degradation in performance or significant backlogs.
- High Availability – It’s all about uptime and business continuity. Ensuring that access to information is uninterrupted is critical for healthcare organizations.
- Security – Protecting the privacy of patient information is essential in healthcare. Organizations must be compliant with HIPAA regulations, which requires encryption of data and tight control over user access and permissions.
- Multiple Data Formats – Data comes in all kinds of formats and variations. As the amount of applications requiring integration continues to increase in healthcare, the capacity to handle multiple data formats is necessary, be it HL7, FHIR, X12, or anything else.
- Rapid Development – Speed matters. Whether it’s how fast a vendor can complete customer implementations or a provider who needs to deploy a new application, the time to develop interfaces directly impacts the bottom line.
Over the course of the next several weeks, we will take a more in-depth look at each topic and highlight how Iguana has been used to address them.
So, what did we miss? Does our list match yours? Let us know in the comments.
As always, if you’d like to talk to us about any of these considerations or anything else integration-related, please don’t hesitate to reach out.