Becker's Hospital Review

40 Executive Briefing Sponsored by: H ealthcare organizations face ample challenges when it comes to maintaining and meeting value-based care technology and information needs. Data integration is especially challenging in health systems. For one, healthcare data is fragmented over dozens or even hun- dreds of applications at most organizations. It's not atypical for larger organizations to routinely juggle information between 800-1,000 applications across disparate IT systems, according to some estimates. The majority of healthcare IT executives struggle to customize software solutions, make them work har- moniously with one another and integrate their respective sets. Leaders are left to endure substantial pain points on a daily ba- sis with their existing enterprise software. "Appian has a client with seven different medical records across their care continuum," says Fritz Haimberger, vice president and global industry lead of the healthcare provider business at Ap- pian Corporation. " A patient in the same town can have three different medical records at three different facilities in that sys- tem. As organizations continue to acquire providers at different points in the continuum and affiliate with others, the need to have a digital relay that allows them to look at the whole patient record at once is paramount." In addition, the rise of consumerism in medicine is leading many hospital systems to look for new ways to build brand awareness among current and prospective patients while meet- ing consumer demands for convenience, access and efficiency. Digital transformation initiatives, including patient-facing apps, are popular means for healthcare organizations to engage pa- tients both within and outside the healthcare arena. Apps let patients schedule appointments, access medical records, lo- cate the nearest care site or determine whether their symptoms even warrant a trip to the care site in the first place. Finally, the slow speed of application creation, implementa- tion, updates and maintenance, along with the lack of mobile offline/native capabilities, are no fit for health systems that must adapt to changing markets, strategy and patient needs. In fact, over 80 percent of executives have had to change a part of their business operations to match the way their software works. Some healthcare organizations have responded to today's care demands by implementing low-code development platforms to meet the app development demands of digital transforma- tion programs while reducing software maintenance costs, im- proving data integration and enhancing business agility. These organizations are fighting IT system sprawl by taking advantage of flexible, scalable, low-code enterprise solutions to create a single digital platform that consolidates and unifies healthcare content and gives organizations opportunities to more quickly build new solutions using technology they already own. State of the Union: Digital Transformation in Healthcare Stakeholders agree: Interoperability across clinical systems is crucial for physician decision-making and improved quality of care. Giving providers access to patient data from disparate sources enables each member of the care team to base clini- cal decisions on a comprehensive image of patient health, re- ducing chances for duplicate testing, gaps in care and medical error. It's true healthcare providers have made some gains in interop- erability in recent years. However, advances across the four do- mains of interoperability — finding, sending, receiving and inte- grating electronic information — have been uneven at best. It's worth noting most health systems have put greater emphasis on exchanging data than combining it. In fact, a 2017 Health Af- fairs study found providers' interoperability efforts have largely focused on developing skills related to sending and receiving data, rather than on integrating data into a single view. Although data sharing is important to advance the adoption of value-based care models, uniting enterprise data from multi- ple information systems into a single access point is integral to making data usable where it counts — at the patient bedside. After all, data is only as valuable as the insights it yields. Nearly 50 percent of healthcare IT executives said improving data inte- gration would reduce operational expenses and improve care delivery at their respective organizations. "Data is everywhere, and yet there are no insights — millions of dollars are spent on software yet there isn't a holistic view of the health system or a 360 degree view of patients," Mr. Haim- berger says. "A greater focus on integration, rather than on the sending and receiving of data, may help shift hospitals' focus to making data available at the point of care when it is clinically relevant." IT sprawl is problematic for hospital staff beyond the IT depart- ment. In fact, the effects of poor data integration and system us- ability are felt most acutely by front-line providers, who rely on multiple systems and apps to accomplish daily tasks. Consider that physicians spend, on average, 50 percent of their work day entering data into EHRs, nearly twice as much as the 27 percent of work hours spent interacting with patients, according to a 2016 study in Annals of Internal Medicine. Physicians have a right to harbor healthy skepticism of health IT. Excess time taken ticking EHR boxes has directly contributed to the rise in physician burnout, with nearly 50 percent of phy- sicians reporting frequent or constant feelings of professional burnout in the past year. However, despite many physicians' frustration with current technology, they are interested in dig- ital health tools they believe will improve clinical practices and How Low-Code Platforms Are Driving Digital Transformation in Value-Based Healthcare

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