The Top Integration Inhibitors From a Business Perspective
1. Solving the Wrong Problem
When designing an integration solution, one of the most imperative steps in your approach is to truly understand the problem you are trying to solve. Oftentimes, solving smaller but immediate integration issues (a.k.a quick-fixes) can take precedence over focusing on a long-term strategy, making you lose sight of the bigger picture and leading your project astray. Understanding the long-term problems and goals of your project allows you to gain a more holistic understanding of the problems you are trying to solve, and can save you from running into issues down the road.
This can be achieved by looking at the specific use case that the integration will be used for. Applications optimized for emergency departments and those developed for supply chain uses are extremely different and clarifying the specific business objectives involved can lead to a successful integration.
The Iguana technical team at iNTERFACEWARE can help develop strategies that identify and analyze the appropriate business cases for a solution that will lead to the highest ROI, lowest TCO, and overall long term success.
2. Lack of Internal Integration Expertise
In a world saturated with solutions, navigating through a sea of information may become overwhelming when trying to determine the right approach for your business. Previous integration experience presents an invaluable set of knowledge and expertise that will not only help to guide you towards a successful implementation strategy, but will also ensure that your business is equipped with the tools and knowledge necessary to succeed in future integration projects, whether it be integrations with EMRs, HIEs, PACS systems, billing systems, medical devices, or IOT wearables. Since all of these applications need integration within the health system, hiring a dedicated team with expertise is paramount.
While the Iguana integration engine has an intuitive development environment, IT organizations can offload projects externally to the Iguana technical team for help with guidance, support, training, and suggestions on how integration processes can be implemented in the future.
3. Inadequate Long Term Strategy
Trying to solve a problem that may happen tomorrow can seem counterintuitive when you have an issue facing you today. However, failure to understand the long-term impacts of your integration design can lead to adaptation issues that will affect the lifetime of the integration. Plug and play tools may help to expedite your integration project, but do not offer the same degree of customization to support a long term transformation that evolves alongside your evolving business strategies.
Iguana’s out-of-the-box platform provides the scalability, maintenance, implementation, and design tools that can help you to future-proof your solution in order to anticipate pitfalls and remain flexible when working around market changes and regulatory pressures.
4. Scope Creep
One of the main reasons why transformation objectives fail is due to scope creep. This happens when constant changes to the initial project requirements occur or the business objectives continuously shift. The lack of a predefined scope during the planning stages can lead to a major failure to follow through on a long term strategy.
While changing the scope mid-project is not ideal, having the flexibility to, will give your team peace of mind. Iguana can easily and quickly adapt to changes in business needs because it is system, data, and transport protocol agnostic. Iguana’s built-in source control also reduces the risk as you are building and changing your interfaces, as your team can document all changes made and rollback to previous interface states if required.
In order to prevent scope creep from derailing your objective, it is important to have clearly defined goals and requirements, a strict time frame, and a set, allocated budget. During the implementation process, questions will inevitably come up about raising customizations and extra features. An Iguana technical team member can work in conjunction with a member of the project management team to monitor potential roadblocks and document changes in the change log. Tackling those extra customizations can happen in the next phase after the initial scope has been accomplished.
Healthcare interoperability is a product of the ever increasing number of applications and devices that are modernizing the current state of the industry. While legacy systems are built to accommodate the old practice of siloed data structures, modern integration engines deliver higher care quality, coordination, and cost control simply because the data transfer is much more fluid across all applications and devices.
Transforming your current system into one that can withstand these changes won’t be easy. Partnering with the right organization, however, can prevent these initiatives from falling flat.
Ready to take control of your digital transformation? Contact us today!