Hospital system

Like many healthcare organizations, the large hospital system decided to become a certified ACO in order to leverage the advantages of new value-based reimbursement incentives from Medicare and to improve its overall quality and efficiency of care.

Rather than simply adding an ACO reporting system and engaging the vendor to create point-to-point integrations that would end up being brittle, the customer wanted to take a holistic, future-proof approach to enable the best, long-term use of its data. This meant overhauling its integration and data management platform in order to address both near-term ACO needs and long-term interoperability and analytics needs. It also meant overcoming a significant number of challenges, including:

• A legacy integration engine built on an application-to-application integration system
• Data silos, wherein each application stored data in a proprietary format, making integration difficult
• Inconsistencies in patient identification across each individual system, resulting in multiple records for the same patient
• Integration and data management processes that function independently, creating inefficiencies and increased risk of error
• HIPAA and data security compliance mandates requiring extensive internal management and overhead to coordinate across each vendor application

Working together, OpenText and the hospital designed a solution on the cloud-based Alloy platform to achieve realtime integration, interoperability and data access across its ACO network.

Creating a unified, integrated data lake, a centralized, cloud-based big data repository, for all patient and process data from across the network was key to the success of this solution. Aggregating this data from both internal and external sources established a persistent, application-agnostic data layer to which affiliated hospitals, providers and other network partners could connect for data input, export and analysis. And, because the data layer exists independently, the healthcare organization can easily connect new applications, data sources and stakeholders to fulfill new requests and maintain a future-ready state.

Key capabilities provided by Alloy include:

• Realtime integration of patient data across 120+ data sources, including hospital units (e.g., ER, surgery, inpatient and outpatient care, etc.), hospital-owned physician practices, independently owned network practices and third-party service providers (e.g., laboratory, physical therapy, etc.)
• Data harmonization involving billing solutions and payers
• Patient matching that establishes a single global ID for accurate tracking across the entire care network
• The creation of a centralized database for research initiatives and population analysis
• Generation of data required for ACO reporting
• Compliance with HIPAA and other data security mandates

By leveraging the unified integration and data management capabilities of Alloy, the hospital system not only achieved the ACO reporting and efficiency requirements it set out for, but it has also integrated thousands of patient records from across 120+ sources (internal and external). The benefits of this include:

• Better patient outcomes as a result of access to patients’ comprehensive medical histories at the point of care
• Reduced cost of care through more efficient access to patient information and reduced duplication of services
• Stronger partnerships as a result of better communication and data sharing across the ACO network
• Reduced compliance scope by allowing the OpenText platform to take on much of the compliance burden
• A future-ready data platform to which new applications, data sources and stakeholders can be easily connected

The healthcare system looks ahead to other benefits that can be realized as a result of the comprehensive approach to integration and data management. For example, due to its newfound ability to aggregate and harmonize evidence in a big data environment, the organization is considering new approaches to population analysis in order to design more effective treatment and prevention programs, anonymizing data for research purposes and other creative ways to continue improving care, network relationships and process efficiencies.