Healthcare IT leaders – whether at a healthcare system or at a dedicated research facility – are all to aware that they should be looking for dedicated partners to access best-in-class solutions. Between insufficient in-house resources, rapid tech development cycles, and the fact that IT solution development is not their core competency, technology partners help them expand their capabilities and streamline delivery of service.
“Working with technology partners helps healthcare IT teams move data to the cloud, invest in elastic computing and computing on demand, as well as data warehousing as a service, machine learning as a service, and integration as a service, all of which help them actually create actionable outcomes from the data,” said Chris Cullen of Perspectium. “Healthcare researchers and other providers must handle massive amounts of data for simulation and analysis to get to the point where all the data they collect is leveraged for better health outcomes,” he went on to explain.
For example, when developing cancer therapies a hospital will run massive amounts of genomic data against simulations to see which treatments might lead to the best outcomes for a population. But, as Cullen pointed out this data is transient. “It doesn’t need to be maintained forever; it just needs to be maintained in bulk for the simulation runs. Then, the resources can be released back to the cloud. So that transient data needs to be processed with elastic computing resource.”
To create the right scenario for that heavy data load, Cullen says it is imperative to find a partner that can bring solutions that are scalable for big data research, flexible to allow for changing out endpoints in the process, and who will stick with you over the entire lifecycle of your project or data-integration needs.
“Data integrations are typically not a core competency of a healthcare provider. While in-house integrations may work at first, they often create one-off solutions that proliferate and result in a patchwork that is hard to maintain,” Cullen said. “Working with an integration partner and leveraging other types of IT partners where it makes sense can help an organization create a standard approach and one that engenders confidence in the outcomes generated.”
Another reason to look to partners comes from the challenges of attracting and retaining talent, because, as Cullen notes, today’s tight job market can make maintaining patchworks of solutions even more challenging.
“Healthcare organizations that engage with providers who can create a repeatable process in a knowable timeframe with a certain cost and a guaranteed outcome not only supports budgeting and planning, but also typically require fewer resources to maintain,” he explained.
Removing the management burden caused by the growth of data and the need to integrate that data, which is growing faster than organizations can manage, offers data operations and data engineering leaders in healthcare the ability to implement the best and most innovative data solutions to help them bridge the gap between the data they have collected and the actionable insights they need from it.
