The empowered patient is a dream of many healthcare technologists. Watch our co-founder Niko Skievaski outline how the work we are doing today to integrate enterprise digital health solutions is actually laying the groundwork for the future of consumer health.
Jessica DeMassa (Health 2.0) – What do you guys do specifically, and how do you help people connect?
Niko Skievaski (Redox)– We have a canonical data model that allows people to exchange data with Redox. Then we map that into the APIs and interfaces used at the healthy system they’re working with. So weather it’s Allscripts, athena, Epic, or Cerner, we can use this standardized method to allow them to connect once and interoperate with any EHR at any health system.
What kinds of outcomes are you seeing from people who are plugging in to get access to those systems?
Health systems have unique initiatives that are important to them, things like remote patient monitoring, telehealth, reduction of readmissions, patient engagement, etc. There are technology solutions for all of these things, and as health systems adopt new technology, they’re needing to extract data from these solutions and put it back into the EHR—the source of truth—and vice versa. We’re seeing the trend industry wide; more and more technology adoption as people are tackling these big initiatives.
So it’s making the EHR work like we always wanted it to?
I’d say the past decade can be marked by the adoption of EHRs themselves, and in the next ten years we can expect that they’ll be optimized to impact provider workflows to make them more efficient and provide better care for patients.
You guys are at the forefront of the API trend in healthace. What do you think will come out of all of this?
One of the biggest challenges for developers is connecting up to all the disparate systems and their APIs. We’re going to start seeing consolidation in that space—rather than each vendor coming up with their own API structure, there’s going to be companies like us and others who are combining those together. It’s going to reduce barriers for application developers to create new and innovative products. The innovation we’ll continue to see adopted will really help us accomplish value-based care by providing the efficiency and quality needed.
Five years from now when everyone has access to these APIs, what does the future look like? How does that improve care?
The infrastructure that’s being laid down right now across the industry will eventually enable patient-controlled access to API data. What that does is enable a new class of applications: consumer facing patient apps. We don’t have consumer health right now. And it’s not because patient’s aren’t engaged. They are—they carry binders with their medical records. It’s because patients don’t have access to pull those medical records in a discrete way from all the EHRs out there. So that’s the next layer. Once we get the businesses talking to each other behind the scenes, how can we open that up so a patient can actually pull down data, put it in applications that they want to use, and be engaged in their own care.
This interview was recorded at Health 2.0’s 10th Annual Fall Conference on September 27th, 2016 in sunny Santa Clara, California.
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