Health Care

Escalating costs of medical care, pharmaceuticals and medical equipment continue to be one of the most significant causes for concern in the healthcare industry. Lack of integration among legacy healthcare systems and applications means a continued reliance on manual processes that can introduce high risk errors into critical medical data. Poor integration with pharmaceutical suppliers impacts both patient care and the business bottom line. And isolated systems can compromise a provider's ability to follow an individual patient's care seamlessly from intake to treatment to aftercare.

While healthcare providers recognize that integration can help them achieve better service levels, many have been reluctant to proceed because of the critical nature of healthcare systems. But the approach to integration need not be a radical one of system rip and replace, nor does it have to proceed through the development of system-by-system integration solutions. Instead, what is needed is an approach to integration that leverages existing IT investments, is standardized in its approach and is flexible enough to keep up with the changing needs of the healthcare industry.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an approach to integrating IT resources that can enable you to leverage existing assets, while at the same time building an infrastructure that can rapidly respond to new organizational challenges and deliver new dynamic applications. The SOA approach can help free application functionality from its underlying IT architecture, and make existing and new services available for consumption over the network.

Healthcare industry spending in the U.S. is currently at about 16% of the gross domestic product—not only higher than any other major industrialized country, but also projected to continue increasing over the next decade. Expensive new medical technologies, the rising cost of pharmaceuticals and physician and patient demands for higher quality healthcare all contribute to rising costs, even as the number of uninsured Americans is at an all time high.

Healthcare organizations can improve the quality of the services they offer to their patients by streamlining supporting processes—from patient care management to purchasing practices with pharmaceutical and medical suppliers.

• Lack of integration between legacy healthcare systems often contributes to a continued reliance on a process of manual input of patient data throughout the course of treatment. Not only is manual data entry time consuming, costly and error prone, but many physicians estimate that they spend as much as 50% of their time with paperwork, rather than with the patients themselves.
• Improving inefficiencies in the supply chain can also increase the quality of service, while failure to address those inefficiencies impacts both patient care and the business' bottom line. Even though material management and inventory systems which are common to the manufacturing world are beginning to be adopted in healthcare, standardized purchasing practices, designed to balance both cost and effectiveness, are still relatively uncommon. Managing the pharmaceutical supply chain—with multiple suppliers, pricing variance and even different disclosure practices on the efficacy of drugs—is also particularly complex.

The first steps to achieving more effective patient and supply chain management are to integrate and automate your existing systems. Once supporting systems are integrated and the information handoffs between them automated, the framework is in place for staff to begin process management. Simply put, process management (commonly known as business process management) is a management approach designed to provide the tools and framework to support the optimization of human workflow and system processes.