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Safe Evolution: How risk adjustment and HEDIS leaders can quickly innovate without compromise

Like most operators in healthcare, your daily focus is on keeping your business running and performing. You may feel torn between the pressure to innovate vs. safeguard the business from too much risk. 

Existing EHR data management processes and technology have had substantial investment, and have been audited and trusted for years. They can also  be overly complex and perceived as difficult to change:

Existing processes, technology, and workflows

You also likely have pressure to automate and create efficiencies to improve EHR data integration and you may think this involves a complete technology overhaul which sounds disruptive, expensive and lengthy.

It’s a bit like thinking you have to change all the plumbing in your home to get filtered water—which doesn’t make sense. It’s disruptive, expensive, and lengthy—plus there are faster and less disruptive alternatives like filtered water pitchers or filtering an individual tap.

So what if we told you there are departmental solutions that can happen very quickly without the rip and replace risk of business disruption?

Filtering water on a single tap is similar to a departmental solution that can happen very quickly and is low risk to implement.

There is also the possibility where you might say, ‘hey that water tastes great, lets filter the water where it enters the home’. That solves the filtration problem for the entire house without ripping out all of the plumbing and life at home can continue during the implementation.

Similarly, all of your existing data ‘faucets’ (workflows, applications, databases) can get the same cleansing and filtration without the risks and high failure rates associated with large scale changes.

That is exactly how APIs can clean EHR data as it enters and moves through your organization. They can be placed in an existing process without replacing any technology or IT infrastructure which can simply the process with little business risk. Oh and a software developer can start testing it in a couple of hours. Yes, that’s right, a couple of hours.

Using an API that doesn’t retain data can also help mitigate risk. The data is never stored outside your organization, and can always be encrypted. Your Information Security team will love it.

Existing processes, technology, and workflows with Orchestrate API integration

Pro tip: There are also many IT benefits to using APIs, just ask your developers.

Learn how health plans are turning raw patient data into analytically-ready gold