Real-Time Data Unlocked for
Healthcare Financial Analytics IT Leader

Seeking to be more data-driven, healthcare organizations are leveraging enormous amounts of data with analytics to achieve better patient outcomes, streamline operations and cut costs. This healthcare business analytics technology leader required a solution that would not only ensure the accuracy and completeness of data capture but integrate with its systems to deliver real-time decision-critical information. Enter PilotFish, a contender among multiple vendors, distinguished by its unparalleled ability to meet the comprehensive needs of this client and deliver high ROI.

THE CLIENT

The client is a leading business decision support platform providing analytics and data integration solutions in the healthcare and financial services industries. Its comprehensive suite of products enables organizations to optimize budget and long-range planning, manage costs, improve margins, and deliver mission-critical performance. Its healthcare solutions leverage big data and technology to drive innovation and efficiencies while improving care and increasing revenues. With its advanced cloud-based healthcare financial and performance tools, the client offers hospitals an integrated solution that manages complex health information to drive improved operational, financial and clinical outcomes.

The company’s deep bench of combined expertise in healthcare IT, cost accounting and financial management helps clinical leaders, CFOs, and CIOs navigate top industry concerns of accelerating mergers and acquisitions, labor shortages, rising labor costs and market shifts. Paramount in those concerns is developing the right strategies to provide the best and highest quality of care.

THE CHALLENGE

The client offers its healthcare customers a centralized platform for actionable performance intelligence and insights. Understanding where revenue or margins can be improved and how these improvements create synergies across the healthcare organization is vital for strategic improvement.

Addressing hospital staffing levels is an area with significant potential to reap hundreds of thousands of dollars in cost savings. Effectively Integrating the staggering amount of healthcare data that captures the patient journey through an episode of care is central to enhancing care while reducing staffing costs and increasing efficiencies. In this area, the client’s growing needs spanned across granular data management of highly complex healthcare data, critically including comprehensive handling of HL7 messages that ensured accuracy and completeness of data capture and processing.

The client was looking for a powerhouse integration platform where automated data reconciliation and auditing maintained data integrity through streamlined processes from data ingestion to data transformation and delivery in near real-time.

THE SOLUTION

During the client’s vendor selection process, PilotFish was the only integration platform to complete a list of tasks numbering in the double digits while no competitor completed even 10. PilotFish stood out for its simplicity, efficiency, and comprehensive approach to healthcare data integration and management. PilotFish successfully managed virtually any integration requirement, communication protocol and data issue encountered. Not only that, but PilotFish was also the most cost-effective option.

The client was impressed by the power of PilotFish’s comprehensive graphical modular integration platform and support of all healthcare standards, including HL7 v2.x and 3.x, FHIR, DICOM, CCD/CCDA, HIPAA X12 EDI, JSON, APIs and any XML-based standard.

Over the course of several weeks of formal training at 2-3 hours per day, consisting of presentations followed by hands-on exercises, the client gained a solid understanding of the PilotFish Automated Assembly Line process for configuring, managing, and maintaining interfaces. Simultaneously, the client began to build out its capabilities leveraging the extensive set of tools and features built into PilotFish for HL7 message processing, validation, mapping and transformation.

To interface with another system or application, the messages needed to map to a common representation and not lose information. PilotFish handles anything that looks even remotely like an HL7 message – including sets of fields, components and sub-components that are not part of the standard. PilotFish’s lenient HL7 parser expeditiously converts HL7 messages into XML without complex configuration to be transformed into a format compatible with the target system.

To build the required interfaces, PilotFish executed a multi-level, sophisticated integration of HL7 ADT messages from 24/7 data feeds. ADT messages are one of the most widely used and high-volume HL7 message types, providing information for many trigger events. ADT messages contain structured information about a patient’s health that uniquely helps users gain a holistic perspective on patients with valuable and actionable real-time information. Here, data specificity down to fields and sub-fields and applied business rules required complex customization. With the as-needed mentorship of a PilotFish Senior Solutions Architect, the framework was developed capable of handling the needed connectivity, data manipulation and complex data validation.

PilotFish’s technology ensured the segregation of each client’s data, a crucial factor in maintaining distinct and secure data routes. Once the HL7 data was ingested, it was categorized as needed per interface and mapped (data mapper demo). It was then queued and routed to an internal database in seconds. In some cases, it became clear that the internal database balked at real-time message receipt. PilotFish’s built-in flexibility and expert help from PilotFish Senior Systems Architect overcame this hurdle with a just-in-time solution that could instantly batch data when necessary with no loss of near real-time receipt.

THE BENEFITS

PilotFish offers healthcare-specific functionality that made working with HL7 easier and faster for the client’s team of technical professionals. Impressively, PilotFish converted a complex HL7 integration challenge into a streamlined, efficient process and robust solution.

The client gained self-sufficiency early on by participating in PilotFish’s professional training. The team was soon able to design and implement solutions independently. Additionally, the client saved enormous amounts of time and money with PilotFish’s built-in support of easy reuse of interfaces and components.

The as-needed mentorship and support of the PilotFish Senior Solutions Architect, combined with PilotFish’s flexibility, allowed the team to overcome issues presented by external and internal systems and databases.

By leveraging the PilotFish integration platform, the firm gained the benefits and financial pluses of a trouble-free, robust process aligned with organizational goals for a resource utilized to its fullest potential with great ROI.

HL7 is the registered trademark of Health Level Seven International.
X12, chartered by the American National Standards Institute for more than 35 years, develops and maintains EDI standards and XML schemas.