Accelerate Healthcare Data Integration with New Publish/Subscribe Capabilities from Informatica

I’ve spent a fair amount of time in my healthcare career either directly involved in data integration working for health systems, or helping guide healthcare organizations develop strategies, architectures and approaches for integrating their data and systems.  During this time, I’ve continuously advocated for the adoption of a publish/subscribe integration pattern as being the most efficient and scalable approach.

A publish/subscribe approach replaces tightly coupled point-to-point mappings between data sources and targets with a more resilient architecture – one that loosely connects content publishers and consumers using an integration hub. 

In simple terms, data publishers  map their content to the integration hub only concerned with getting the needed data to the hub in a consumable format at the right latency. Publishers do not need to be concerned with the nuanced requirements and formats of each consuming system. Conversely, data subscribers focus on their specific data needs, formats and other requirements without regard to the publishing source. By decoupling sources and targets in this manner, the publish/subscribe model creates a far more scalable, reusable and efficient integration architecture.
 

Do you have the time and expertise to handle integration design?
 

Despite the advantages of a publish/subscribe integration pattern, many healthcare organizations remain committed to the more prevalent point-to-point integration pattern where all of the logic for getting data from a source to a target is contained in a single workflow. With this logic repeated over and over for each source for each downstream target, and for each target for each upstream source. In my experience this is because designing a publish and subscribe pattern requires more time, effort, and expertise from the start – resources that are frequently in short supply. 

I’ve seen the difficulties that planning, developing and deploying a publish/subscribe integration architecture can create for healthcare organizations. The design work alone can become a significant obstacle, for example the need to design for a variety of data publishers and consumers along with the  unique needs of industry data standards, such as HL7, FHIR, and X12 for HIPAA.
 

New integration functionality streamlines publish/subscribe design
 

That’s why I’m so pleased that Informatica is announcing our Cloud Integration Hub for Healthcare, a new capability of Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC). 

Cloud Integration Hub provides healthcare industry-specific content that makes it easier for your organization to adopt a publish/subscribe integration pattern. It offers a single hub that unifies and centralizes dataset publishing and subscribing processes. 

With a hosted or managed repository for file, transaction and batch datasets, the solution publishes certified datasets to the hub. You can publish data once, and multiple data consumers can subscribe to it at different latencies. What could be easier?
 

Healthcare-specific content is already built in
 

Prebuilt templates handle the validation, parsing and transformation of data received. The Cloud Integration Hub for Healthcare also includes prebuilt topics (such as patient, encounter, provider and location) that help you simplify and expedite the publishing of data. 

Accelerators transform the data from common healthcare data standards into a relational format. Once the data is transformed, it can be used by analytics or AI-enabled applications (see the figure).
 

Self-service, automated subscriptions to all systems help increase agility, putting datasets in the hands of authorized business users. Using this solution, you can improve the availability, visibility and control of datasets while ensuring that dataset distribution is well-governed. 
 

Get started fast, but build for the long term
 

As part of IDMC, Cloud Integration Hub for Healthcare helps you jumpstart your data management implementation with a purpose-built industry data model, integrations and standards. 

Key features of the solution include:

• Pre-built data services for handling HL7 and HIPAA 
• FHIR validation services 
• Data services transformation  
• Pre-built mappers between HL7 2.x and HL7 FHIR 
• Pre-built ISD models for mapping HL7 and FHIR to relational format
• Data services APIs 
• Connectivity features, including an MLLP client connector and MLLP server and a FHIR REST connector

By providing all of the benefits of IDMC – plus prebuilt, healthcare-focused entities and content – Cloud Integration Hub for Healthcare eliminates the barriers to deploying a publish/subscribe data integration model. In doing so, the solution helps you create a resilient technology infrastructure that can more easily adapt to changing data sources and targets. 

And in my experience, that’s the best way to stay ahead of an ever-changing healthcare industry. 

To learn more about Informatica’s Cloud Data Integration Hub for Healthcare, read the data sheet.