A Single Patient View Improves Health Outcomes
While the mission of healthcare providers and services has always been to promote and support their patients’ well-being, they’ve often faced many challenges in following through on that promise. Sprawling healthcare systems — comprising physicians, nurses, hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, labs, insurers, and more — haven’t always developed effective means of communicating and sharing data among their disparate components. This has produced widespread fragmentation of patient data and a lack of comprehensive patient profiles. Because having a holistic, 360-degree view of a patient’s health information and history is integral to delivering the highest quality of patient care, the lack of these comprehensive profiles can lead to degraded health outcomes.
How a 360-Degree View Enables Patient-Centered Care
In a far-reaching effort to improve health outcomes while also reducing costs, healthcare systems are innovating in the delivery of patient care and services — in ways that make a single, 360-degree patient view more important than ever. One example of this important evolution is the rise of accountable care organizations.
Accountable care organizations (ACOs) are voluntary networks of healthcare providers and services that have elected to closely coordinate their patient care with one another. ACOs were borne out of a new effort to incentivize and reward beneficial health outcomes and maintenance instead of simply the volume of procedures and interactions — in other words, quality over quantity.
The close coordination and sharing of patient information within ACO networks — which can include physicians and practitioners of different specialties, hospitals, specialized clinics, labs, and service centers — allows healthcare providers to see a fuller profile of patients’ medical conditions and history. This enables them to focus their efforts and resources on the most beneficial tests and treatments — while also eliminating redundant or unproductive efforts. More importantly, it allows providers to coordinate their treatments, so together they can offer patients more holistic care that better promotes patients’ integral health and well-being. But these and other innovations hinge on the ability of healthcare providers and services to assemble and share a comprehensive 360-degree patient profile — increasingly in the form of electronic health records, or EHRs.
The Challenges of Building a Single Patient View
As various providers and services throughout the healthcare system deploy an increasing number of on-premise systems and SaaS applications, each managing different types of information, it becomes increasingly challenging to create a single 360-degree view of the patient. Outdated and inflexible legacy systems — which are especially difficult to integrate — aggravate the problem by preventing efficient data-sharing and creating data silos that isolate important patient information.
At the same time, the explosion of new technologies and treatments — from new diagnostic methods and monitoring equipment and apps, to new surgical methods and tools, to groundbreaking new drugs — have vastly expanded the typical patient’s interactions with the healthcare system. This has added to the difficulty of identifying and managing all the different pieces of information associated with a particular patient. Different providers, services, devices, applications, and databases contain all sorts of disparate patient data that must be aggregated to present a single patient view. Moreover, the numerous data types must follow HL7 standards in order to transfer data between healthcare systems. For this to happen, a healthcare network’s various systems need to be seamlessly integrated.
MuleSoft Enables a Single Patient View
MuleSoft makes it easy for healthcare providers and services to assemble a single patient view. By enabling seamless integration and systems interoperability throughout their networks, MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform™ lets them securely share information across applications, services, and healthcare systems. MuleSoft also simplifies management and maintenance of information through a unified interface, making patient data accessible to those who need it. Additionally, with the Anypoint™ Healthcare Toolkit, transferring data according to healthcare standards and guidelines is simplified.
Another component, Anypoint™ DataWeave, provides simple yet powerful data mapping and transformation through a graphical interface, making it easy to transform and normalize data, including patient profiles. For example, by applying defined rules and mapping requirements, DataWeave can help healthcare providers and services identify profiles for John Doe, John D, and Johnny Doe as belonging to the same patient, enabling data consolidation that prevents confusion, unclutters systems, and creates a more comprehensive patient profile.
Meanwhile, Anypoint™ Connectors enable instant API connectivity to some of the most commonly used healthcare applications, services, and standards such as HL7 and MLLP. With a library of pre-built healthcare application integration templates, you can rapidly connect EHRs, diagnostic, monitoring, pharmacy, insurance, billing, and other healthcare applications — and even legacy systems. Unlike other integration options, Anypoint Connectors are built and managed on MuleSoft’s Enterprise integration platform, allowing you to deploy integrations rapidly, either on-premise or in the cloud, for all your healthcare application integration needs. In addition, Anypoint™ Connector DevKit makes it easy to create connectors to your bespoke systems.
These components of MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform make it easy for healthcare providers and services to connect and enable secure communication among their disparate on-premise and cloud-based systems and applications. This, in turn, allows them to share valuable patient data throughout their networks, to build a single, 360-degree patient view that allows them to achieve better health outcomes in ways that are also more cost-effective. Learn more about how MuleSoft’s integration solutions can help healthcare providers move toward a more efficient and patient-centered future.