IT leaders have long recognized the benefits data interoperability brings to internal and external healthcare organizations. Yet despite years of efforts and regulatory mandates, data in today’s healthcare ecosystem is still locked up in standalone systems.
But there’s good news: Cloud computing and services can play a key role in helping IT leaders achieve this goal, and partnering with a systems integrator like Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and leveraging a platform like Microsoft Azure can help expedite the process.
How the Microsoft cloud fosters data interoperability
In addition to standard cloud features such as cloud-based security, centralized data repository, and scalability, Microsoft has introduced new capabilities specifically designed to improve data management and interoperability. These new capabilities include:
Azure Health Data Services (AHDS) ingests, manages, transforms, and persists health data by consolidating FHIR, DICOM, and MedTech data in one place to provide a holistic view of patients. As an Azure PaaS service, healthcare organizations can seamlessly combine health data on Microsoft Cloud. Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare provides a starter healthcare data model aligned with the HL7 FHIR standard, and data ingestion tools to combine and help share data with other services. Dataverse healthcare APIs and virtual health data tables enable interoperability and data exchange between Azure-based FHIR servers and FHIR-enabled endpoints. Microsoft Fabric healthcare data solutions can ingest FHIR resources from various sources, transform them into a relational structure, and enrich them with unstructured data such as clinician notes and imaging data. It uses a tiered approach with bronze, silver, and gold data lakehouses.
How TCS and Microsoft can help
TCS, in partnership with Microsoft, brings extensive expertise across multiple healthcare verticals and a suite of healthcare-specific solutions to accelerate data interoperability.
“The future of healthcare is data-driven, breaking down silos and expanding ecosystems,” said Magna Hadley, vice president and global head healthcare advisor at TCS. “Interoperability delivers benefits to healthcare including increased productivity and reduced costs, improved patient care and experience, improved public health data and research, increased data security and easier data exchange.”
Specific healthcare-related accelerators include:
Health Data Interoperability: Enables healthcare organizations to rapidly develop, test, and evaluate specific standards-based data integrations before migrating applications from on-premise to the cloud. Reference use cases include: FHIR-based pre-authorization on Microsoft Azure and other public clouds. Patient cost/price transparency through patient, provider, and payer integration. Edge Claims to document potential patient out-of-pocket costs before receiving care. TCS Compliant Data Interoperability for Healthcare with Microsoft Azure Health Data Services (on Microsoft AppSource): For healthcare organizations planning to leverage Microsoft’s FHIR, this TCS offering helps IT leaders understand the customer ecosystem and identify fit-for-purpose FHIR configurations available from Microsoft. TCS works with customers to: Understand the customer ecosystem and build out use cases. Design and develop proof of value for shortlisted use cases. Review recommended uses of FHIR within the customer organization.
Conclusion
Healthcare data interoperability remains a major challenge. By leveraging these technologies and partnering with experts like TCS and Microsoft, health IT leaders can enhance data exchange, improve patient care and drive innovation.
For more information, see “Patient-Centered Care Models at the Heart of Life Sciences.”
