We are in the midst of a profound period of change in healthcare and health IT. Today, access to data — the right data at the right time — is more important than ever. That means healthcare organizations must be hyper vigilant when it comes to data, ensuring it is safe, secure, and efficiently shared. At Interlace Health, we are excited about the new technologies that are making data easier and safer to share and use — and we’re moving aggressively to enable our solutions to share the data we collect with EHRs, like MEDITECH Expanse.
While we work with other EHR vendors, we are particularly enthusiastic about our work with MEDITECH and our membership in the MEDITECH Alliance, because we share a vision for a FHIR-enabled, cloud-based future that improves data access and usability.
FHIR Integration will enable Interlace Health and MEDITECH clients to capture and leverage discrete data that patients enter on forms like consents, medical history questionnaires, and more. Up until recently, the only way to store completed forms was to save them as image files in the patient’s medical record, requiring care teams to review data from the archived images. Today, we're excited about our new FHIR-enabled, cloud-hosted Nova solution, which can share discrete data with MEDITECH's Expanse EHR, saving scanned forms in their original format for archival purposes.
Like MEDITECH with its MaaS offering, Interlace Health is also taking advantage of improved data integration, security, scalability, and ease of maintenance enabled by cloud-hosted solutions. Our Nova platform for forms automation and eSignature is fully cloud-hosted and offers many benefits.
The electronic medical record is the single source of truth for a high volume of useful patient data. That data becomes much more useful if you can leverage it in specialized third-party applications. For years, HL7 v2 and v3 messages and data files have been the standard for exchanging data. Several years ago, HL7 released a simplified approach for sending information between systems, FHIR, and it has been growing in popularity. FHIR is an acronym, which stands for Fast, Healthcare, Interoperable, Resources. The Resources are the data elements shared across the systems, and FHIR lets you get very specific about what you’re sending with nuanced request and response behaviors. As you can imagine, the power of FHIR facilitates countless benefits.
Interlace Health can now leverage FHIR-based integration to create a streamlined consenting workflow for the care team while enabling them to remain within the MEDITECH EHR. Clinical and registration users seamlessly launch from their MEDITECH workflow into the correct forms in the patient context; they do not need to spend time logging into another application, or finding the right patient and the right forms. Thanks to FHIR integration this is automatic. Behind the scenes, FHIR integration requests and responds with user, patient, and encounter information, and preserves the user and patient context to enable this advanced automation. In addition to auto-loading the forms, patient data auto-fills onto the form, so you are not starting from scratch. Any data patients and providers enter in the forms is collected discretely, allowing the EHR to integrate that new data directly into the patient’s chart. Forms range from registration packets to informed consents for procedures, to medical history questionnaires, and more.
With all of this data being collected and exchanged, cybersecurity is more important than ever. On-premise architecture has been standard for years, but as data warehouses and servers have evolved, more and more organizations across all industries are moving to a cloud infrastructure, which is typically more cost effective, lower maintenance, faster, and more secure. Security is at the forefront of everyone’s mind, and cloud providers invest a great deal of resources into cybersecurity — typically much more than any single organization using on-premise servers could afford.
Cloud service providers maintain an impressive level of physical security, advanced threat detection, and vigorous encryption protocols. They constantly monitor for threats and can roll out additional defenses and patches against suspicious behavior with a remarkably rapid response time. They also always offer better redundancy. All this amounts to a decreased risk of cyberattack, improved business continuity, and reduced downtime in the unlikely event of a breach.
Historically, MEDITECH and Interlace Health solutions were implemented directly on client-owned and managed on-premise servers. This was, and can still be, an effective approach. But with advances in cloud security, more healthcare organizations are looking to migrate and Interlace and MEDITECH have cloud-based offerings that enable organizations to reap these benefits.
Our new cloud-based platform is fully hosted, offering enhanced EHR integration, improved usability, advanced automation and simplified workflows. The platform includes the classic Interlace Health solutions such as eConsent, Forms on Demand, and Remote and Onsite Patient Intake; with opportunities to grow and add more capabilities, like eSignature for Home Health, Secure Online Forms available on your website, eFaxing Integration, and more.
Cloud-hosted servers are faster to spin up and require less overhead to build and configure. This means that Interlace Health can complete a software install in as fast as one month. Moreover, since Interlace maintains access to cloud-hosted servers, we can assist in managing and maintaining your applications and forms libraries. Whether your organization updates forms weekly (and someone constantly has their hands in the system) or only once a year (and they need a refresher on the form design process each time) the specialized Interlace Health form management team can lighten their load.
To Interlace Health and MEDITECH, data integration, cybersecurity, and SaaS are more than just buzzwords. They’re powerful tools for making data more integrated, usable, and secure. Today we’re working with MEDITECH to develop and simplify workflows at every level of the healthcare organization. During this profound period of change, we’re proud to be working with MEDITECH at the forefront of the interoperability movement, helping pave the way for better, safer workflows that support happier, more efficient staff and healthier patients.
Learn how Nathan Littauer Hospital in Gloverville, NY is succeeding with Interlace and MEDITECH in our case study and visit interlacehealth.com to learn more about our offerings.
Learn more about Interlace Health and other members of the MEDITECH Alliance.