Power Global

 View Only

IBM Power for Better Interoperability with FHIR in Healthcare

By Melis Ozturk posted Wed September 07, 2022 06:52 PM

  
IBM Power for Better Interoperability with FHIR in Healthcare

IBM Power Solution Editions for Healthcare are designed for organizations to transform healthcare in a cost effective and secure way. IBM Power is committed to empower healthcare stakeholders to digitize, exchange, access, process, manage and store sensitive health data in the most secure way with high availability and lower operational costs.
 
For 15+ years, IBM Power has collaborated with leading software vendors to help healthcare organizations better manage health data and their IT environments. IBM Power has a proven track record of providing the most reliable, secure, high-performing server infrastructure needed to support mission-critical healthcare workloads, like Electronic Health Records(EHR) software. 
 
Today, approximately 30% of the world’s data volume is being generated by the healthcare industry and it is expected to grow at a CAGR of 36%, faster than any other industry.[1] Exponential growth of digital data (including EHR) and increasing adoption of big data/AI/ML technologies require significant advancements in computing power and storage capacity.[2]
 
Amid exponential growth of digitized health data, there is a growing need for a standard format to easily read and exchange data across the vast healthcare ecosystem players. Accordingly, in 2021, the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) mandated the use of Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) for CMS-regulated organizations, accelerating its adoption by US based healthcare organizations.
IBM Power for FHIR offers a critical patient data interoperability platform to ensure both providers and payers can share, manage and protect healthcare data to meet compliance requirements with a secure, cyber-resilient platform while meeting FHIR compliance objectives. 
  • Security: End-to-end security which is built-in at all layers of the stack, including processor, firmware (secure and trusted boot), hypervisor, OS, system management. In addition, the PowerVM hypervisor has an excellent security track record when compared against major competitors.
  • Efficiency: Run FHIR workloads along with EHR instances in the same server, with virtualized partitions and minimum system overhead, then scale and grow simply by adding instant capacity on demand with Dynamic Capacity. Workload consolidation and superior core and memory performance means efficiencies in cooling, energy usage, and data center floorspace.
  • Reliability: IBM Power has been ranked as the most reliable infrastructure by ITIC for 13 years in a row.[3] IBM Power delivers the most reliable hybrid cloud infrastructure to meet around-the-clock customer demands.
 
IBM Power now partners with industry leading ISVs (Exafluence, MongoDB and InterSystems) to offer FHIR-based interoperability solutions to healthcare organizations.
Exafluence:
Exafluence’s FHIR offering, EXF FHIR, is a containerized, cloud-ready solution that automates bulk creation of FHIR resources, its profiles, and their storage in any relational or non-relational database.  EXF FHIR also enables and provides for customization of RESTful FHIR APIs. The key differentiated aspect of the solution is that it also supports extensions for custom data points not included in FHIR specifications. Exafluence also provides accelerators to help do attribute mapping and migration of client data to the FHIR standard. 
 
Building EXF FHIR on IBM Power provides a scalable infrastructure that ensures clients have a compliant, reliable, and secure interoperable health data system.  Exafluence selected IBM & IBM Power as an infrastructure solution for EXF FHIR to provide clients the best hybrid cloud option with a leader in healthcare, payer, provider and life sciences.
 
EXF FHIR powered by MongoDB is customizable to the specific needs with custom attributes and profiles. "MongoDB is proud to be the exclusive data platform powering Exafluence’s best in class FHIR solution,” said Sarah Branfman, Vice President, ISV, MongoDB. “Exafluence empowers healthcare organizations to FHIR-enable their data within days, vs months, and deliver interoperability across their IT assets and broader FHIR ecosystem. The inherent JSON-based characteristics of both Exafluence FHIR and MongoDB’s Document Model eliminate the need for costly and complicated data conversions between database and API tiers, and we ensure healthcare organizations have the freedom to deploy on-prem or in the cloud. We’re excited for the collaboration of our strategic partners, Exafluence and IBM, to help customers easily achieve regulatory compliance, while delivering critical healthcare services to their customers."
 
Please see https://fhir.exafluence.com for more information on Exafluence - FHIR.
 
InterSystems: 
InterSystems is a creative data technology provider dedicated to helping customers solve the most critical scalability, interoperability, and speed problems. InterSystems' FHIR stack is used by leading independent software vendors and healthcare organizations, the largest clinical laboratories, and the largest regional health information networks.  Globally, more than one billion health records are managed by solutions built on InterSystems Technology.
 
InterSystems provides "Industrial Strength" FHIR software - high performance even at extreme scale and highly reliable, conformant, and secure. The same FHIR stack is included in a range of offerings, including Health Connect (a leading healthcare integration engine), InterSystems IRIS for Health (a platform for developing advanced healthcare applications), and a suite of InterSystems FHIR Cloud Services.
 
"IBM Power provides unique performance and reliability for our customers, and we have many happy customers using InterSystems software on Power.  Our FHIR offerings are a great fit for the IBM Power Solution Edition for Healthcare, and together these provide the highest capacity FHIR offering on the market, " says Jeff Fried, Director of Product Management for InterSystems.
 
See https://www.intersystems.com/sa/solutions/fhir for more information on InterSystems and FHIR.
 
For more information on IBM Power for FHIR and our pilot program, please contact
Normand R Champigny, IBM Power EcoSystem ISV Team at normand.champigny@ibm.com
 
[1] Looking to Tomorrow's Healthcare Today: a Participatory Health Perspective (Nov 2018)
[2] Markets and Markets, Healthcare Cloud Computing Market (Sep 2020)
 
2 comments
192 views

Permalink

Comments

Thu September 08, 2022 11:54 AM

I added some links on the blog to explain FHIR and the CMS mandate for the adoption of FHIR.

Thu September 08, 2022 10:06 AM

Please expand acronyms.  What is FHIR?