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.  

In an era of rapid digital healthcare innovation, Humana, the third largest health insurance company in the U.S. faced several challenges within its digital channels unit to rapidly bring new solutions to market. It was laden with complex architecture, which meant IT had to tread carefully, given the importance of safeguarding personal health information for millions of members.

Amid this complexity and the COVID-19 pandemic, Humana needed a solution for its contact center’s number one ask: locating a COVID-19 testing center for its members.

The existing giant spreadsheet was slowing down contact center staff, so Humana turned to its low-code delivery partner, Cloud Development Resources (CDR)—an Emids company—to co-deliver a solution on the OutSystems platform. Through this low-code co-creation approach, Humana was able to create the web app experience on OutSystems in a weekend and Emids was brought in to develop a full suite of back-office functions, allowing 30 reps to regularly update the testing locations database in real time on the web app.

Learn more about the partnership between CDR, OutSystems and Humana here.

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. 

Emids worked with a top Fortune 500 payer organization, which aims to empower their over 100m members to live healthier lives.

The organization wanted to complement its care advisors with a high touch, digital concierge experience for families experiencing complex care needs regardless of their health plans. The objective was to free up space for the provider and specialty-care practices so they could focus on care delivery and member health.

Through continued collaboration with the client team, Emids delivered a UX Playbook to serve as a reference point for product decisions going forward, including research findings and recommendations and design decisions. Emids also delivered two prototypes to reference for the MVP and Beyond the MVP work, highlighting key service design considerations as the project continues into the build phase.

Challenge

One of Canada’s leading mental health care facilities was facing significant difficulties in delivering necessary care to their patients with mental-health illness and addiction during the COVID-19 pandemic. With the limitations imposed by the pandemic, in-person access to medical care was restricted, and the opioid-overdose rate surged. To continue providing quality care, the facility required an innovative solution that could provide remote care services to their patients.

Solution

Emids was engaged to develop a digital platform that could effectively facilitate remote care delivery. Leveraging the facility’s existing Rapid Access Addiction Medicine (RAAM) Clinic, Emids applied its design-led engineering and user experience design knowledge to digitize the facility’s workflows, resulting in a seamless ‘digital front door‘ experience. This allowed patients to access the same care services via the internet on both desktop and mobile devices.

Emids’ HealthConnect and InQ technologies were integral to the development of the digital front door and workflow experience. This digital platform expedited the care delivery process through online meeting tools, minimized the need for extensive IT support, and simplified system integration.

Patients could log in to the RAAM Clinic from a device with internet connectivity and a camera, answer a few preliminary questions, provide insurance information, and then connect with a clinician for personalized assessment. Moreover, this solution enabled patients to interact with various care team members, such as addiction counselors, social workers, nurses, and physicians, while also allowing additional support members like friends and family to attend the sessions.

Results

The digital solution increased the facility’s regional reach by 20 percent, extending care to underserved and remote communities. It improved the access to team-based, personalized care, with patients being triaged within three minutes and meeting their first clinician within nine minutes of entering the digital front door.

The solution had a positive impact on the facility’s performance metrics, thus aiding its continuous improvement efforts. The facility successfully transitioned from in-person care to digital care, with the digital solution receiving high praise from the facility and patients alike. A satisfaction rate of nearly 96 percent was recorded among patients, and 100 percent of the clinic staff agreed that the digital solution increased their capacity to see clients and maintain the standards of care. Patient feedback underscored the solution’s success, with one patient wishing more healthcare services were set up in a similar manner, and another expressing surprise at how quick and easy the online service was.

Availity, a benefits and claims management platform, facilitates over 4 billion clinical, administrative and financial transactions annually for their payer & provider network.

Facing market pressure from customers and competitors, Availity wanted to take a blue sky approach and reimagine their provider portal to reduce the overhead that resulted in calls to support. They turned to Emids for their design-led approach to product creation.

Emids and the Availity product team worked to ideate, research, and deliver on an experience prototype, initially solving for a narrow slice of the workflows that could be scaled to the entire platform. 

With an advisory committee, composed of existing end users spanning organization size and specialty, the Emids team implemented an agile, iterative design and research framework that allowed for the quick creation of design concepts that could be tested with end users before the next iteration.

The final experience design was delivered in the form of a clickable Invision prototype.

End users were delighted by the reimagined portal experience, remarking how quickly and frictionless formerly confusing processes were made, which will no doubt reduce the need for phone calls to health plans for support.

Overview

The Emids client is a not-for-profit 501c3 health maintenance organization (HMO) insurance company with a consistent record of earning accreditation by the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA).

Emids partnered to help them build the right capabilities that comply with Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) regulatory requirements related to Interoperability and Patient Access final rules. These regulatory requirements are applicable to the client’s LOBs – Medicaid and Duals only.

The Challenge

Developing interoperability preparedness for not only regulatory compliance but “beyond the rules” readiness.

Emids Solution

Our team performed a discovery assessment to understand as-is state and data ingestion process, data flows, technology and integration tools. We carried out a detailed assessment around FHIR integration, “Build on Cloud” solution approach, and discovered FHIR resource gaps within the current data landscape.

Results

In 10 months we helped the client meet the Patient Access API & Provider Directory API deadline of CMS mandate.

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.

Contact us to learn more about partnering opportunities.

Leveraging the AWS Cloud platform to help leading medical organization accelerate growth and cut operational costs costs

Overview

The Emids client is a leading national medical group with more than $5 billion in revenue. The group provides physician-led services, ambulatory surgery center management, post-acute care and medical transportation among other services. The client encounters more than 30 million patients annually across the U.S.

But the client faced several data challenges impeding its long-term growth.

The group’s clinical data exchange had more than 1,100 point-to-point connections to support data acquisition and had more than 600 sites reporting Medicare-Access-and-CHIP-Reauthorization-Act/Merit-based-Incentive-Payment-System data via a paper-based abstraction process. Additionally, the client was losing revenue from delayed billing caused by incomplete data as well as minimal to no internal checkpoints on data feeds.

Emids Solution

That’s where Emids was brought on to serve as a strategic data partner.

Our team adopted a consulting-led approach to identify key stakeholders, conduct interviews, understand the state of data acquisition & ingestion, clinical flows, technology and integration tools. We carried out a detailed assessment of Health Information Exchanges (HIE), Epic App Orchid, Cerner Hub and other data sources as identified by the client.

The solution was built on the AWS cloud platform leveraging S3 for storage, RedShift for data warehousing, Athena for interactive analytics and a host of other AWS services like Lamda, Glue, and Kinesis data streams.

Results

Emids became the client’s strategic data partner for more than two years, resulting in scalable FHIR-based solutions hosted on the AWS platform. This reduced effort and increased savings on operational costs.