The pandemic has acted as a fierce catalyst for digital transformation — and nowhere is that more evident than in the healthcare industry. This period of uncertainty has sparked experts to look at the future of health; one that is more just, equitable and efficient with the strategic use of technology.

According to a recent KPMG study, 62 percent of CEOs from leading public and private healthcare providers say they were already undertaking substantial change prior to the pandemic.

Now, 97 percent agree that COVID has significantly accelerated those change agendas. The vast majority (79 percent) also believe that, within the next three years, all aspects of care delivery models will be transformed. But significant obstacles and challenges are ahead.

Health, AI and automation

Powerful new technologies like AI and machine learning are enabling knowledge workers to do more than they ever could before. These technologies are optimising the healthcare and pharma value chain by accelerating breakthrough innovation, delivering better patient care and scaling stronger outcomes across entire organisations.

In fact, according to a recent report from Bain & Company, 80 percent of physician respondents say they use digital tools more often than they did just three-to-five years ago. They say technology helps them better manage workloads and cited increased caseloads during the pandemic as a key driver.

When automation is tied to these digital processes, healthcare and pharma organisations become quite literally bionic, with new capabilities and insights to make better, more accurate decisions. In turn, this enables them to take swift, life-saving actions. Bionic healthcare and pharma companies harness automation not to replace humans but to equip them with capabilities that drive productivity and lead to far better outcomes.

Everything from obtaining complete patient information to recommending a personalised medical treatment based on the patient’s information and providing access to clinical trial data across stakeholders, both internally and externally, are processes that can be automated to serve the industry’s dynamic needs.

Health care’s data integration challenges

Despite the benefits of technology for the healthcare industry, it’s estimated that only 56 percent of healthcare organisations are using all of their available data. This means nearly half the industry is missing out — and paying for it.

Here’s some of the many limitations that are costing the healthcare industry approximately $342 billion:

• Lack of a standard data format: Over the years healthcare organisations have accumulated various data formats, some incompatible with systems and other data.

• Holistic approach to data handling is missing: More often than not, the individuals who process a given set of data are not the same people who need and make use of the data. This means important details might be missed in the transition; data ownership can be unclear.

• Misconceptions in data privacy and data sharing: This hinders successful data integration. Some healthcare organisations have incomplete understandings of laws regarding data privacy and confidentiality. Data must be protected from illegal access and tampering, but also shared under specific circumstances. Balancing these two concerns can be tricky.

• Inconsistency of data among applications: One application can address some but not all of the needs of a healthcare organisation. Healthcare organisations are most likely to use several applications to serve their various users. The data in these applications should be consistent to ensure sensible, data-driven insights.

Intelligent integration platforms like SnapLogic help address these issues by providing the tools necessary to connect various cloud, on-premises and hybrid software applications and data sources.

The healthcare companies leading the way

The following companies are delivering the future of health care with intelligent integration and automation. They serve as the benchmark for others, inspiring a revolution across the health landscape.

Magellan Health

The mission at leading healthcare provider Magellan Health was clear: deliver innovative products and services that resulted in business outcomes that were 10x greater than competitors by using breakthrough organisational techniques and modern exponential technologies.

With entrenched competitors up to 30 times larger than Magellan, and a diverse and growing customer base that expected exceptional services without cost increases, Magellan’s IT team set out to transform the company’s IT operations and pave the path to the connected enterprise.

Magellan Health enabled enterprise automation, via SnapLogic, at the center of its transformation, tackling five strategic – and ambitious – initiatives: Modernisation, B2B Integration, SaaS Connectivity, Automation and Big Data.

