2020 has dramatically accelerated the pace of digitization in healthcare. Specifically, COVID-19 has resulted in a step change in demand for digital health, most notably in virtual care. Digital solutions, like telehealth and remote patient monitoring,
have the potential to make healthcare more affordable and more effective. It is when all applications share data to create a complete view of a patient’s health that the true potential of digital health will be realized. The data exchange requirements in the 21st Century Cures Act mean that applications that are not designed to securely exchange data risk becoming irrelevant. The future belongs to digital health applications that feature data liquidity—the ability to exchange data without friction.
Read further to explore how Redox and Amazon Web Services (AWS) combine to deliver the Redox data interoperability platform on top of AWS’s scalable infrastructure.
A step change in healthcare
COVID-19 has significantly altered healthcare as we know it. According to a recent McKinsey report, as reported by Forbes, there was an increase of up to 175 percent in the number of virtual care customers after March 2020.
New digital tools – and their challenges
Telehealth and remote patient monitoring are among the digital health applications that are seeing a sudden rise in demand. But to be effective, these applications must securely send and receive data that resides in other clinical systems. A single healthcare encounter only tells part of a patient’s story. Using a disconnected piece of data to make a care decision poses risks for the patient.
Data liquidity is a critical component in the success of digital healthcare tools. Because it gets data to the healthcare systems and people that need it—in real time, it helps organizations avoid the data silos that can derail the best of healthcare intentions. The path to data liquidity has been carved out by Redox and AWS.
Patient preferences are changing1
11%
choose to use telehealth in 2019
76%
express interest in telehealth going forward
Telehealth now accounts for
50-175x
the number of pre-COVID visits.
Getting data where it needs to go with Redox
Data liquidity requires the capability to exchange data in a bidirectional flow. The Redox data interoperability platform enables data liquidity with a better, faster, and more effective method of data exchange than traditional integration approaches.
Healthcare systems are extraordinarily complex, and as a result, navigating the web of data exchange is challenging and varies with each unique system. Redox provides a centralized, consistent pathway to exchanging data with the right systems at the right time.
First, Redox enables customers to use a single HTTPS connection to communicate with thousands of systems, abstracting away the various connection methods used by healthcare organizations, including FTP/S, MLLP, Direct, and XCA (and the headache of maintaining those individual endpoints). Second, Redox transforms the myriad of data specifications in use today—such as FHIR, HL7v2, CDA/CCD, X12, XML, custom CSVs—into a standard set of JSON data models. Further, Redox ensures that data is normalized to standard value sets. For example, one system might refer to “Food Allergy” as a custom value of “FA”. With Redox, the field will always be “Food Allergy.” Finally, Redox takes care of the processing and persistence of the firehose of data (often reaching more than 500k messages a day for a single system), caching information so that vendors can query for data when they need it. Redox works with health systems to continuously update and maintain connections while supporting the latest regulatory standards in its products, ensuring customers are “future proofed” against rapidly evolving healthcare interoperability regulatory changes.
A better, faster, and more cost-effective way
Integrations between healthcare applications and data can quickly consume engineering time and staff. Traditional point-to-point connections must be continually customized, increase in complexity as time passes, and require massive amounts of coding. Scalability is a constant challenge.
Redox removes the issues inherent with traditional connections and delivers data liquidity to software vendors through a networked approach that provides a more predictable integration method. The Redox team builds and maintains connectivity to all integrated health systems on the network. Vendors simply use the Redox API to connect to the Redox Network – managing their API Keys and Webhook configurations in the Redox Administrative Console.
Redox is a veritable workhorse. Every day, Redox processes millions of messages and thousands of HL7 feeds and EHR vendor API calls. Redox customers take advantage of this and are able to reduce their time spent setting up and managing integrations by up to 75 percent. These savings scale with connections as companies grow from a single connection to thousands of connections.
Closing the adoption gap
Software vendors can use the Redox platform across the different groups they work with. Redox has worked with the major EHR vendors, CRMs, and Health Information Exchanges. Whether organizations are receiving HL7 from Epic, C-CDAs from Allscripts, FHIR from Cerner, or using any of the myriad of EHR vendor APIs in the market, Redox supports secure data exchange. Redox exceeds industry and the National Institute of Standards and Technology
(NIST) recommended encryption standards to provide maximum data protection. Redox has also successfully secured compliance verification from HITRUST and SOC2 Type 2 certification.
Redox removes the barriers to adopting the integrations needed for data exchange that is truly bidirectional. The proof is in the market today. Redox-powered applications are live at 80% of the largest 100 hospitals and at more than 850 hospitals and clinics in total.
“The biggest reasons we switched to Redox from Mirth was the ongoing costs of customizing messages for each client. We had to invest in a lot of specialized knowledge and dedicated developers just to handle Mirth. We already do REST APIs so switching to Redox was a win-win.”
Glen Colby, Developer Lead, Healthwise
Delivering data liquidity and elasticity with Redox and AWS
Elasticity accommodates bursts in usage and demand without sacrificing user experience service levels. With elasticity provided by AWS solutions, Redox offers the flexible, scalable architecture needed for data exchange at scale. No customer needs to worry about a brittle infrastructure that cannot handle workflow peaks and valleys.
Scalable and Compliant Architecture
Redox designed its data exchange platform to meet the demands of high quality healthcare integrations. Patented technology is used to ensure high-fidelity FIFO processing and data transformation. To accomplish this, Redox utilizes HIPAA-eligible AWS services including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to run its container-based ecosystem. Amazon ElastiCache and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) enable Redox to save time developing scalable and compliant architectures that help standardize data, maintain integrations, and get technology into the hands of healthcare providers and patients. With these tools, Redox scaled its network by more than 500 percent in one year.
The AWS Connection
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 175 fully featured services from data centers globally. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies— are using AWS to lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster.
Customer proof point: Putting it all together
PointClickCare enables customers to connect, communicate, and access the insights, partners, and tools they need to achieve the care outcomes they want. Using AWS services to remove the complexity of managing a compute environment, Redox powers interoperability for the PointClickCare solution while remaining in a fully HIPAA-compliant environment on AWS.
Summary
Healthcare has reached an inflection point. Virtual care has skyrocketed, dramatically increasing the need for delivering interoperable digital health at scale. Redox offers easy integrations for software companies and developers who are working to move healthcare forward through digital solutions. AWS delivers the scalable and elastic backbone needed to support data exchange at scale.
Data liquidity is key to the success of new digital healthcare tools. Today’s healthcare solutions and systems must be future- proof, scalable, and deliver a holistic view of a patient. They must also adhere to the data exchange requirements contained in the 21st Century Cures Act, comply with HIPAA, and meet other security and regulatory requirements. These capabilities are the new foundational requirements for digital health applications. Redox and AWS offer the definitive way forward for software companies building interoperable digital solutions that deliver better, faster, and more cost effective healthcare at scale.
Sources
- Telehealth: A quarter-trillion dollar post-Covid-19 reality? McKinsey & Company, May 28, 2020.
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