Challenges to Transformation
As a result of the 21st Century Cures Act Final Rule on Interoperability and Patient Blocking, there is a newfound importance for integration engines that can support high levels of data collection, aggregation, and program requirement formatting.
Unfortunately, nearly 70% of integration implementations fail due to the holistic changes required in all facets of the day to day business operations. Therefore, it is important to recognize the top integration inhibitors early in the integration process and stop them before they become rooted patterns that hold back patient care, drive up costs, and leave systems vulnerable to unexpected roadblocks.
The Top Integration Inhibitors From a Technical Perspective
1. Complex Integration Challenges From Legacy to Modern Systems
As legacy systems were not originally built for data consolidation, they often do not employ integral methods for data exchange, resulting in information that remains siloed and creates barriers for integration.
Moreover, these legacy systems often run on on-premise exchange servers that can’t be replaced, further affecting the ability to successfully integrate with other systems. Iguana’s agnosticism and cross-platform functionality, however, allows for hybrid deployment through both on premise and cloud-based servers providing organizations with the tools necessary to break down data silos and without having to replace the necessary physical servers.
Finally, while legacy systems don’t have a ready-made integration suite, they do host data in databases or can export data to a file system. Iguana can directly connect to the back-end databases and file systems to work around the lack of application-level integration capabilities.
2. Mixed Vendor Environment
One of the main challenges when developing an integration solution is the need to handle multiple integration scenarios, including various data types, network connectivities, cloud-based architectures, on-premise integrations, and cross-platform functionalities. The difficulty lies in the fact that each of those systems have their own technical and resource requirements which may lead to dissension when trying to tie them all together.
To mitigate these potential conflicts , Iguana’s patented Translator environment allows you to apply a canonical, transformative layer of integration from which all existing engines can exchange data with other engines. Rather than attempting to manage multiple different integration engines for multiple purposes, organizations can turn to Iguana to transform the data for easy cross-platform exchanges.
3. Building a Black Box
Developing self-made integration solutions can result in an integration that works, but are difficult to scale, maintain, and can lead to black boxes that have little visibility into the status and processing activity of your integrations. For an integration to be successful, it requires monitoring of ongoing integration and the logging of process activities.
Integration engines like Iguana, offer an end to end solution that accelerate the interface build and test process, while providing tools to ease and automate monitoring, troubleshooting and maintenance. Integration engines provide one place for complete visibility and control over how interfaces are running.
Monitoring and troubleshooting interfaces becomes easy with Iguana’s Logging, Dashboard and Notifications. Critical to troubleshooting, Iguana’s logs provide visibility into interface and user activity with invaluable insight into every phase of message processing and transport. Automate monitoring with customized email notifications or use the Iguana dashboard to have ‘at a glance’ insight into the health and status of your integrations.
4. Poor Data Quality
Integration projects between multiple systems should begin with a data audit and data cleaning process that filters for missing data, incorrectly formatted data, and unfiltered messages amongst other issues. Failure to ensure high quality data sources can lead to poor integration capability with downstream systems, as it may affect the way that the data is processed throughout various stages of integration. Starting off a digital transformation with quality data leads to accurate reporting and greater productivity. By using Iguana’s patented development environment, you can easily integrate and enhance data while solving for duplicates, outdated information, and incomplete fields.
5. Lack of Testing with Real Data
Testing the integration implementation workflows with real data ensures the interface ingests and processes messages in an accurate way. Building an interface without real sample data can lead to a longer testing period as well as more defect resolution when the integration goes live. The Iguana Translator uses real sample data and the annotation window to represent all data types of exceptions that you expect to process to provide a holistic view of how your data is being processed. This combination of using real sample data and seeing your results as you build and test your interface, results in greater speed to transformation, and lowers your time-to-market.
6. Inadequate Error Handling
The modern healthcare IT environment includes more clinical, administrative and operational systems than ever before. This also means that there are more inevitable errors and points of failure that can interrupt critical data flow. One of the most important strategies in creating a robust integration, is ensuring proper error handling. Error handling will enable your integrations to be proactive and prevent adverse events, like building queues and downtime.
The Iguana Translator scripting environment allows for more control to implement customized error handling during message processing and adds resiliency when managing transmission with external connections.
A modern integration engine can also mitigate slowdowns and downtime with automated error logging that triggers email and SMS notifications, allowing one to receive SMS online, to immediately connect operators who can handle manual resolutions. Iguana’s error logging helps organizations identify, analyze, and troubleshoot errors directly in Iguana and implement message resubmission strategies.
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