Everyone seems to agree that the current US healthcare system is broken, or at least needs serious overhaul. Healthcare has been an ongoing national debate with both sides agreeing on the many problems (although not the solution), and everyone has their own personal tale of healthcare falling short.
Many of healthcare’s systemic problems come from being overwhelmed by big data, too many systems recording too much diverse data and not actively working together. If a healthcare organization’s billing doesn’t connect with patient discharge, treatment tracking or a customer web portal there are bound to be problems. Mistaking a patient’s gender seems like a small problem, but can reflect a systemic lack of connected data that can and does lead to faulty billing, misdiagnosis, bad overall care, and unrealized revenue for the business. Enter Siemens Healthcare, whose job is to fix the healthcare industry through technology solutions, services, and consulting.
To be honest, the main failing of healthcare organizations is a byproduct of their success. Healthcare grew too fast to keep up a quality supply of patient and payer interaction to meet the growing demands of a growing population. Siemens’ ongoing struggle is to find a way to create a cohesive view of healthcare organizations’ customers and partners. Siemens Healthcare uses an enterprise service bus as the backbone for integrating healthcare organizations. Data is correlated through once-disparate systems into a centralized bus that now provides cohesive information on each individual patient.
In healthcare, time-to-action has the incalculable importance of saving lives in getting the right treatment to the right patients at the right time. Siemens has over 500 workflows in production that are configured and written based on an individual healthcare organization’s preferences providing critically needed customization. A customized workflow can guide a doctor or nurse in time-sensitive moments to take the right course of action to provide the correct treatment and save patients’ lives. In a YouTube video, Siemens Healthcare’s CTO and VP of Technology Tommy Richardson said,
“For a patient with a high risk for diabetes, we need to make sure that we get him a home healthcare nurse or book his appointment right now for a week later. We can really make a difference in people’s lives and save lives, and to me that’s certainly the exciting part about healthcare.”
With the enterprise service bus, healthcare organizations can look at data in-the-moment and change how they monitor, test, perform procedures, bill, discharge, or admit patients at any scale. This results in lower costs, better care, optimized processes, and revenue maximization. Adaptability within the TIBCO-powered solution allows for workflows to be changed, and greater integration capabilities with any type of enterprise software or hardware. Hospital discharge workflows can evaluate risks and probabilities for readmissions, thus improving quality of care and value to patient life.
If you’re interested, read about more technology solutions for the healthcare industry.
“By being able to be more adaptable in the systems changing the workflows, being able to integrate in the different systems much more easily, we feel that gives us unique opportunity to really become what the next healthcare systems are going to be in the 21st century, especially if you look at kind of where our competitors are today.”
–Tommy Richardson, CTO, VP of Technology, Siemens Healthcare
