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Tuesday September 20, 2022

How MEDHOST EHR Leverages AWS Analytics

MEDHOST first engaged with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2013 to facilitate a cloud-based patient portal. Since then, we have expanded this collaboration to include the development of better interoperability solutions, enhanced clinical capabilities, and access to meaningful analytics.

As part of the AWS Partner Network (APN), this ongoing dialogue provides us with the necessary tools to create and deploy new products while enhancing existing customer solutions. In this post, we discuss our history with AWS, current initiatives, and projects still on the horizon.

CURES Act

As a leader in the Healthcare IT (HIT) space, our mission is to help providers achieve interoperability, or the secure and easy exchange of electronic health information (EHI).

Seeking to protect and define interoperability, congress signed the 21st Century Cures Act into law on December 13, 2016. The Cures Act established an actionable legal framework that required hospitals to give patients and their providers secure access to all healthcare information stored in electronic health records (EHR) and other health information technology (HIT) systems.

More importantly, the Cures Act prohibited all practices that interfere with collecting, sharing, and using EHI within an appropriate care setting, commonly known as health information blocking.

API Support

As part of the Cures Act, compliant EHRs were also required to provide data through application programming interfaces (API), allowing programmers to use third-party resources to create interoperability software geared toward providers and patients.

Moreover, APIs must comply with Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standards for exchanging healthcare information. FHIR API interface standards ensure that patients own their data and can access it in real-time. While this benefits the patient directly, it also allows providers to adopt emergent technologies, such as mobile applications, that increase ease of use.

Multi-Tenancy

Using AWS FHIR Works, Amazon’s open-source programming toolkit for creating multi-tenant, interoperability solutions, we worked with AWS to build an API platform that could be universally implemented at our partner hospitals.

Multitenancy is a software architecture that allows a program to run on a single server, accessible by many clients. For MEDHOST customers, many of which operate in remote or rural settings, independently setting up and managing an FHIR server is a daunting challenge. By offloading FHIR API to our servers, these customers can simplify compliance, enhance security, and minimize disruptions.

The MEDHOST Cures 2023 Interoperability Solution incorporates all the functionality mentioned above into a single, comprehensive deliverable. This solution creates a framework for the seamless and secure access, exchange, and use of electronic health information for healthcare systems of any size, anywhere.

Mobile Solutions

As part of MEDHOST’s commitment to providing industry-leading, affordable technology to rural and community hospitals, we conduct regular advisory group sessions that help facilitate a dialogue between our engineers and customers. These sessions allow us to understand the unique challenges these facilities face and better catalog their workflows and processes.

Developed in collaboration with AWS, and with insights gleaned from our customers, we created MEDHOST Mobility Physician, a mobile solution that empowers providers by putting EHR insights in the palm of their hand.

Instant messaging was a particularly exciting capability that stemmed from these sessions. Through Amazon Chime SDK, which facilitates real-time communications for web or mobile applications, providers can place orders and receive critical notifications within the MEDHOST Mobility Physician app.

In the future, we plan to augment this solution with machine learning-powered data visualizations and intelligent tools that allow physicians to better predict patient outcomes.

Analytics

When MEDHOST first began working with AWS to enable Cures Act compliance, it became apparent that artificial intelligence could be leveraged to extract advanced analytics, opening the door to better insights from secure clinical data, such as vitals, diagnoses, medications and procedures.

After collaborating with the AWS Data Lab team, our engineers quickly identified the importance of data lake, and built a platform to deliver analytics to hospitals as software as service (SaaS).

Data available in the cloud can provide radical solutions for some of clinicians’ most pressing concerns, like predicting the onset of sepsis and cardiac risk.

In addition, by utilizing the AWS QuickSight business intelligence tool, MEDHOST YourCare Analytics brings these advanced insights to the hospital back office, making it easy to target and track the most critical data related to effective contract management, projections, postings, denials, and overall business growth.

To learn more about how MEDHOST’s AWS-powered solutions can benefit your hospital, please reach out to us at inquiries@medhost.com or call 1.800.383.6278.

The regulatory views and assessments contained within this post are solely those of MEDHOST.

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