In 1863, British nurse and statistician Florence Nightingale stated:
“I must point out the urgent need for (…) a uniform system (…) of hospital statistical records.”
How do we solve a problem that’s over 150 years old?
The fragmentation of health information.
Based on our own experience, let’s explore the benefits of interoperability and healthcare standards, and integrating our application with other systems.
After reading this, you’ll understand why you should integrate your application and what benefits it brings.
A Pinch of History #
Today, and for the past 150 years, healthcare information has been fragmented and duplicated in paper medical records, physical files, and systems.
In 1863, Florence Nightingale – a British nurse, writer, and statistician – expressed:
“I must point out the urgent need to adopt (…) some uniform system of publishing hospital statistical records. There is a growing conviction that in all hospitals, even in those where work is best done, there is a great and unnecessary waste of life (…) Trying to reach the truth, I have sought information everywhere, but it has been rare that I could obtain hospital records suitable for any purpose of comparison (…) If used intelligently, these statistics will tell us the real relative value of some measures and forms of treatment that we have today.”
Florence Nightingale
As you might imagine, solving this problem isn’t easy. It requires communicating and unifying healthcare information among different systems, based on a set of common rules that consider the greatest number of possible scenarios.
This problem is addressed by the concepts of interoperability and healthcare standards, which we will explore through our articles from our own experience.
Why Should I Integrate My Application? #
Integrating our application into a healthcare system using standards offers the following advantages:
Prevents Fragmentation of Knowledge #
Our application surely provides useful information for other systems and is an important part of the knowledge. Not having this information available to other systems can affect relevant decision-making.
Why keep knowledge decentralized and not help improve patient care quality?
Avoids Information Duplication #
If we have an isolated system, we will need to replicate its entire database to have the necessary input information.
Why do this when we could have access to it at any time through integration?
Minimizes Manual Data Entry #
And if duplicating information wasn’t bad enough, we’ll have to enter it manually. Manual data entry involves additional costs and a high risk of errors.
Why waste resources and risk making avoidable errors?
Ensures Data Quality #
We’re not just exposed to errors in manual data entry. Errors are certain when information changes in other systems and is not reflected in ours. Without integration, it’s almost impossible to maintain information synchronization between systems.
Why compromise the quality of our data when we could have all the updated information?
And of Course… Reduces Costs! #
We might consider:
Why not develop a quick, customized, and more economical solution?
We might think that designing custom solutions to communicate systems is faster and cheaper, but that’s not true.
These solutions are hard to adapt to problems that arise with the growth of systems, processes, and organizations and are complicated to maintain.
Conclusions #
In the end, the cheap option becomes very expensive!
Solutions based on standards, although a bit more complex to implement, meet the needs of different scenarios and are prepared to support growth, as they are the result of many minds thinking over many years.
It’s a small investment that will save us a lot of costs and headaches in the future. This is undoubtedly the way to go!
