Are platform-first companies positioned to change healthcare?
EHRs as a health platform
Until fairly recently, the concept of platforms and true interoperability within the electronic health record (EHR) market was more of an aspiration than a reality. Even well-intentioned startups and end-point clinical solutions often ran up against technical obstacles when attempting simple integrations.
These obstacles would force them to shift to either recreating commodity parts of the EHR ecosystem (demographic capture and scheduling, for example) or reverting to decades-old file formats such as CDA.
These limitations created not only brittle integrations, but often bespoke implementations that had little chance of working across different vendors.
Over the past decade, following the rollout of Meaningful Use and more recently the 21st Century Cures Act, EHR vendors have been tasked with making interoperability a priority and creating an ecosystem enabling data sharing and portability.
Instead of creating “shadow IT” projects outside of that ecosystem, companies are now able to find ways to boost and enhance those existing systems, tightly integrating with them to make those systems more useful and their users more productive.
In 2022, 85% of large hospitals (> 500 beds) used one of the two largest EHR vendors. When taking the entire U.S. hospital market into account, the top 3 EHR vendors captured more than 75% of market share. The number of EHR vendors over that same decade consolidated from 1000+ to roughly 400 by 2019.
With these regulations and consolidations, the technical landscape of the EHR more closely resembles a platform than at any time in history. Today, there are more tailwinds than headwinds when considering integration as an approach to building healthcare solutions.
Why does this matter?
Healthcare organizations have invested millions of dollars and tens of thousands of hours building and refining their IT systems. Instead of creating “shadow IT” projects outside of that ecosystem, companies are now able to find ways to boost and enhance those existing systems, tightly integrating with them to make those systems more useful and their users more productive.
Validic and our platform-first approach
In a Forbes article from 2019 explaining the rise of business software platforms, author Mohamed Zahreddine discusses the emergence of solutions that take a platform-first approach:
These solutions can be thought of as business software platforms that are designed around a subset of business processes that are closely related — even if the initial design did not intend to be for more than a single-purpose solution. These solutions don’t cover every business process in the enterprise by design, but they are designed with an awareness of other upstream and downstream business processes.
Zahreddine further describes the key characteristics of what differentiates these solutions:
1. Unmatched subject matter expertise in the business processes that they cover.
2. Extreme flexibility, with configurable platforms that provide out-of-the-box best-practices simultaneously.
3. Software as a service (SaaS) systems that are scalable and take advantage of the cloud.
4. The ability to integrate and interface with other solutions.
Validic® Inform: Health IOT Platform
When looking at Validic and our platform-first approach through this lens, the similarities are plain to see. Our platform offering, Validic® Inform, intentionally focuses on the specific problem space of conquering the dozens and ultimately hundreds of personal health-related, digitally connected devices and data sources.
A new integration requires, on average, 200 hours of engineering, plus management of 10-15 vendor-related issues per year — each involving 5-10 hours of research, communication, and remediation.
We manage device/data source vendor relationships in our platform solution. We understand complex and nuanced concepts such as evolving Bluetooth specifications, and we do the “heavy lifting” in managing updates, upgrades, deprecations, and other changes across the vendor and device landscape. Because Validic® Inform is designed to be a platform, we are continuously adding new devices and data types, which broaden potential use cases for our clients.
Managing data and device vendor relationships is a complicated undertaking. Platforms need to maintain compliance while creating secure data-sharing channels that regularly communicate sensitive patient data. Data integration across multiple sources is equally challenging, particularly as data sources change and new data points are created.
A new integration requires, on average, 200 hours of engineering, plus management of 10-15 vendor-related issues per year — each involving 5-10 hours of research, communication, and remediation.
Validic® Inform simplifies a traditionally complicated, challenging data connectivity space.
It acknowledges that the most important problem to solve for our clients is simplifying a vast device and data source library. This creates a simple pathway to reliably deliver user-generated data back to the client’s environment, to be used by downstream processes. We are un-opinionated in how these services are offered to their users and what they do with the data once received — while at the same time delivering a reliable platform upon which users can build mission-critical business processes.
Validic® Impact: connecting people and their health providers
A platform is a raised surface upon which things can stand. Having built the Validic® Inform health IoT platform, with its vast library of devices and data sources, we created an opportunity to think about how data could be used in clinical workflows — making personally generated data actionable and part of care plans and treatment programs. With domain expertise and knowledge gained through connecting millions of peoples’ devices, we built the Validic® Impact remote care application, using Validic® Inform as the basis for data collection and delivery.
Because we are directly integrated into EHR platforms, clinicians and care teams can access comprehensive patient and personal health data in one place. We deliver data generated by patients directly into the digital record, where it is available for any workflows that have access to that data.
Validic® Impact lives at the intersection of two platforms: our health IoT, device connectivity platform and EHR interoperability services. Seamless integration of visual experience and data are key philosophies of how we conceived of and built Validic® Impact. In an approach similar to how we built Validic® Inform, we focused on the areas where we have expertise, while allowing for upstream and downstream business processes to evolve and grow independently.
Because we are directly integrated into EHR platforms, clinicians and care teams can access comprehensive patient and personal health data in one place. We deliver data generated by patients directly into the digital record, where it is available for any workflows that have access to that data. Care teams configure remote care programs to fit their needs and create customized rules to support their standards of care. Seamless enrollment, triage, and review can help save time and drive rapid clinical adoption.
In addition to being a turnkey remote care application, Validic® Impact also embraces the value of platform thinking by exposing services that allow clients to build their own patient-facing solutions. Because Validic® Impact is built using Validic® Inform, the data in that platform can also be made available. Over time, Validic® Impact will continue to evolve its platform capabilities, enabling innovation and creativity in how programs are constructed and managed within a digital health ecosystem.
Validic® Impact strives to help our clients move away from fragmented ecosystems, and to create a platform for how they digitally connect to their populations of users, for any and all use cases where personally generated data can become actionable in health and care.
How platform-first solutions will help your organization improve healthcare delivery
Interoperability among EHR platforms was more of a goal than a reality — until recently. The past decade has seen EHR vendors prioritize a data ecosystem, one that makes data sharing easy and portable.
This shift allows health systems the flexibility to integrate data directly into the EHR landscape — a trend that works well with our platform-first approach. We created Validic® Inform as a streaming platform for personal health data, and Validic® Impact as an opportunity to integrate that personal data directly into a clinical workflow.
These products represent our efforts to migrate clients further from fragmented data ecosystems, and toward a digitally connected ecosystem where providers have ethical access to user data that informs better, smarter, faster health decisions.
If you’re interested in scaling your organization as you coordinate your virtual health strategy, connect with our team at hello@validic.com to schedule a meeting. Stay updated with Validic in 2023 by following us on Twitter and LinkedIn.