Redox Survey Reveals That Clinical Integration Challenges are Slowing Cloud Adoption for 97% of Provider Organizations

Redox  the leader in healthcare interoperability recently partnered with Sage Growth Partners to survey executives and technology decision-makers from over 100 large academic medical centers and multi-hospital health systems. The survey uncovered strategic cloud investment priorities for large healthcare organizations, including current and future use cases and desired business outcomes for cloud technology, as well as roadblocks to realizing those outcomes at scale. Findings are published in their new report “Uncovering hidden data roadblocks of cloud and AI adoption in healthcare.”

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While improved data security and reduced costs are table-stakes expectations for cloud adoption, executives expect to see a sharp increase in use cases for enhanced product innovation, improved patient engagement and retention, and improved diagnosis and treatment in the near future.

When evaluating future use cases, 97% of provider executives stated that ingesting real-time clinical data is crucial to their enablement – but only 3% haven’t encountered any challenges when attempting to ingest clinical data into the cloud.

All major cloud clinical data repositories store data in the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard, making it easier to build and connect to an ecosystem of analytics, AI, and apps. However – most legacy systems do not yet use FHIR, requiring organizations to transform data from multiple legacy systems into FHIR to prepare for cloud ingestion. As a result, these projects can become mired in technical complexity, leading to delayed implementation and a critical lack of understanding of clinical workflows.

Survey respondents shared that their top 3 challenges to execute on cloud ingestion projects are:

• Human capital (68%) – lack of in-house expertise and/or human resources to map legacy standards to FHIR and maintain integrations
• Financial capital (52%) – lack of budget for data translation and ingestion
• Technical capital (44%) – lack of technology to facilitate translation and ingestion at scale

These barriers collectively add up to one overarching challenge – significantly delayed time to value. Cloud ingestion projects can often be slow and painful to execute, with 40% taking longer than initially budgeted. 86% of cloud integration projects take longer than 6 months to complete, while 34% take longer than 12 months.

“Clinical data ingestion is critical to enabling cloud projects, and the complexity of translating legacy data from multiple sources into FHIR is a barrier that many organizations don’t anticipate,” said Devin Soelberg, Redox’s VP of Strategic Partnerships. “The survey results illuminate the nuanced challenges that result when undergoing these projects. This report serves to surface those challenges so that these organizations are well-prepared and don’t waste scarce time, budget, and human resources.”

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Takeaways

Cloud offers unprecedented access for organizations to securely centralize and scale the management of millions of patient records, eliminating silos of patient data that have previously been the standard in on-premises environments. Despite widespread excitement and high expectations for cloud-based innovation in healthcare, these opportunities don’t come without obstacles, particularly around the ingestion of clinical data into the cloud at scale.

As healthcare organizations continue to encounter human, financial, and technical capital challenges in their cloud endeavors, healthcare IT leaders will look for opportunities to accelerate time to value, ultimately leading to improved business, patient, and clinician outcomes.

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