Electronic Data Interchange Challenges Which a Healthcare Integration Tool Must Surmount

Seamless Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is always a continuing IT challenge for the lifesciences, healthcare, and Pharma industries. Over the years, life sciences and healthcare players registered a significant growth in cloud and onpremise Electronic Management Record Systems (EMRS). Leading healthcare players are struggling with siloed systems that prevent in increasing patient engagement, improving clinical workflow, and deriving insights. Complex integration scenarios prevent drugs from reaching the market and also slow down the health care services. The following are some integration issues which hound the drug discovery process: Islands of automation: Hospitals, and Pharma companies have gradually develop a breed of cloud, on-premise, and legacy applications. These disparate systems fail to communicate with each other and manual ways to connect them requires brute manual coding. A lot of resources and skills need to be hired for integrating these systems. Apart from this, there are a lot of cost overheads for maintaining these systems. Data Errors: Only Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC) has suggested over 15 fields that need to adhered while making submissions for drug approval. Apart from these standards, there are various such data reporting regulations that must be considered during data interchange. Businesses lose critical time while formatting the data as per Standard Data Tabulation Model (SDTM). Compliances: Another beckoning challenge is maintaining a balance between healthcare experience and ensuring adherence to compliances. Healthcare providers, insurance companies need to strictly observe and Pharma companies need to strictly observe HIPAA requirements. Apart from HIPAA there are many other laws which regulate healthcare information exchange. A violation can lead to penal provisions and damages. Data Security: Healthcare system deal with confidential and sensitive patient data and its safety concerns healthcare service providers. There should be ene-to-end layering of data to protect data from breaches, and security threats. Pharmaceutical data is governed by a lot of regulations and an information breach can make the organization responsible for unliquidated damages. Hence, Pharmaceutical companies must use an advanced firewall and layered approached to secure their data. The companies must have the capability to distinguish and hide confidential data while exchanging information with external vendors. Data Quality Issues: Multiple files are created when data is entered multiple times into systems and life sciences companies end up sharing insufficient and wrong data with regulatory authorities. Data quality issues show up and prevent Pharma companies from sharing credible data for drug discovery. Related data quality issues prevent smoother exchange of data with authorities and slow down the drug discovery. Unstructured Data: Unstructured and raw data in multiple systems can be leveraged for deriving information which can help in making impactful decisions. With conventional systems, pharma companies miss out on opportunities in visualizing the data. Pharma companies must keep data visualization techniques for getting insights out of the data. A healthcare integration solution must address overwhelming integration needs by safely bridging the great divide between application networks. A good integration solution can help life sciences companies in significantly improving their processes and making the most out of their IT investment.