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Data Management
Activating data stores for interoperability with other systems.
As the healthcare industry continues to strive for broader interoperability, the importance of data integration projects for delivering connectedness in the form of data exchange and sharing is instrumental. The goal of interoperability is to coordinate the cooperative use of data across the care continuum to tell a patient’s full health history. This seamless access to data supports improved care delivery, better outcomes, and more satisfied patients.
With the 21st Century Cures Act adding enforceable rules to guide interoperability with fines to prevent information blocking, integration is as important as ever.
That means that we not only extract data, but migrate, consolidate, and retain it as well so that it may be enabled. These integration services are made possible through interoperability standards in the healthcare industry.
Common Health Data Standards
USCDI HL7 FHIR C-CDA XML Direct
Standards provide a common language for information to be ingested and made sense of regardless of its source system. Harmony Healthcare IT’s team of data experts have been utilizing standards to manage discrete, narrative and unstructured data for decades. Some examples:
With standards in place to guide the “what” and “how” of data movement, a variety of healthcare integration use cases may be addressed. The benefits of these use cases are shared among clinicians, hospitals, labs, pharmacies, researchers, payers, suppliers and patients.
Harmony Healthcare IT is the maker of HealthData Archiver® and HealthData AR Manager®, which offer HIPAA-compliant storage of protected health information (PHI) as well as employee, financial or business data from legacy software. With data from multiple data sources or domains consolidated to a single archive, some of these and other use cases become readily available:
Link historical patient records to a Master Patient Index (MPI). This greatly reduces manual or fuzzy logic patient matching, thereby increasing patient context accuracy when accessing patient records via Single Sign-On and establishing a foundation for interoperability and future integration projects.
After establishing the MPI foundation with historical patient records in HealthData Archiver®, leverage HealthData Integrator® to update the historical patient ID with the go-forward EHR, using a form of HL7 to link and unlink records when a merge or unmerge request has taken place keeping both systems in sync.
The 21st Century Cures Act requires healthcare providers to provide extensive patient access to their electronic medical records. With Secure Record Delivery, enable the transmission of an archived historical patient chart to a designated EHR endpoint.
Secure Record Delivery is a feature set of our solution under HealthData Integrator, which is one of our interoperability solutions. It allows for seamless delivery of records from a historic archived record set to a go-forward data endpoint. So, whether that be an EHR solution or a patient portal as an example it allows for seamless integration delivery of those records. Secure Record Delivery allows us to meet compliance for the 21st Century Cures Act, specifically the Data Blocking Provision. So, the archived or legacy data that’s stored within HealthData Archiver can seamlessly be delivered to an end point whether that be an EHR to a patient portal or other endpoint of choice for the health system. Additionally, it’s comprehensive records. So, a patient again, if they’re looking at their particular patient portal as an example as a comprehensive view of not only their current production EHR or clinical data, but also their historic and full patient chart, historical information as well.
Seamlessly authenticate, in patient-context, from most major EMR brands (e.g., Epic®, Cerner®, Allscripts®, MEDITECH®, athenahealth®, NextGen®) to HealthData Archiver®. Oauth/OpenID, Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML 2.0) and other standards are supported.
Log in to your everyday EHR to launch the application. Now simply use your EHR standard functionality to bring the patient chart into context on your screen, locate and click the button to launch HealthData Archiver. The legacy data for the desired patient will come up within context of their full chart. From here, You can simply navigate through the patient’s history provided by HealthData Archiver without ever leaving your EHR eliminating the hassle of logging into a separate system to return to the patient chart. Simply close HealthData Archiver and continue working in your EHR.
Ensure that archived data within HealthData Archiver® and HealthData AR Manager® is monitored for unusual activity and compliance through an integrated third-party monitoring platform like FairWarning®, P2Sentinel™, and Splunk®. Capture audit activity from login to logout and rest assured that the privacy and security of protected health information is covered.
Pre-define required reports as a part of the data storage planning process. Connect an ODBC/JDBC reporting, analytics, or business intelligence tool of choice (e.g., Crystal Reports®, Qlik®, Tableau®, Microsoft Power BI, SAP®), to make data dictionary and schema available to technical resources who then self-serve on-demand.
Export legacy data from HealthData Archiver® and HealthData AR Manager® and share it with population health management applications, data warehouses, APIs, dashboard/visualization tools, HIEs, research teams, and more.
Further enabling interoperability in healthcare are application programming interfaces (APIs). APIs clearly define the calls, requests, formats, and conventions that enable software applications to build on the functionality of each other. Our developers at Harmony Healthcare IT work collaboratively with APIs of leading health IT vendors to ensure the secure exchange or accessibility to data within the healthcare ecosystem.
The exchange of health data must be secure. HIPAA privacy and security requirements are in place to safeguard how data is transmitted, received, or maintained. An added layer of security comes in the form of frameworks such as HITRUST. There is a difference between HIPAA and HITRUST. HIPAA is a federal act that sets compliance standards while HITRUST is an organization that has established a common security framework (CSF) to help companies reach HIPAA standards and beyond. Harmony Healthcare IT maintains HIPAA-compliance and HITRUST-certification to ensure that health data is protected at rest and in transit.
Active archives like HealthData Archiver® and HealthData AR Manager® can help your organization deliver on interoperability goals. With many customers across the US and Canada, the data experts at Harmony Healthcare IT have worked with 550+ unique software brands to achieve the goals of complex data migration, archival or integration projects.
We ensure technical standards, policies and protocols are followed to securely store legacy data in an accessible archive while supporting the exchange of health information.
As your team continues to adapt to Cures Act regulations, safely guide the data within your care wherever it needs to go with a team of experienced clinical data experts. Ensure the data from your inventory of legacy applications is consolidated, secured, accessible and usable. This is the foundation for system integration and the backbone of what is needed to realize sustainable interoperability in healthcare technology.
Interoperability is the Secret to Effective Healthcare – MedCity News featured David Navarro, Senior Director of Data Science at Harmony Healthcare IT, in an article where he discusses numerous topics surrounding interoperability and the 21st Century Cures Act.
The 21st Century Cures Act aims to make health information more sharable among patients, providers, and payers. The recent move by the ONC to advance interoperability includes guidance and real-time compliance deadlines. This includes adoption of HL7® FHIR APIs as a standard to accelerate data exchange across healthcare.