Nexla Simplifies Working with Healthcare Data

Healthcare data is more abundant today than ever. Its volume continues to increase exponentially, facilitating opportunities such as personalized medicine and precision practices while also increasing requirements for consumer data processing, transparency, and engagement. This increase in data availability, ability to collect data from various devices, and need to store patient data in a secure manner, has also brought about the rapid introduction and modification of associated regulations and controls. In addition, medical and technology advancements necessitate that healthcare organizations improve the accessibility and interoperability of their data systems. These advancements continue paving the way for more efficient and effective healthcare, but they also require organizations involved in all aspects of the healthcare industry to dramatically increase their data management and processing capabilities. However, data operations in many healthcare organizations currently rely on legacy systems and proprietary tools that make this level of scaling difficult or impossible in addition to creating high workloads and long delays in data processes. Thus, implementing the right data solution increases healthcare data processing efficiency, quickens data-driven decision-making and provides interoperability and solid data governance, which is an important step toward future-proofing healthcare operations in today’s competitive market.

Healthcare Technology Innovations

Medical technology innovations are occurring rapidly, and the pace of introduction of new methods and practices is increasing exponentially. For example, emerging practices such as personalized medicine, which ensures that each patient is administered the medications, customized dosages, and/or treatments that are most suited for them, continue to gain traction. These practices often require aggregating high volumes of both new and historical data about each patient, frequently along with data from reference cases and clinical studies. In the healthcare industry, fragmented data analytics processes remain common, with multiple systems used to access and analyze similar or identical data in different ways. Valuable clinical data is also commonly siloed in legacy and/or specialized data stores that make accessing, identifying, analyzing, and transferring data difficult and routinely require manual data-entry and maintenance processes. Furthermore, these systems can result in the duplication of patient information across multiple systems, increasing data storage and labor requirements. They can even increase the cost of medical care by requiring redundant testing due to inaccessibility of previous testing and other diagnostic data.

Adopting a data solution like Nexla, with its existing FHIR REST API connector and auto-generation of additional connectors, can make ready-to-use data easily available to all healthcare data consumers, including providers and care managers, clinical researchers, claims managers, and other less-technical users. It facilitates efficient usage of the massive amounts of patient and clinical data available, and this ultimately decreases the time-to-value of medical data, which is an important factor in vital clinical decisions. Nexla also allows healthcare providers and other medical life sciences companies to uncouple from legacy and vendor-controlled systems.

Healthcare Interoperability

In achieving the long-sought goal of healthcare interoperability, an all-in-one data solution that can seamlessly transform and transfer data between multiple systems and providers is essential. Most healthcare information systems currently in use have been independently developed. Therefore, they require medical data users to employ heterogeneous, often proprietary tools, standards, formats, methods, and procedures, which not only complicates data access but can also lead to missing important patient-management information. Nexla allows professionals in all departments of a healthcare organization to quickly access patient data—from diagnostic results to billing information—in a consistent way, regardless of the system in which it is stored. This decreases the chance of medical errors due to information mismanagement, as well as billing issues. Nexla can also prevent data access delays associated with the transfer of information between existing and new systems by giving organizations building blocks to quickly construct reusable data pipelines on demand, all backed by metadata intelligence and using a simple low-/no-code interface.

Business Advantages in a Competitive Market

Healthcare organizations must also consider data needs to achieve and maintain success as businesses. For example, market volatility due to rapid changes in business drivers and growing competition from disruptive, non-traditional service providers creates the need for healthcare organizations to enact frequent and rapid operational responses backed by data-driven decision-making. Healthcare consumer needs and requirements are becoming increasingly sophisticated as the plethora of care experience, access and pricing options expands. The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 accelerated consumer expectation trends such as shortened on-site waiting times, self-service online scheduling, virtual care availability, and pricing transparency. These trends continue to necessitate that healthcare enterprises integrate additional digital strategies and other consumer-friendly practices. However, these changes also require healthcare organizations to process, apply, and provide access to high volumes of data in varying formats, which have the potential to dramatically increase workloads, associated time and financial costs, and delays.

Healthcare organizations that use Nexla as their data solution can easily retrieve all needed data, transform it into any format, and send it to any destination—such as internal and consumer-facing scheduling systems, patient portals, and business analytics tools—at the chosen frequency without requiring complex data engineering and processing workloads. Currently, there is a large gap between strategic priorities and capabilities in the healthcare industry. The 2021 State of Consumerism in Healthcare report indicates that 66% of healthcare organizations considered redesigning and expanding digital capabilities and physical facilities, while only 11% of healthcare enterprises had been able to achieve their goals in these areas. Nexla’s data processing and transferring capabilities can hasten a healthcare organization’s transition to consumer-friendly strategies, providing competitive business advantages for consumer recruitment and retention.

Rising healthcare consumer data awareness and concerns alongside the expansion of patient data availability have also motivated the introduction and modification of data privacy and accessibility regulations. These changes make it even more difficult to ensure data process compliance in an already-complex regulatory landscape. Violations can result in fines, other sanctions, and decreased consumer confidence, which heavily impact business operations. While healthcare organizations’ data needs are growing, implementing new data solutions can increase the risk of information leaks; this presents a difficult paradigm that can be avoided by choosing a solution with the proper certifications. The Nexla platform is HIPAA- and SOC II-certified, meaning that healthcare organizations can have confidence in its data security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy capabilities. Nexla’s fine-grained access controls and data monitoring capabilities also ensure that organizations have complete records in the event of a regulatory compliance audit. Additionally, Nexla can be installed on-premise for use with data systems that do not connect to the public Internet, such as electronic health record (EHR) systems.

Healthcare Data Made Simple

Accessing, using, and protecting healthcare data is simple and quick with Nexla. Its automated platform and data governance protect patient and clinical data without requiring each user to have specific knowledge of every new and updated data regulation. Nexla applies consistent data governance while provisioning access to any data for which a user is qualified, no matter where that data is stored. It allows users to securely find needed information and seamlessly transfer data between systems without storing copies of the data. Nexla eases the transition from complex, difficult-to-navigate legacy storage systems and allows healthcare organizations to decrease their need to acquire and maintain additional data storage systems. 

Check out our previous post for a step-by-step introduction to working with FHIR-based healthcare data in Nexla, or read this article to learn how Nexla integrates specifically with healthcare data.

If you’re ready to see how seamless integration and a unified data solution can streamline your processes, get a demo or book your free data mesh consultation today and learn how much more your data can do when everyone can use it securely. For more on data, check out the other articles on Nexla’s blog.