Designing Conversational Healthcare Experiences with Third-Party Integrations

When searching for Digital Health Solutions, organizations must consider several important factors. Generally, these tools are designed to enhance the delivery of medical services, education, and products to patients, all while delivering meaningful improvements and clinical efficiencies.

The term ‘Third-Party Integration’ refers to the incorporation of essential external data into an existing project by utilizing various APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). Instead of building a new chat interface from scratch, developers can simply leverage an existing API to seamlessly integrate it into their solution. The healthcare industry is currently experiencing significant digital transformation. Medical facilities with insufficient or lacking risk management systems expose themselves to potential third-party liabilities.

• The healthcare sector is highly attractive to cybercriminals due to the value of patient information. In 2019, this industry recorded the highest number of breaches, with 41 percent of healthcare facilities reporting an incident. Vendors often have access to Personal Health Information (PHI) and other sensitive data, yet they generally adhere to less rigorous security and compliance standards compared to healthcare facilities, making them vulnerable without adequate risk management.
• Aiming to address these vulnerabilities, a Third-Party Risk Management program provides organizations with a framework for conducting thorough due diligence across their entire vendor ecosystem. This is typically accomplished through the use of vendor questionnaires. These standardized assessment questionnaires evaluate various aspects of vendor security in relation to industry regulations and trends, helping healthcare providers assess individual vendor risks by shedding light on their security posture.
• Successful third-party integration in today’s healthcare landscape is driven by a multi-party product view that enables unobtrusive access to web applications, providing optimal visibility for clinicians. A single source for data minimizes transcription errors and ensures the delivery of the most accurate and current clinical information. An HL7 messaging layer serves as a buffer between the cloud and core systems, preventing third parties from gaining direct access to sensitive data. Additionally, third-party integration facilitates faster access to patient medical records for emergency department clinicians, enhances communication between patients and medical staff, and improves the quality of care through streamlined workflows, allowing medical personnel to instantly retrieve patient information.
• Integrating with third-party systems, such as Electronic Health Records (EHR) or Customer Relationship Management Systems (CRMs), enables organizations to upload and download data efficiently. By leveraging various communication methods, including APIs and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), platforms can utilize existing functionalities instead of reinventing the wheel with entirely new code. While third-party applications can enhance features, functions, and efficiencies within your organization’s digital environment, achieving seamless and quick integration is often more challenging than anticipated.

To stay competitive, businesses must adapt swiftly to market demands. Third-party integrations enable rapid addition of features and tools into business processes, which might otherwise take months to develop independently. Even with the necessary resources to create internal tools, the refinement process can be time-consuming.