This is a guest post by David Chao 

It’s a brave new world for healthcare organizations. Hospitals and other providers are teaming up to form Accountable Care Organizations to take a coordinated, community-level approach to health care.

Health insurance companies are no longer passively paying off claims, but are becoming active managers of their policyholders’ health. Providers and payers are having to change what they do and how they do it.

This requires the use of technology to ensure a free flow of information across clinical and non-clinical systems and across legacy, cloud, mobile, and personal device platforms. As the number of systems increase, this integration challenge will only grow.

How can organizations successfully meet this integration challenge?

1. Eliminate point-to-point integrations

All too often in the past, health care organizations have built custom point-to-point integrations between systems, creating a tangled web of connections. Businesses should instead turn to an integration platform that provides a common interface for all systems.

2. Leverage learnings from other industries and adopt a best-of-breed systems approach

Experience from other industries tells us that sharing data through a single, inflexible system is doomed to failure (contrary to what what some heatlhcare vendors would have you believe). Instead, loose coupling of “best-of-breed” applications has proven to be a far more effective model. Initiatives such as the CommonWell alliance and the SMART API platform are on the right track, but more must be done to push healthcare IT vendors to open up their systems.

3. Be pragmatic 

It seems that as a response to outdated technology in healthcare IT, there is a tendency to over-engineer solutions. As Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg said, “done is better than perfect.” Case in point: the 10+ years it took for the HL7 v3 healthcare messaging standard to supersede HL7 v2. For many, v3 is now so bloated that it’s impractical. At the same time, use of v2 is so deep-seated that it can’t easily be replaced. Low-tech examples can be very successful, as we see from the adoption of DIRECT protocol (essentially secure email), and the popularity of the secure e-fax feature in Doximity’s doctor platform. When it comes to solving healthcare interoperability challenges, done is certainly better than perfect.

As we’re all well aware, when it comes to technology, the healthcare industry is struggling to play catch up. The HITECH and Affordable Care Acts have provided a real catalyst for change, and it is up to all of us who work in the healthcare space to ensure we work together to deliver on this promise.

David Chao is a Product Manager at MuleSoft where he leads MuleSoft’s healthcare business. In this role, he works with providers, payers and government bodies to improve patient outcomes and lower costs by solving the challenge of interoperability across healthcare systems.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Despite concerns about data security and loss of control, cloud-based service providers are highly confident about the growth of the industry through to 2014.

The confidence stems from cost savings for customers; a KPMG International survey released today found that technology companies can expect the portion of revenue they generate from cloud services to double in the next two years.

The survey found demand for cloud services is “even stronger than we expected,” Tom Lamoureux, global leader for KPMG’s technology advisory team, told the Wall Street Journal.

Cloud providers revealed that revenue generated from the migration to cloud will be from data-intensive applications, such as business and data analytics, content management, customer care, and operations and manufacturing.

The survey’s participants expect the shift to occur despite ongoing concerns over loss of control of data and security as well as the challenge of providing consistent cost-savings.

“While providers are seeing the challenges of a maturing yet still relatively young market, we’re at a pivotal point in the evolution of the cloud ecosystem as users become more comfortable with a variety of cloud applications,” said Gary Matuszak, a partner, global chair, and U.S. leader for KPMG’s technology, media, and telecommunications practice in a release. “Leading cloud providers know they must evolve to provide a new level of scale, capacity and capability.”

The survey found evidence of a disconnect between real and expected cost-savings from cloud-based services. Four out of 10 survey participants said that proving cost savings was the biggest challenge in selling cloud services, and that most IT buyers are unrealistic about the amount they can save by switching to the cloud.

Indeed, cloud providers will need to work hard to continue winning over customers. Nearly half of providers say that loss of control is one of the biggest hurdles to deciding to purchase a cloud service to perform critical business functions, and 60 percent of service providers say they need to retrain their sales forces to effectively sell cloud services.

“The lines are blurring across the various types of cloud services; users need and want to understand cloud’s value and immense power much better than they do,” said Lamoureaux.

KPMG, the global provider of audit and advisory services, surveyed 179 cloud companies in North America, Asia Pacific, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Image via Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

For years, institutions of higher education have been a target for cloud technology providers.

College students and faculty are desperately in need of cloud-based services that enable them to stay connected, store documents, and collaborate on coursework with their peers. However, budgets are slim, and the industry is in the nascent stages of understanding how to market to college technology executives.

To get ahead of the market, one of Meg Whitman’s first public appearances as the chief executive for Hewlett Packard (HP) was to beam in by video-conference and address a group of college technology decision-makers. During the meeting, they discussed how the leading colleges could band together to demand better terms (increased storage capacity, lower pricing and so on) from vendors than an individual college could get on its own.