Results:

• Automated end-to-end HR processes on employee onboarding, triggering up to 20 automated workflows, provisioning everything from user ID and application access to the procurement of laptops and other equipment and more

• Automated repetitive tasks of its medical pharmacy business that manages prior authorisations of specialty drugs for its members, replacing a source -, time-, code-intensive process with a real-time automated pipeline

• Integrated more than 20 SaaS applications, including Workday, ServiceNow, Okta, and more. Put more than 100 pipelines into production in record time

• Kept IT resources and budgets flat while the company more than doubled revenues

AstraZeneca

As pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca embarked on new cloud-first initiatives, IT needed to bring numerous apps and data sources together with a globally available, self-service integration platform that could be used by distributed teams with minimal corporate support or intervention. The company needed a comprehensive platform to execute more than 300 integrations in just one year.

To achieve this scale with a lean central IT team, following a “do more with less” principle, AstraZeneca sought out a simple, but powerful integration solution – one that could easily be used by hundreds of staff outside IT who were anything but integration experts. With SnapLogic, AstraZeneca was able to integrate numerous applications, systems and technologies across cloud platforms and its own on-premises investments with impressive scale.

Results:

• 100+ integrations completed within six months
• 300+ integrations completed within one year
• 4X faster development and integration of Salesforce
• Self-service integration powers 500+ users across the organisation

Illumina

The leading biotechnology company Illumina develops and manufactures innovative technologies for large-scale analysis of genetic variation and function. The company embarked on its cloud-first journey with the goal of moving more applications to the cloud, including Workday, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Concur and others. Its technology stack included many cloud applications as well as legacy, on-premises applications that were sprawled across the enterprise.

To successfully achieve its cloud-first initiative, the company needed to modernise its legacy integrations. However, its legacy integration tool wasn’t equipped to support integrations for cloud applications. This stalled its cloud strategy. After deploying SnapLogic, Illumina quickly retired its legacy applications and modernised legacy integrations.

Results:

• 10X faster in delivering integrations compared to legacy integrations
• Eliminated bottlenecks and pressure from small IT Team

• Optimised confidence in data and analytics, enabling swift decision-making
• Connected applications across departments

Intelligent integration: the superpower of modern health care

Today, patients engage with their healthcare providers across multiple channels. From outpatient and inpatient procedures to virtual check-ups and medicine pickups, patient information is created or updated in multiple systems. While having all of this data available is a step in the right direction; If these systems are not integrated, healthcare providers lack a complete view of each of their patient’s medical conditions, medical history, risk factors and treatments.

Having only a partial view of a patient’s health information limits their potential to provide the best medical care and recommendation for patients at each touch point. What’s more, lack of information could also lead to misdiagnosis or mistreatment that could hinder patient outcomes.

Streamlined medical processes, on the other hand, deliver complete patient information, empowering healthcare providers to offer the right medical care at the right time and moment, optimising the patient outcome. Healthcare providers can transform their care delivery and healthcare programs by increasing efficiency and innovation.

By understanding trends in patient outcomes, providers can improve existing programs or create new ones to bolster their service to patients. Preventive health care and medical diagnosis, for example, can be made more efficient if providers see better results in one type of treatment over another, or if the treatment processes can yield the exact results if performed over a shorter period of time.

Better outcomes in patient care as well as faster, more streamlined research, innovation, greater efficiencies, improved revenues and enhanced staff satisfaction are all on the other side of intelligent integration.

The pandemic has acted as a fierce catalyst for digital transformation — and nowhere is that more evident than in the healthcare industry. This period of uncertainty has sparked experts to look at the future of health; one that is more just, equitable and efficient with the strategic use of technology.

According to a recent KPMG study, 62 percent of CEOs from leading public and private healthcare providers say they were already undertaking substantial change prior to the pandemic.

Now, 97 percent agree that COVID has significantly accelerated those change agendas. The vast majority (79 percent) also believe that, within the next three years, all aspects of care delivery models will be transformed. But significant obstacles and challenges are ahead.

Health, AI and automation

Powerful new technologies like AI and machine learning are enabling knowledge workers to do more than they ever could before. These technologies are optimising the healthcare and pharma value chain by accelerating breakthrough innovation, delivering better patient care and scaling stronger outcomes across entire organisations.

