AWS Smart Business Blog

How One SMB Unified Clinical Data to Better Understand Health Trends

Imagine having volumes and volumes of data but not knowing how to take action. You know there are hidden trends, but do not have enough staff to generate insights to help your business. If you work in a highly-regulated industry there could even be specific practices required for managing the data. As if it weren’t complex enough, you might also be a small or medium business (SMB) that has a patchwork of technology where the data is stored. Ultimately, you’re faced with seemingly endless possibilities but lack the modern technology and processes to move your company forward.

Curantis Solutions knows about the value of health data. It’s an SMB based in Texas (US), where they’re focused on delivering value to hospice and palliative care organizations. Their solutions allow providers to increase clinical, operational, and financial efficiencies, while offering high quality, well-coordinated patient care. This is all possible with their innovative, cloud-based management solutions.

Curantis wanted to make data enhancements to their platform to tackle two of the most common issues in the healthcare industry: siloed data and disparate software systems. With a strong commitment to advancing patient care and the desire to re-imagine new workflows that collapse days of work into hours, the company embarked on this mission.

Facing challenges with patient health data and clinical systems

In the healthcare IT community, software and data integration is notoriously challenging. The systems used to collect, maintain, store, disseminate, or process patient data (known as clinical systems) have evolved over time to meet the demands of more complex compliance and certifications. Clinical system vendors develop their own standards or processes, which makes it difficult to transfer data between different systems. If you’re an American who has ever had to transfer electronic patient records from one medical provider to another, you know this all too well.

Today, a number of clinical system vendors are moving toward a single standard: HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR). At a federal level, The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have several regulatory milestones both providers and health plans must meet. Together this could create a better, more efficient experience for those interacting with clinical data. For Curantis, they needed to address FHIR compliance and recognized it was the right move for customers, new partners, and its engineers.

The path to a data-unified software company

Curantis viewed data unification as a daunting task due to their size and the expected effort. They turned to an Amazon Web Services solution to help them centralize their FHIR-compliant data in Amazon HealthLake. HealthLake is a fully managed FHIR service that allows customers to make data interoperable.

Curantis had already identified the challenge—so the team used Amazon’s Working Backwards process to find a customer-centric solution. AWS proved to be instrumental in helping the Curantis team work through the following:

To make the initiative even more successful, Curantis implemented Amazon Kinesis, a service that helps collect, process, and analyze real-time data to enhance HealthLake’s functionality. Today, all of Curantis’s data within HealthLake is easily accessible using Structured Query Language (SQL), which opens the door for using AI, analytics, and business intelligence.

Emphasis on analytics

For Curantis’s customers, analytics are integral for placing patients in the correct level of care. Before HealthLake, Curantis’s data was difficult to access and analyze. After moving to HealthLake, Curantis chose to use another service, Amazon QuickSight, to build visual dashboards and reports. This became valuable for leaders who needed to make decisions without spending hours analyzing each data point.

As care facilities look for quick responses to their data queries, this integration happens in near real time—and provides a seamless experience to Curantis’s customers. As Curantis continues to grow and customers request more of their data, HealthLake and QuickSight make a powerful combination. They are designed to help Curantis continue to expand their analytic capabilities, bringing to market powerful patient trends data and key indicators that will enhance critical decision making for high quality patient care.

Advancing care through innovation

With the help of AWS, Curantis now has a data platform that allows the company to represent business changes in near real time. Curantis expanded abilities to meet their customers’ and partners’ needs, including:

  • Enhanced partner integrations
  • Diverse ways to present a patient-focused view
  • The power to make predictions about a patient’s decline based upon chart data
  • The ability for customers and internal stakeholders to easily explore data

AWS enabled Curantis to be responsive to internal product requirements—all the while giving customers access to tools and analytics that better help them manage their patient populations as they work hard to do more with less. It’s a transformation that allows Curantis to achieve their prominent motto to re-imagining hospice and palliative care software.

Speak with a healthcare cloud expert at AWS to begin your data analytics journey or learn more about digitization on AWS Smart Business.