We’ve made a conscious effort over the last few months to share our views, far beyond our product and services. The question you might be asking yourself is “why?”. What does an article on women’s representation in health tech have to do with Redox? With integration?
Our position as a bridge between healthcare organizations and this new wave of healthcare technology solutions offers us a unique perspective. We feel it’s our duty to assemble the trends, pitfalls, and successes.
Through our work, we witness first hand the difficulties healthcare organizations have executing strategic initiatives. From startups bringing technologies and best practices from different industries, to healthcare behemoths modernizing their processes, we are on the front lines discovering what works and what doesn’t.
This position gives us unusual clarity on the realistic applications of buzzword trends (blockchain, FHIR, etc.) and an ability to sift through the hype. As an organization committed to the modernization and improvement of our healthcare system’s technical foundation, we believe that in order to drive the industry forward, and at a rate we are satisfied with, we need to call out what we see and share it with fellow innovators.
We have identified the three pillars that all of our content will stand on moving forward. It is a combination of where we’ve been, who we are, and where we are going. It is my hope that by defining our perspective for you here, you will be able to better consume and benefit from the content we create.
Healthcare’s unique constraints and what that means for disruption.
Early on, groups tried to pigeonhole us as the “Epic guys”. Competitors told prospects that we didn’t work with other systems (currently live with three dozen different EHRs and counting) and silicon valley types tried to position our background as a crutch preventing us from “thinking outside of the box”.
What it actually provided us was years of experience working directly with healthcare organizations and understanding the unique constraints they face. Healthcare is unlike any other industry and there are certain aspects that you can only understand through intimate first hand experience. This history, along with our continued work helping healthcare organizations tackle big problems, allows us to defend our industry from those who bluster from some consumer product mountain top about the “way it should be”. It allows us to help those with great ideas get up to speed on the quirks of our industry and modify their solution to work within it.
Moving forward we will continue to explain why healthcare is unique and facilitate collaboration to find common ground between the demands of privacy, safety, and aversion to disruption, and innovations that have the potential to dramatically improve outcomes and experiences.
The impact of government regulation on healthcare innovation.
At the end of the day, we are all patients. Most of what we do is driven by this simple truth. We want to see healthcare accelerate its ability to discover, adopt, and deliver the absolute best solutions because it will directly impact our own experiences and the experiences of our loved ones. From our vantage point, we are able to see the strain placed on healthcare organizations by giant initiatives like ICD-10, Meaningful Use, and now MACRA.
We witness the way resources are diverted from projects targeting patient and provider experience and moved towards ensuring full compliance with the newest 1,200 page regulation. We are able to see how this will impact the way care is delivered and what it means for patients. As champions of innovation in healthcare, it is important for us to explain how certain regulations stand to aid or slow down our inevitable march towards sophisticated, technology-enabled healthcare.
Best in breed technology and what it means for healthcare.
The origin of Redox is fairly simple. Nearly every other industry had settled on the use of APIs to standardize and simplify the exchange of data between systems. The impact had been enormous as more and more services were developed to augment and expand the functionality of popular products. Literally everyone benefited. From the creators who saw their products get “stickier” thanks to a thriving ecosystem of add-on applications to the application developers who now had clear populations to build for. We saw how the user (*cough* patient) benefited the most with a sea of organizations and solutions vying for their attention and use by building useful tools and services.
Healthcare was lagging behind, waiting on vague standards bodies to possibly introduce APIs that would demand standardization from a swath of vendors at an undisclosed date. We said forget waiting and built it ourselves. That same mentality is something we carry into everything we do today. What are the best technology practices in other industries? How are they transitioning into healthcare? We believe it is our duty to keep our finger on the pulse of what is happening in other industries and explain how that will eventually make its way into healthcare and what the implications of that technological disruption are.
Where we go from here.
As we continue to evolve our brand and voice, this is the foundation we will grow from. This is who we are as a team, as a company, as a member of the healthcare community. We are passionate about the continuous improvement of how healthcare is delivered and will continue to share our point of view in hopes of adding transparency to the system and championing the innovators that are reimagining our age old industry for the better.