How Infor integrates healthcare EHR and ERP

Infor solutions help to standardize healthcare data and reporting

Healthcare rules and regulations are constantly changing, and technology must respond.

To meet the latest reporting requirements, many healthcare organizations rely on disparate information that is isolated in silos across multiple teams. This can create reporting nightmares – or worse, patient safety issues. Today’s healthcare organizations must find better ways to ensure patient data and financial information is always protected, current and reportable.

Healthcare organizations are constantly challenged to standardize and maintain consistent data while improving operations and maintaining patient safety and satisfaction. As hospitals grow and consolidate into larger health systems, they must rely on a network of systems that share data with the least amount of data manipulation—fewer touches helps to ensure more accurate and usable data.

Standardization is a foundational principle of any IT solution, including an enterprise resource planning (ERP) or electronic health record (EHR) system. Following the same processes and using the same technology across the organization increases predictability and confidence in the data. Standardization allows an organization to achieve optimal data management performance, report more accurately, adhere to the ever-changing rules and regulations surrounding patient safety and privacy and achieve client satisfaction. Accurate, real-time information allows decision makers at all levels to gain immediate insights into the overall health of the organization and understand what is happening in their area of the business.

To maintain standardization across multiple data sources, the key is interoperability. Interoperability is achieved when different information systems, devices or applications connect in a coordinated manner, within and across organizational boundaries. With interoperability, organizations can access, exchange and cooperatively leverage data amongst stakeholders, with the ultimate goal of optimizing the health of individuals and populations.

Common mistakes

Data management is very complex. As an organization grows, so does its data, and there must be a plan and processes in place to effectively manage the information. Organizations often mistake data governance for data management. Both require executive commitment and investment, but data governance is business-driven while data management is a diverse and skill-rich IT function ideally reporting to the CIO. Many organizations have the decision tree and policy making structure in place, but they lack the tactical execution of those policies.

A critical error organizations often make is not having a data governance body in place to manage the administration of data. An organization must ensure the framework is ready prior to starting any type of implementation. Another common mistake is ignoring data quality – organizations are only as good as the data on which they rely. Data integrity can be ensured when sufficient measures are in place. Confident business decisions can be made when the data quality is maintained in every application and standardized data exists across the enterprise.

Data sharing can also present major hurdles when various business groups within an organization set their own definitions of specific data elements. This can lead to poor decision making based on inaccurate and untimely data. Good data governance is only possible when a business treats data as an organizational asset. The emergence of a Chief Data Officer (CDO) in many organizations and across industries indicates a growing recognition of information as a strategic business asset, separate from the technology in which it resides. By 2020, Gartner predicts that 10% of organizations will have a highly-profitable business unit specifically for productizing and commercializing their information assets.

Another mistake healthcare organizations frequently make is to rely solely on the IT team to manage the data governance process. While IT can play a major role in helping to manage the data governance initiatives, the IT team should not solely manage the governance process. This process starts from the very beginning when a patient first calls or presents. It is just as important that operations and other business units are involved. The data is only going to be as reliable as what is captured in the system.

Infor integration solutions

Infor CloudSuite™ Healthcare is one of the few systems in the market today capable of supporting all of the major areas in a healthcare organization. The financial management and supply chain management solutions provide healthcare organizations with tools for management, reporting, financials and the supply chain, and the human capital management solution allows organizations to achieve a greater return on their workforce investment while streamlining administrative functions to free HR staff for more strategic activities. Additionally, Infor Birst® technology allows Infor to integrate with third-party systems to become a source of truth for data management through a cloud-based business intelligence and analytics component. This integration provides data that is reliable, consistent and readily available for the entire enterprise.

Infor Clinical Bridge can further simplify the interoperability capability for organizations looking to integrate with today’s more prominently used EHRs. Many healthcare organizations lose efficiency because they rely on unconnected information silos that make it costly, time-consuming and expensive to maintain data. Infor Clinical Bridge, powered by the Infor Cloverleaf® interface, establishes a secure connection to integrate directly with the EHR through pre-built adapters that pass data bi-directionally between the EHR and Infor. This eliminates the need for the cumbersome interfaces required with other ERP solutions and electronic health records. Advantages of integrating with Infor:

• Streamlined processes
• Process automation
• Minimized manual entry
• Reduced error rates
• Utilization/Inventory transparency

Infor Clinical Bridge provides the ability to connect to specific data sources, map to appropriate fields and make the information available to the users that need to make informed decisions.

Infor Cloverleaf integration also provides a comprehensive platform that securely streamlines healthcare interoperability at scale. It helps healthcare organizations connect the growing ecosystem across patients, care providers and related entities, to:

• Transform and route almost any message or protocol common in healthcare
• Secure data at rest and in flight, as well as control access to data feeds and create an audit trail
• Monitor all data feeds and configure alerts to maintain data flow
• Easily build web services connections
• Quickly develop database connections
• Gather, deduplicate and normalize data from disparate source
• Accelerate FHIR implementations, connecting legacy systems to the FHIR ecosystem
• Manage API-driven connectivity at an enterprise level

The Infor OS with the Cloverleaf integration suite provides an innovation platform that helps healthcare organizations:

• Deliver clinical and business data to intuitive, cloud-based analytics
• Connect data feeds to Infor and third-party APIs
• Persist data in a data lake
• Leverage AI and machine learning
• Rapidly develop applications

A guide to successful integration

A successful data integration begins with having the right people in place to help facilitate the change. Organizations also need to outline the overall project goals and strategy. There are several questions that should be answered prior to beginning any work. These questions will help guide the organization toward success:

• Are your business and data strategies aligned to support growth and innovation for long-term success?
• Do you currently have a data management plan in place to manage the movement, lifecycle, security, availability and quality of your data?
• Is there standardization across the organization for the data being collected?
• What is the overall goal of collecting this data?
• Is your organization using tools to manipulate this data in order to report on it?
• Where is your master data stored? Do you utilize a data warehouse or are you using tools in place of a data management plan?
• Who owns the data?
• Do you have complete visibility of your data?
• How prepared are you respond to a data breach?
• How do you manage data vulnerability in a post-production phase?
• How are you managing third party risks for outsourced activities surrounding this data?
• Is there a high level of accuracy within the reports that depend on this data?

Once these questions have been answered, the organization and implementation team will have a preliminary roadmap to a successful integration. These basic questions often uncover areas the organization did not think of initially. There are often gaps in resources, processes or technologies that may go unnoticed if the right questions are not asked. A successful integration does not stop here, but the questions above provide a starting point for a successful journey.