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Achieving Middleware Success Through VigiLanz Connect

Challenge

In the age of value-based care, it’s all about performance. Hospitals continually face increased financial pressure to reduce length of stay, hospital-acquired infection rates and hospital readmissions. Organizations must improve healthcare analytics and core measures, avoid penalties, and secure reimbursement, so that they can continue to grow and thrive. This shift means hospitals must now consider cost avoidance instead of expecting direct reimbursement for patient care.

The challenge becomes how to support and enable next-generation healthcare providers to deliver real-time results from disparate platforms and technology. Sixty-two percent of hospital CIOs identify interoperability as a top priority, and 80 percent of accountable care organizations also cite data integration as a top challenge for their IT departments.

To help more healthcare providers deliver real-time results and to improve interoperability, medical facilities require a services-oriented architecture and open application programming interface (API). The API must enable efficient aggregation, interaction, and exchange of disparate data throughout the healthcare enterprise and across any of its software technologies, including EMRs and third-party single-point-solution vendors.

Solution

APIs fit the bill by allowing access to all of the data a digital health application and a health system would need in real time. Clinicians and administrators can now rapidly integrate new clinical and business information for better decision-making and, most importantly, for improved patient care with new interoperability services.

Many VigiLanz customers utilize the company’s middleware API solution, VigiLanz Connect, to convert health data from their EMRs into uniform, actionable intelligence in the VigiLanz Platform. Through VigiLanz Connect, these hospitals turn their closed EMR systems into open platforms through robust services that do not rely on HL7 interfaces. VigiLanz handles connectivity and normalizes data structures across major EMR platforms to quickly unlock the data. Benefits include shorter integration time (from months to days), elegant workflows, decreased maintenance costs, and minimized risk.

“An API is definitely the way to go. Not only are APIs easy to use, but they are a no-brainer when it comes to rapid and successful implementation. Using VigiLanz’s middleware API helped us maximize the platform in a different, modern way. It is a simpler effort than using a solution like HL7, and it’s also stable and steady so it’s easy to maintain, despite the significant amount of data being pulled.” – Vice President of Technology at a 400-bed hospital

A middleware architecture has been shown to be the best technological solution for addressing the problem of EMR interoperability. The middleware platform facilitates the transparent, yet secure, access of patient health data directly from the various databases where it is stored. Hospitals no longer have to do all of the development themselves. Instead, they can rely on off-the-shelf applications to solve problems. Middleware brings an application-agnostic approach to connecting EMRs to one another while allowing for specific development to enhance the significant investment by hospitals, health systems, and physicians.