One of the largest healthcare companies in the Fortune 500 approached Emids with a vision for a modern IT ecosystem. They found themselves in a situation where their IT infrastructure and capabilities were not scalable to support their rapid growth.

These infrastructural shortcomings were not merely internal roadblocks. They directly impacted the customer experience and created friction between different businesses within the enterprise.

The customer wanted to build an IT ecosystem that would enable swift integration of its various lines of businesses from a data perspective and place them on a scalable, secure, and flexible cloud platform.

The goal was to develop an enterprise platform that supported the organization’s future organic and inorganic growth endeavors, and that also leveraged its current assets. To realize this vision, the client required a strategic partner with extensive experience in strategic consulting, data & digital engineering, and product engineering.

Emids was brought in to provide technical leadership while building a cloud data platform and various enterprise data products. Emids also supported the building of enterprise governance processes along the way to ensure data was being accessed, processed and stored in line with organizational policies.

The solution involved a three-pronged approach:

1. Operating Model Development: Emids designed an Operating Model for a multi-tenant ecosystem grounded in four principles: Minimum friction across all interactions, Self-Service, Tenant Collaboration, and Risk Reduction. This model served as a blueprint, outlining the organization’s data-focused operations, enabling them to manage, share, and utilize data for insights and business outcomes.
2. Data Strategy Formulation: Emids collaboratively developed a data strategy with various lines of businesses, enabling subsidiaries to use data in a self-serve manner while migrating existing data to the enterprise platform. This alignment of data strategy with the corporate vision ensured a unified data-driven culture across the organization.
3. Enhancement of Platform Capabilities: Emids defined and prioritized platform capabilities such as DevOps patterns, infrastructure automation, test data management, data catalog, and metadata management. These capabilities empowered internal teams to build new solutions effectively and manage data efficiently.

Thanks to its deep domain expertise and outcome-oriented team, Emids delivered a modern IT ecosystem including a robust data platform to support the organization’s overall growth and collaboration among lines of businesses. The scalable and secure IT ecosystem now stands ready to support the client’s growth vision.

The Emids customer is a leading payer—with nearly 47 million members operating across the commercial, Medicare, and Medicaid markets—focusing on whole-person health for improving outcomes.  

The customer had developed and acquired applications across their business, primarily leveraged for internal use with a few external clients. They saw a market opportunity to commercialize these apps for external use. The key challenge was that the suite of applications wasn’t created for data ingestion from external sources. Emids was approached to build an ingestion framework that allowed for these apps to absorb data from both internal and external sources. 

Having a tight deadline of six months, the customer tasked Emids with developing a cloud-data platform with the ability to ingest data from multiple parties in a secure, multi-tenant way. That’s where Emids’ CoreLAKE™ came into the picture.  

CoreLAKE™ is a ready-to-implement data management solution that can ingest and integrate disparate data in a comprehensive health care data model—helping customers get to market faster.  

Medtronic is the largest maker of surgical equipment in the world. One of its offerings is a nerve integrity monitoring (NIM) system to help surgeons avoid accidents that can impede or even end nerve function for patients during surgery. 

With its existing product, operating room staff copied reports from the NIM to the EHR using a USB memory stick or by printing and then scanning reports, but neither approach was elegant or efficient. Medtronic wanted to explore a more seamless integration between its NIM system and backend electronic health records (EHR).  

That’s where Emids came into the picture.  

Emids set up an on-site alignment workshop where it explored a range of options for integrating the NIM into back-end EHR systems. These included cloud-based solutions, Interface Engines, FHIR and HL7—two data-interchange standards commonly used in healthcare. Emids created a proof-of-concept dashboard for device-specific information. This cloud-based functionality took only a week to develop and showcases some of the potential benefits of cloud-based service and support for Medtronic. 

Following the workshop, Medtronic settled on a combination of FHIR integrated into the NIM units for patient record lookup to prevent patient mismatches—important because patient mismatches increase the complexity on data submission—and HL7 to do the actual data updates. Within a few months of starting the project, Emids had designed and built a working prototype for the next generation NIM. 

Overview

The client is one of the nation’s leading operators of general acute care hospitals. The organization’s affiliates own, operate or lease 84 hospitals in 16 states with approximately 13,000 licensed beds.

As part of a multi-year partnership, we develop and support HL7 interfaces to expedite a Promoting Interoperability Program for clinical data exchange. This program prevents delays in execution by EMR vendors to provide Public Health Reporting (PHR) services due to a lack of PHR expertise and inability to accommodate frequent changes in the regulations.

Results

Our team performed interfaces development for 6 programs supported under MU3  – Syndromic Surveillance, Immunization Registry, Immunization Query, Electronic Laboratory Reporting, National Hospital Care Survey. We successfully helped the client meet state-specific deadlines for COVID-19 case reporting and managed frequent changes in data specifications by the DOH.

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A world-leading medical device company turned to Emids for help designing a cloud-based solution to preserve and protect previously unrecorded patient data.

Those who’ve been in an operating room (or seen one on TV) will recognize the pole-mounted medical monitoring devices displaying patient vitals in real time. What if there was a way to preserve that data to be used at a later date?

Opportunity

A leading medical device manufacturer wanted to develop a way to preserve and contextualize the data, and then make it available for reporting and research. Enter Emids, which was uniquely qualified for its technical and business expertise, and deep healthcare regulatory insight.

Approach

Emids enabled tablets to be connected to medical devices’ Ethernet ports. The tablets could capture heart rate oxygen levels, blood pressure and other vitals exhibited during procedures. Clinicians could then annotate the data via touchscreen and upload it to a private cloud for storage.

The data had to be impregnable. Emids programmed end-to-end encryption, along with carefully controlled access to passwords, and a robust firewall.

Flexibility mattered when it came to client reporting requirements. Emids built in Microsoft’s Power BI Embedded report development tool to enable hospital business analysts to work with clinicians and customize reports as needed.

A different regulatory-related challenge then arose: business analysts aren’t permitted to view patient data. How could they create reports? Again, Emids found a solution. They created a secondary, synchronized database that achieves HIPAA compliance by providing the access analysts need while masking all protected personal information.

Solution

Emids took the project from concept to working prototype in six weeks, on budget and with only two full-time resources. Following trials, the client expects to release a commercial version of the product toward the end of 2017.

Project Details

Regulatory Compliance

Synchronized database to mask PHI and allow business analysts to create reports.

Data Engineering & Data Visualization

Microsoft Power BI Embedded leveraged to allow business analysts to create a flexible reporting solution.

Secure Cloud Integration

Fully encrypted data transfer between the tablet, cloud, and client devices.