All agreed that individually they can’t be all things to all people -- ‘interoperability’ was the word.
A lesson to us all — “you can’t be everything to everyone”. In the digital healthcare space, that means interoperability is the word.
Speaking at the Talking HealthTech Winter Summit’s digital integration session last week, the comraderie was palpable between the four providers on the panel – Best Practice, Oracle, Cubiko and Alcidion.
Dialing in from Kuala Lumpa, Oracle lead business developer Phillip Loya said that despite the providers’ want for market share, domination in isolation was misguided.
“We’re beyond the timeframe where we think of one system being the end all, be all for everything,” he said.
“I’m from Oracle Health … we’re a big EMR provider.
“Yes, we want to be the system of record for a lot of things, but there’s no one system for everyone, for every single use case, for every single purpose, and interoperability is required no matter what.”
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Mr Loya said it wasn’t plausible for one provider to cover all bases.
“Interoperability standards are starting to help us create situations where there’s enough commonality that you can start to get some economies of scale, and you can create support for something really niche and share data and have new use cases … and build a business off it,” he said.
“Interoperability is absolutely key. Being part of the ecosystem is very important.
“Clinicians do expect a consolidated workflow, and we want to try and give it to them, but we know that … no one has enough engineers to cover every single use case for every single clinician in every single country of the world.
“That’s just not happening.”
Best Practice’s Danielle Bancroft seconded the sentiment, adding that client-base and use-case variability negated the possibility of one “uber system”.
“You can’t be everything to everyone,” she said. “Ultimately, you have a client base that all practice differently.
“Everyone’s not the same, so what their needs are and how they treat their patients differs slightly. The tools that they utilise to back that are going to be different across different practices, across different areas and sectors of the health system.
“Increasingly, there is multidisciplinary [use], and it’s a great word to use, but at the same time, that also means transitions of care change and alter very quickly.
“No patient’s the same, so their transition and journey across the care ecosystem is different. You can’t just build one uber system that does everything.
“It’s not possible to deliver the kind of innovation, support and technology for our customers at that rate.
“So being able to integrate, have a partnership and offer those additional tools that our customers can pick is absolutely pivotal.”
But it’s about more than just integration, added Ms Bancroft.
“An ecosystem is bigger than just integrating one system,” she said.
“How do we actually innovate at scale? How do we allow new technology advancements to be included? How do we incorporate tools much quicker for our customers and allow that change to happen?
“With the way that healthcare is changing from being reactive to proactive means we need to move faster, and that’s where I think ecosystems come in and the approach changes.
“It’s not just about bespoke integrations that have to be installed at the site.
“It’s how do we actually offer those tools quicker in an ecosystem that can continue to evolve?”
The panel members agreed that facilitating the coexistence of different systems and methods of integration was key.
“We would all love to have these beautiful, standardised APIs today that everyone can connect to,” said Ms Bancroft.
“But we have a plethora of software in this industry that’s at different maturity levels and flexibility to be able to move quickly versus move slowly.
“I think the core focus of where we should be is not, ‘how do we get interoperability?’, [but] how do we support each other to integrate in this current hybrid world, to move towards our end goal.”
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Chief product officer at Alcidion Kaye Hocking said that it was about adopting standards and providing roadmaps to compliance.
“While we’re advancing, while we’re adhering to standards, we’re also keeping everybody in touch and connected, rather than disadvantaging, potentially, some sections of the health sector because they can’t maintain the pace that’s needed,” she said.
Delegate, founder and CEO of technology provider KRE8 IT, Charles Papp commented that “to really solve interoperability, everyone’s systems need to speak and understand the same language (standard)”.
“The sooner we all embrace and implement the changes required, the better. It will take time, and there will be early adopters and laggards, but we’ll get there.”
Cubiko CEO Chris Smeed outlined the importance not only of data itself but of its availability.
“Without data, we’re nothing,” he said.
“Cubiko is a tool that pulls data and displays insights, so if we can’t get data, we don’t have a lot of display. It makes it a pretty boring and useless product.
“I was a practice manager for many years, and was installing add-ons and doing things on my servers to try and get data out of them.
“When I was good enough to start working in the space and doing things, I quickly realised the importance of integration, because without that source data, it wasn’t useful.”
According to a poll undertaken by Talking HealthTech, 48% of listeners felt interoperability was the biggest challenge in integrating health technology ecosystems.
Stakeholder collaboration was second at 27%, followed by technology infrastructure, 15%, and regulatory compliance, 9%.
