Venkat Gogulamudi
Mar 3 2022
Reading Time: 4 minutes
There are a lot of systems in healthcare that carry out a variety of tasks. These systems often times are not integrated, which results in duplicate, error prone data entry and staff inefficiencies—leading to delays in patient care. In order to mitigate these issues and ensure operations run smoothly, these disparate systems must integrate and exchange data seamlessly.
CitusHealth is built on a modern tech stack, with microservices architecture exposing the service contracts over industry-standard APIs. These include Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) APIs, RESTful APIs, and GraphQL APIs. FHIR is the open specification that the majority of modern health systems use to exchange patient data seamlessly between the systems.
The idea of these interoperable APIs is to receive information into the CitusHealth system and export that information into other supporting applications with very little effort, all while designed to be HIPAA compliant.
How are interoperable platforms valuable in home-based care?
Overall, this simplified and secure way of exchanging patient data makes work easier for care teams. Here are a few reasons why:
It eliminates double entry.
The ability to create a patient demographic profile in CitusHealth with data automatically populating from the EMR eliminates the need for double entry, which also eliminates the possibility of human error.
It allows easier use of the data.
Since machines are taking care of the data transfer from one system to another and it’s automated, care teams and pharmacy teams have immediate access to the full patient history, eliminating gaps in care due to waiting on information.
It simplifies and makes payroll processing faster.
Payroll processing is based on data coming in from CitusHealth when nurses capture the basic information such as time in and time out, date of service, etc. As soon as the data is submitted in CitusHealth, it’s optional to integrate it into the payroll processing system automatically and in real-time, which eliminates stalled payments.
It streamlines refill requests.
While pharmacy teams send refill requests and patients respond, the medication delivery management is done through the EMR. CitusHealth APIs and integration allow for a streamlined process, as the request is pushed back to pharmacy as soon as patients respond.
What are the different use cases of the systems needing data transfer?
One use case is to avoid the duplicate and error prone entry of patient demographic information. When a patient record is entered in an EMR system, this demographic data (first name, last name, date of birth, gender, address, etc.) can be automatically transferred to CitusHealth using the FHIR API, as it provides this patient demographic profile interface.
Similarily, data such as documents, clinical notes and other discrete data from CitusHealth can be pushed back into EMR systems if an EMR also has the FHIR APIs and other interfaces.
Another use case is if an IVR system wants to collect patient information through a traditional telephony or wireless channel like using the phone system. The data from here can be converted to text and sent to CitusHealh using the RESTful APIs.
For use cases that require special integrations and are not yet supported through the FHIR profile, RESTful or GraphQL APIs can be used to integrate with systems. Since these specifications are so commonly used, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel.
With this interoperable platform approach to information exchange, data is securely transferred between two systems—machine to machine—rather than staff copying and pasting from one system to another system. Healthcare is complex with regulatory and compliance needs, along with a lot of tools being simultaneously used. Connecting these tools is how we can make healthcare more efficient so care can be provided to patients on time while increasing staff efficiencies in the care setting.
Schedule a demo today to learn more about how CitusHealth can help you streamline your operations with interoperable and integration solutions.