In fact, according to a recent report from Bain & Company, 80 percent of physician respondents say they use digital tools more often than they did just three-to-five years ago. They say technology helps them better manage workloads and cited increased caseloads during the pandemic as a key driver.

When automation is tied to these digital processes, healthcare and pharma organisations become quite literally bionic, with new capabilities and insights to make better, more accurate decisions. In turn, this enables them to take swift, life-saving actions. Bionic healthcare and pharma companies harness automation not to replace humans but to equip them with capabilities that drive productivity and lead to far better outcomes.

Everything from obtaining complete patient information to recommending a personalised medical treatment based on the patient’s information and providing access to clinical trial data across stakeholders, both internally and externally, are processes that can be automated to serve the industry’s dynamic needs.

Health care’s data integration challenges

Despite the benefits of technology for the healthcare industry, it’s estimated that only 56 percent of healthcare organisations are using all of their available data. This means nearly half the industry is missing out — and paying for it.

Here’s some of the many limitations that are costing the healthcare industry approximately $342 billion:

• Lack of a standard data format: Over the years healthcare organisations have accumulated various data formats, some incompatible with systems and other data.

• Holistic approach to data handling is missing: More often than not, the individuals who process a given set of data are not the same people who need and make use of the data. This means important details might be missed in the transition; data ownership can be unclear.

• Misconceptions in data privacy and data sharing: This hinders successful data integration. Some healthcare organisations have incomplete understandings of laws regarding data privacy and confidentiality. Data must be protected from illegal access and tampering, but also shared under specific circumstances. Balancing these two concerns can be tricky.

• Inconsistency of data among applications: One application can address some but not all of the needs of a healthcare organisation. Healthcare organisations are most likely to use several applications to serve their various users. The data in these applications should be consistent to ensure sensible, data-driven insights.

Intelligent integration platforms like SnapLogic help address these issues by providing the tools necessary to connect various cloud, on-premises and hybrid software applications and data sources.

The healthcare companies leading the way

The following companies are delivering the future of health care with intelligent integration and automation. They serve as the benchmark for others, inspiring a revolution across the health landscape.

Magellan Health

The mission at leading healthcare provider Magellan Health was clear: deliver innovative products and services that resulted in business outcomes that were 10x greater than competitors by using breakthrough organisational techniques and modern exponential technologies.

With entrenched competitors up to 30 times larger than Magellan, and a diverse and growing customer base that expected exceptional services without cost increases, Magellan’s IT team set out to transform the company’s IT operations and pave the path to the connected enterprise.

Magellan Health enabled enterprise automation, via SnapLogic, at the center of its transformation, tackling five strategic – and ambitious – initiatives: Modernisation, B2B Integration, SaaS Connectivity, Automation and Big Data.

Results:

• Automated end-to-end HR processes on employee onboarding, triggering up to 20 automated workflows, provisioning everything from user ID and application access to the procurement of laptops and other equipment and more

• Automated repetitive tasks of its medical pharmacy business that manages prior authorisations of specialty drugs for its members, replacing a source -, time-, code-intensive process with a real-time automated pipeline

• Integrated more than 20 SaaS applications, including Workday, ServiceNow, Okta, and more. Put more than 100 pipelines into production in record time

• Kept IT resources and budgets flat while the company more than doubled revenues

AstraZeneca

As pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca embarked on new cloud-first initiatives, IT needed to bring numerous apps and data sources together with a globally available, self-service integration platform that could be used by distributed teams with minimal corporate support or intervention. The company needed a comprehensive platform to execute more than 300 integrations in just one year.

To achieve this scale with a lean central IT team, following a “do more with less” principle, AstraZeneca sought out a simple, but powerful integration solution – one that could easily be used by hundreds of staff outside IT who were anything but integration experts. With SnapLogic, AstraZeneca was able to integrate numerous applications, systems and technologies across cloud platforms and its own on-premises investments with impressive scale.

