Interviewed by Susan Sharer, EVP, FedHealthIT
Chris Aherne, Regional Vice President of Federal, North America at MuleSoft, took some time recently to share insights about the company’s interoperability applications and trends that will influence future spending.
What category does your product fall into (e.g. Cyber? Interoperability? Open Source? Big Data? Telehealth? BPM? Or something else not on this list.)
MuleSoft provides the leading platform for building application networks. Ours is the only unified platform for API-led connectivity, which marries the best of traditional data integration with full API lifecycle management capabilities.
What are the top 2 Federal Health Agencies you are currently working with?
[su_pullquote]An API-led approach could enable real-time, enterprise wide visibility into operations, patients, resources and analytics — to eliminate waste, reduce latencies out of workflows, accelerate business processes, and maximize the use of assets and human resources.[/su_pullquote]Our company works with both the VA and HHS. Last year, Georgia Tech leveraged MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform to prove out a Digital Health Platform (DHP) proof of concept based on the VA’s environment. The DHP successfully demonstrated how patient outcomes and operational efficiency could be improved. The proof of concept showcased how an API-led approach could enable real-time, enterprise wide visibility into operations, patients, resources and analytics — to eliminate waste, reduce latencies out of workflows, accelerate business processes, and maximize the use of assets and human resources. Ultimately, it demonstrated future potential for modernizing VHA’s culture, processes, and capabilities to allow VA to continue to put the needs, expectations, and interests of Veterans and their families first, and put Veterans in control of how, when, and where they wish to be served.
What are the trends you are seeing in your space and where is the market going?
Healthcare bodies are increasingly looking to unlock data from legacy EHR systems and plug that data into modern technologies, whether they be SaaS applications, mobile apps, or IoT devices. The challenge for them is to quickly and efficiently connect across a growing number of endpoints to deliver the promised benefits of digital transformation to the constituencies they serve.
What advice would you give to the system integrators and/or partners that hope to drive new opportunities in this space?
Agencies are increasingly looking for modern, light weight, open architectures. They’re also realizing that the legacy, ad hoc approach to connecting data, devices and applications is problematic when trying to migrate off older technologies. Federal enterprises of the future will rely on a connectivity strategy based on reusable, discoverable, well defined, lightweight APIs built on common standards. As explained in a recent study from the Federal CIO Council, using APIs and shared services, “significantly reduces the amount of source code needed—a team of two can implement what formerly took a team of twenty.” The ability to reuse these applications, data sources and devices increases their overall value, allowing for greater efficiency in Healthcare and more opportunity for innovation.
About MuleSoft: MuleSoft is assisting Government Healthcare related Agencies to improve outcomes while reducing spending. Doing so requires interoperability across both clinical systems (e.g. EHRs) and non-clinical systems (e.g. Salesforce). We help hospitals and health systems meet these challenges by using APIs to connect both types of systems, exposing the data in a secured and governed fashion to web and mobile platforms.
The result of applying an API-led approach is the emergence of an application network. Our Anypoint Platform also includes Catalyst Accelerator for Healthcare, a set of out-of-the box FHIR API designs and reference implementations that further accelerates digital transformation through a set of connectivity assets that deliver processes like patient onboarding, scheduling, and device connectivity more quickly. It also provides a prescriptive architecture to promote asset self-service and reuse which allows Healthcare organizations to change and innovate faster, while driving down costs.