The participants also voiced a major concern: how to pick between dozens of vendors with similar marketing messages. What are the right questions to ask? Would they place their trust in an innovative startup or stick with a legacy vendor like HP? And what cloud-based services would students benefit from most?

At VentureBeat’s CloudBeat, we’ll be taking the discussion one step further to address these issues, and cut through the jargon to reveal the best options for higher ed.

(CloudBeat is unique with its emphasis on customer case-studies. It’s not abstract theories and ideas — executives will reveal their hard-frought solutions to very real technology problems).

Purdue’s Executive Director of Infrastructure Systems and Operations, Michael Rubesch, will provide feedback and tips on the university’s transition to the cloud. The session will be moderated by Ben Kepes, blogger and cloud computing expert at Diversity Limited.

In a twist, the university chose Oxygen Cloud, a smaller and younger competitor to the leading cloud services provider Amazon Web Services, to provide mobile access, file sharing and collaboration capabilities. Oxygen Cloud specializes in making it possible to move around data between a corporate network and a device outside the firewall.

Rubesch will reveal how he assessed the full spectrum of services before coming to a decision, and how the university will expand its range of cloud-based services in the future.

At CloudBeat, another major theme will be cloud security – this is a leading concern for colleges that deal with student’s sensitive and private data. 

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Our second annual CloudBeat 2012 conference is just around the corner! Today we are extremely excited to announce our finalists for the event’s Innovation Showdown, a lively competition where seven new companies (chosen from over 200 nominees) will battle it out onstage to see whose product or service is leveraging the cloud in the most revolutionary way.

The finalists will have five minutes to pitch, and our team of sages — made up of industry experts, venture capitalists and actual enterprise customers — will provide detailed feedback and ultimately determine a winner.

We’ll announce the Showdown winner onstage at CloudBeat (Nov. 28-29, Redwood City, Calif.). In addition to the onstage accolades, the winner will receive a VentureBeat editorial profile, introductions to investors and relevant potential customers in our network, and a handful of other prizes to be announced.

Last year’s winner, Zadara Storage, went on to raise $7 million in first-round funding.

Without further ado, here are our 2012 Innovation Showdown finalists:

Kabbage

Kabbage has developed a technological platform to analyze seller data and advance cash on the spot. The internet-based funding platform enables small businesses to receive approval and funds within 7 minutes of completing a simple online application — a process that would normally require months of hassle and paperwork when applying for traditional funding through a bank. This data is pulled from sources such as PayPal, UPS, Intuit, Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Twitter, and many others. All of this is stored and processed in the cloud, making the product fast, efficient, secure, and capable of scaling.

Appsecute

Appsecute bridges the divide between developers and IT operations, delivering collaborative management tools for PaaS. The company provides application management for the cloud, with an emphasis on transitioning applications into production. It’s like RightScale for PaaS.

Fiverun

Fiverun provides a tablet solution that helps retailers provide advice/recommendations and checkout customers, anywhere in a store with any sales associate. The company believes consumers should first be helped by a sales associate that is armed with a device that has every product the retailer carries. Fiverun leverages the power of its cloud based platform to power this functionality as a SaaS based solution for any retailer on the globe.

MuleSoft

Founded on the idea that connecting applications should not be hard, MuleSoft lets organizations harness the power of their applications through integration. The company provides one of the most widely used integration platforms for connecting SaaS and enterprise applications in the cloud and on-premise. Customers include Zynga, Boeing and Bank of America.

Cloudessa

Adaptive Planning

Adaptive Planning is a cloud-based solution for budgeting, forecasting, reporting and analysis, sales planning, data visualization, and business intelligence. It works with companies and nonprofits of all sizes to fundamentally transform their management processes – the way they plan, monitor, measure, and analyze their business performance, throughout the entire company to improve productivity, costs, and decisions. It is a step ahead of traditional Excel-based planning and budgeting and legacy enterprise performance solutions.

Circle

Circle provides hosted continuous integration for web applications. Once developers push their code to GitHub, Circle immediately begins testing it, and deploying the application to Heroku if tests are successful.

The CloudBeat 2012 Innovation Showdown is sponsored by Norwest Venture Partners.

It’s one track in a program packed full of never-before-seen customer case studies, fireside chats with top-level speakers, and focused breakout sessions.

Tickets are very limited, so make sure to grab yours today!

Special thanks to the industry leaders who are supporting CloudBeat 2012: Ping Identity as Gold Sponsor; New Relic, dotCloud, Huddle, and Oxygen Cloud as Silver Sponsors; and CollabNet, Aria, Apprenda, Nasdaq OMX, Scality, Egnyte, Norwest Venture Partners, Silicon Valley Bank, RingCentral, and Scale Venture Partners as Event Sponsors.

Image via Shutterstock