When I worked at Epic, I was asked to do many challenging and exciting things. The most challenging and least exciting thing, though, was being a project manager for integration projects. Since this role exists at Redox as the Customer Success (CustoSucc) team, I feel privileged to be working with people who are excelling in ways I never could.
In this post, I’ll explain what an integration project is, why it’s a project, and why Redox has a recipe for success.
A typical integration project
A typical integration project has three moving parts:
- The EHR (which I was sort of leading)
- The interface engine (owned by an employee of the health system)
- The application to be connected
At a minimum, this is three individuals with very different goals who needed to be able to speak highly technical language, communicate effectively, and complete technical tasks with a measure of speed. As you can imagine, one of these usually breaks down at some point.
Personally, my biggest weakness was never with speaking the technical language, but with getting people motivated and on the same page. The hardest part was having control over only one-third of the project.
Why do these projects exist?
HL7 standards and EHR developer portals exist in a kind of elevated plane—separate from the day-to-day of hooking things up. Check out #FHIR on Twitter and you’ll get the sense that we are headed for a golden age of interoperability. The sticky truth is that each health system is a fiefdom, and both data quality and consistency have different issues going on. Each one needs TLC from a technical perspective as well as from an operational one, too.
The bulk of the work the CustoSucc team does is to work through the process at each health system so our apps don’t have to. They also make sure the Redox solution engineers and developers are on track with mapping each site’s inconsistencies to the Redox data model.
Our unfair advantage
The Redox team has more years of Epic implementation experience than we care to recognize on our site anymore. We have never billed ourselves as solely a technology platform—instead, we are an I14YaaS company, and acknowledge wholeheartedly that the pareto principle applies in integration, and the technical stuff is the 80% (sorry dev team).
The biggest innovation yet may be our ability to cover 2/3 of the integration problem. When we approach a health system, we can affirm that we are going to do all of the dirty work. Of course, their interface analysts will have work to do, too, but we can offload a substantial portion of it to our engine.
And sitting behind it all is a mastermind project manager from our CustoSucc team.
Cheers to you, CustoSucc team. You’re my heroes.