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Integration: The Gateway To Online Success
September 2006
Web portals have become a crucial information entry point at many provider and payer organizations.
Some providers are using their Web portals to offer physicians and nurses a centralized location for clinical data about all their patients, as well as enabling patients to schedule appointments, enroll in health classes or send messages to their physician.
Payers also are using portals as a gateway to information and services. Patients can pay bills, physicians and verify coverage information, and business partners, such as brokers, can communicate with health plans via electronic pathways.
In addition, the strategy for many emerging regional health information organizations is to use portals as online information exchanges, pulling clinical and demographic data from numerous facilities and disparate information systems.
With so much online progress in a relatively short period of time, one would assume that designing and deploying portals capable of conducting health care transactions is a relatively easy task.
But many providers and payers that have moved transactions online say the opposite is true. Web portals require a major reshuffling of I.T. staff, processes and technologies to integrate information and enable transactions to flow seamlessly through a Web portal into back-end information systems and then out again.
"To move an organization to Web portals requires more than just making the portal work," says Gale Wilson-Steele, chief strategy officer at MedSeek Inc., a Solvang, Calif.-based vendor of health care Web portal systems and services. "You have to start changing how you get data and the processes around that. It requires a lot of thought."
The technological challenges can be daunting: trying to connect a jumble of information systems-some enterprisewide, some departmental-in such a way that they can exchange data with one another as well as the central Web portal. But the task is becoming easier thanks to a toolbox of integration and interfacing technologies, and messaging standards, that are enabling health care organizations to piece together myriad systems and data sets in a cohesive way and set up shop online.
Service, please
One of the most common technologies used to migrate data online is service oriented architecture. SOA is an application architecture that creates interfaces via a series of repeatable tasks or processes. The interfaces are platform independent and can coexist with the processes already working within an application.
For example, a group practice could use SOA to design a task in a scheduling application that pulls up and displays open time slots in physicians' schedules each time a patient initiates an appointment request via a patient portal.
SOA usually refers to the use of several universal standards-called Web services-to create repeatable tasks that enable data from disparate systems across different industries to be exchanged via the Internet.
In this arena, health care has a leg up: Many health care clinical applications use message protocols developed by Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Health Level Seven to exchange text messages and data. Having an industrywide, standard messaging protocol makes it easier to create Web portal interfaces to link clinical systems.
"SOA and Web services technologies are really designed as integration architectures for larger legacy environments," says Eric Bartholet, partner at Computer Sciences Corp., an El Segundo, Calif.-based consulting and software firm. "Because provider organizations can use HL7, they have less of a need for those technologies than companies in other industries."
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