Healthcare and pharmaceutical organizations leverage modern technology to automate daily operations and increase their efficiency. The advent of digital imaging technologies, electronic medical records, and resource-intensive applications has restructured existing data infrastructure. At the same time, the increasing use of mobile applications and telemedicine technologies has led to a notable increase in data generation.
Data integration software in healthcare and life sciences
Healthcare and pharmaceutical organizations leverage modern technology to automate daily operations and increase their efficiency. The advent of digital imaging technologies, electronic medical records, and resource-intensive applications has restructured existing data infrastructure. At the same time, the increasing use of mobile applications and telemedicine technologies has led to a notable increase in data generation.
Data integration software in healthcare and life sciences enable organizations to simplify the cleansing, storage, and retrieval of healthcare information. These solutions store and manage data securely in order to reduce costs, empower patients, streamline administrative processes, increase speed-to-market, and improve the quality of care. It is important to understand and leverage healthcare information that is generated throughout the industry—through patient care, clinical outcomes, financial results, and other avenues.
Importance of Data Integration
Data integration solutions consolidate raw data and prepare it for use in data analytics. Through data integration, a complete picture of a patient’s medical history, care, and outcomes is obtained. This facilitates meaningful communication across multiple providers and sites of care within the same organization as well as across organizations. These solutions also provide clinical and business analytics, thereby increasing the quality of care provided to patients.
Data integration processes start with patient data being entered into a source system. Data entry policies, validation, standards, audits, and feedback contribute to improving the quality, reliability, and applicability of this data across the industry.
Hospitals face several challenges in maintaining healthcare facilities and taking care of patients. Nurses, physicians, and other hospital staff often undertake time-consuming administrative tasks and use inefficient healthcare applications. Data integration plays a significant role in easing this burden. The use of integrated healthcare data is swiftly growing across the industry. This data is sourced from multiple disparate systems, with varying levels of sophistication, accessibility, transparency, and quality.
Present analysis techniques cannot help in the identification of inefficiencies or opportunities for improvement. Moreover, if stored information is violated, patient experience will suffer greatly, and organizations’ returns on their technology investments will decrease considerably. With an effective integrated platform, healthcare organizations can track and study patients and diagnoses while maintaining stringent data security.
Benefits of Data Integration platforms
Following are a few more benefits of an integrated platform:
- Reduces costs and bureaucracy in terms of paper, office supplies, printing, and mailing
- Increases coding accuracy and charges
- Increases the turnaround time for payments
- Improves physician-patient communication
- Provides detailed appointment information—including minute details such as traffic delays on the way to the hospital or clinic
- Enhances coordination of care and patient safety
- Increases the availability of patient information
- Improves length of stay management and decreases duplication of diagnostic tests
Selection of an incorrect or inefficient data integration solution can result in low end-user adoption of applications, which in turn creates issues with data quality. With the right integration platform, hospital facilities can spend less time with time-consuming rote processes and more time improving the quality of their services. Hospitals need to move away from isolated data sources and toward a common, easy to use, and unified platform that acts as a central hub for all related organizations. Healthcare organizations can even leverage existing data and enterprise software in one place through the use of a no-code platform.
