By Matt Ferrari, Chief Technology Officer, ClearDATA
Twitter: @cleardatacloud
Host of CTO Talk – #CTOTalk
On my HealthcareNOW Radio show CTO Talk, I get to speak to colleagues from across the country about the people, processes and technology that are helping healthcare innovate. In this session, I visit with the CTO of Manifest MedEx, David Kates.
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David and I both used to work in software organizations where our time was focused on procurement of services and concerns about watts, voltage and capacity. Since those days, he and I have moved from legacy systems, data warehouses and co-location facilities to embrace the public healthcare cloud. Today our concerns are more focused on business prioritization, considerations about talent, and creating an ability to move from Capex to Opex to optimize our IT spends. As public clouds continue to offer more and more HIPAA eligible services behind a BAA, the challenge is simply to keep up with all of the innovation happening and services available.
David is working with ClearDATA to enable Manifest MedEx on the AWS cloud within a secure and compliant platform. I’m pleased to get to partner with him on this as the potential it holds to improve cost-effective quality care is real and timely. Manifest MedEx is a non-profit network set to silo bust healthcare data across California as the largest health information exchange in the state. David and team aggregate data from across clinical data, claims data and a variety of information from providers and payers. He recently worked to move 8 million patient records to the AWS cloud.
Partnering with Manifest MedEx, I’ve been impressed by how deep they get in the longitudinal health system. In addition to their sheer scope, the services they offer are substantial. They create a consolidated patient view by ingesting, leveraging and aggregating data so payers and providers have a holistic view of any patient. When an event occurs like a patient being admitted or released from a facility, for example, the care manager can trigger a series of notifications and ensure the right people are advised to provide the best follow-up care. Manifest MedEx is becoming a rich resource to support workflows including EHR or analytics systems, and they have an eye on managing the data for 12 million lives in their repository when they start building out new data feeds next year.
David and I talk about what it takes to make this kind of change management work effectively, and how to serve up this volume of data in a secure and compliant fashion. When you think about HL7 or FHIR and other data feeds they can pull into their platform, the tech considerations are substantial. We’ll talk about what he had to consider to migrate at this size and scale – covering all of California – and why that work requires the agility and flexibility the cloud provides including the ability to cost effectively spin up or down based on demand.
About the Show
On CTO Talk, technology expert Matt Ferrari discusses the issues, challenges, and opportunities transforming healthcare technology today, all from the CTO point of view. Tune in because when CTOs talk, health IT listens.
This article was originally published on ClearDATA and is republished here with permission.