5 Reasons Why Health IT Teams Should Consider a Managed Services Partner

Data are the new business currency because the insights they yield drive profits and disrupt industries. Data play just as pivotal a role in the healthcare and life sciences sectors, giving organizations insights they need to improve outcomes, manage population health effectively and run operations efficiently. But too many organizations are held back by internal integration engines or outdated technology like enterprise service buses.

>> READ: Why Don’t Enough People Want to Work in Health IT?

Technologies developed decades ago aren’t up to the task of handling high volumes of data from multiple sources. And with data connections growing exponentially due to the expansion of the Internet of Things and increasing use of connected devices, relying on solutions developed in house for data integration and management causes problems, too.

Healthcare IT departments struggle to build point-to-point connections, and data scientists are too busy serving as “data janitors” to innovate. So, what can healthcare organizations do to get the integration, interoperability and data management capabilities they need? One increasingly popular path is to find a partner that provides an advanced platform and managed services. By outsourcing data integration and management to a partner, healthcare organizations can:

1. Solve integration, interoperability and data management challenges.

With the right vendor, healthcare IT departments can gain access to a platform that supports healthcare’s diverse data requirements. The right platform can also provide the ability to collaborate across sectors, so that health systems, clinicians, labs, researchers and life sciences organizations can use data in meaningful new ways to improve patient care and outcomes.

2. Reduce complexities in data.

With a managed services partner, health IT can access unified integration and data management capabilities as services, which reduce the complexities that arise alongside the proliferation of data and the diversity of clinical, research and other types of data that organizations encounter in the course of operations, care delivery, chronic disease monitoring, research or clinical trials management.

3. Connect any two endpoints.

One of the major challenges facing healthcare IT is connecting new sources of data that arrive in a variety of formats, from an array of sources. A vendor that specializes in data integration can handle connecting virtually any two endpoints, including internal, external, mobile, electronic health record, claims, medical device data and other new applications that exist today or may evolve tomorrow.

4. Access high-quality data on demand.

A data integration and management vendor with an advanced platform can ensure on-demand, self-service access to clean, high-quality data, preserving the information in a big data repository. This frees up highly skilled data scientists from performing the “data janitor” services that currently consume 80 percent of their time.

5. Ease the burden of complying with today’s increasingly complex and expanding data security and privacy regulations.

Healthcare organizations handle financial data and incredibly sensitive personal health information. Keeping up with the evolving regulations and industry standards for data security and privacy is a significant responsibility. But a managed services agreement with a data integration and management vendor that understands the challenges and makes data security and compliance a key tenet of their platform relieves the healthcare organization of much of this burden.

Health IT departments have lengthy to-do lists, and budget dollars and resources are often in short supply. An agreement with a managed services vendor to handle data integration and management can be an investment that pays off by erasing the limitations imposed by outdated systems and freeing in-house IT professionals to focus on more strategic projects, such as digital transformation.

By selecting a data integration and management partner with an advanced platform and managed services team that can handle modern data requirements, healthcare leaders can take care of today’s data needs and prepare for tomorrow’s challenges. But the most important return on the investment is the potential for better patient outcomes delivered by a more efficient, agile and innovative healthcare organization.

Shabih Syed leads product marketing and field enablement for the Liaison ALLOY® Platform. Syed is a seasoned software executive with more than 12 years of experience in defining the strategic vision and roadmap of enterprise software platforms at IBM, HP and Liaison. Shabih is passionate about helping customers with their digital transformation efforts and loves sharing his experiences with building and marketing enterprise platforms, big data lakes and data analytics solutions.

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