Solving interoperability in healthcare with AWS Marketplace

The need for interoperability in the healthcare industry is no surprise. Healthcare data should be easy to transfer between all organizations and individuals to enhance patient care, lower costs, and improve outcomes across the patient care cycle. The big question that remains is if healthcare organizations today are prepared to advance interoperability and if the challenges they face are being effectively addressed.

Fierce Healthcare conducted a survey and found common themes across 100 healthcare providers, payors, and IT vendors that provide insights into the state of interoperability. Most providers are investing in consolidating clinical systems, adding new talent, and upskilling existing employees. More than half of payors are partnering with new IT vendors to address their interoperability projects. Across the board, providers, payors, and IT vendors are looking to upgrade current solutions, upskill existing employees, and invest in new technologies.

AWS recently hosted a webinar that addresses this topic titled Advance healthcare interoperability with AWS Marketplace. Featured guest speaker Mike Holtshouse, Senior Director of Commercial Operations at Murj Medical, and I go into more detail about the interoperability survey. We give an overview of the real-world challenges Murj faced and how the team solved them by partnering with Redox. We also introduce a variety of proven healthcare solutions from independent software vendors that offer support to accelerate your interoperability initiatives.

AWS Marketplace simplifies interoperability challenges

Together with a network of technology partners, AWS can help with the outside thinking and technology advances to improve interoperability across the healthcare industry. With AWS Marketplace, healthcare customers can easily find, buy, consume, and manage third-party software, services, and data that you need to build solutions and run your businesses.

AWS Marketplace offers quick, easy, and secure deployment, flexible consumption, and contract models, and streamlined procurement and operations. It can take around half the time to find, buy, and deploy a solution through AWS Marketplace compared to other sources.[1] These third-party healthcare solutions in AWS Marketplace are purpose-built to help healthcare organizations enhance patient care, lower costs, and improve outcomes across the continuum of care.

Implementing electronic health record (EHR) integration with Murj and Redox

An example of a healthcare solution that promotes interoperability is Murj, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), cloud-based cardiac device management platform. Since entering the market in 2017, Murj’s platform has been used by clinicians to streamline care for patients with implantable cardiac devices, merging in-office and remote patient monitoring with simplicity and efficiency.

Today, in a typical workflow, clinics use legacy software and inadequate tools, which can be inefficient. Murj set out to solve this problem by deploying the Redox EHR Integration platform, available in AWS Marketplace. Redox has a portfolio of approximately 1,700 connections across a variety of Healthcare Organizations (HCOs). This made it straightforward for Murj to connect to Redox via APIs and subsequently double the number of connected organizations in a single year (2020) while cutting the average install time by 54 percent.

Using Redox as its solution also gave Murj the capacity to add new features, such as a record locator service, automated ticketing, and support dashboards. It also helped Murj not only improve scalability but also lower its average price per connection.

Conclusion

Healthcare organizations indicate that they are investing in interoperability initiatives, policies, and procedures, underscoring the importance of facilitating data exchange. With technology upgrades and improving employee talent top of mind, customers are solving interoperability issues by implementing partner solutions available in AWS Marketplace. To learn more about real-life use cases and customer stories, watch the webinar Advance healthcare interoperability with AWS Marketplace.

About the author

Michael Leonard is the Global Healthcare Category Lead responsible for growing the AWS Marketplace healthcare vertical business. His previous role was a Principal Product Manager on the AWS Storage Gateway team. Over the past 20 years, Michael has progressed through a variety of roles in business development, product management and engineering at AWS, Commvault, Iron Mountain, Merge Healthcare and GE Healthcare. He has built and managed teams to develop Healthcare IT solutions focused on medical imaging, EHR systems, hybrid cloud storage services and data protection solutions.

[1] Source: ESG Research Report, AWS Marketplace Purchasing Efficiency, November 2020.