Results:

• 100+ integrations completed within six months
• 300+ integrations completed within one year
• 4X faster development and integration of Salesforce
• Self-service integration powers 500+ users across the organisation

Illumina

The leading biotechnology company Illumina develops and manufactures innovative technologies for large-scale analysis of genetic variation and function. The company embarked on its cloud-first journey with the goal of moving more applications to the cloud, including Workday, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Concur and others. Its technology stack included many cloud applications as well as legacy, on-premises applications that were sprawled across the enterprise.

To successfully achieve its cloud-first initiative, the company needed to modernise its legacy integrations. However, its legacy integration tool wasn’t equipped to support integrations for cloud applications. This stalled its cloud strategy. After deploying SnapLogic, Illumina quickly retired its legacy applications and modernised legacy integrations.

Results:

• 10X faster in delivering integrations compared to legacy integrations
• Eliminated bottlenecks and pressure from small IT Team

• Optimised confidence in data and analytics, enabling swift decision-making
• Connected applications across departments

Intelligent integration: the superpower of modern health care

Today, patients engage with their healthcare providers across multiple channels. From outpatient and inpatient procedures to virtual check-ups and medicine pickups, patient information is created or updated in multiple systems. While having all of this data available is a step in the right direction; If these systems are not integrated, healthcare providers lack a complete view of each of their patient’s medical conditions, medical history, risk factors and treatments.

Having only a partial view of a patient’s health information limits their potential to provide the best medical care and recommendation for patients at each touch point. What’s more, lack of information could also lead to misdiagnosis or mistreatment that could hinder patient outcomes.

Streamlined medical processes, on the other hand, deliver complete patient information, empowering healthcare providers to offer the right medical care at the right time and moment, optimising the patient outcome. Healthcare providers can transform their care delivery and healthcare programs by increasing efficiency and innovation.

By understanding trends in patient outcomes, providers can improve existing programs or create new ones to bolster their service to patients. Preventive health care and medical diagnosis, for example, can be made more efficient if providers see better results in one type of treatment over another, or if the treatment processes can yield the exact results if performed over a shorter period of time.

Better outcomes in patient care as well as faster, more streamlined research, innovation, greater efficiencies, improved revenues and enhanced staff satisfaction are all on the other side of intelligent integration.

Faced with increased pressure to drive enrolment and retention, are education institutions across APAC digitally prepared to attract, engage and retain the new generation of globally minded, digitally savvy students?

Students are now expecting consistent, real-time access to information on housing, parking, class schedules, grades, financial aid and more. At the same time, a third of Gen Z respondents say the pandemic is changing the way they study over the long term. The  EY Oceania report predicts that higher education is moving swiftly towards digital, on-demand and lower cost learning as students – and faculty – increasingly demand flexible and job-ready training to set them up for future prosperity.

“Marrying data and intelligence in a way that is student-centric is key.”

This means the pressure is on higher ed institutions to place an even higher emphasis on delivering a remarkable digital experience. 
Today’s most progressive universities and colleges are doing that. They’re rising to meet the challenge by embracing the cloud, unifying their applications and systems, and putting data front and centre of their strategies to enrich the experiences of all – students, faculty and alumni.  

How data analytics helps higher education adapt and scale 

Technology plays a significant role in how educational institutions differentiate themselves, unlock fresh opportunities to educate new learners via innovative business models and pursue strategic business initiatives. Having flexible and scalable digital platforms built on trust that marry data and intelligence in a way that is student-centric and supported by a vibrant ecosystem of providers and skilled higher education users is key.  

With so much riding on the ability to deliver a seamless, connected experience for students, faculty, administrators and alumni, universities must integrate their data and apps and automate their processes. They need to connect all of their disparate systems.  

This integration enables a single source of truth where data and applications can communicate effectively with one another to optimise the experience for all, resulting in better recruitment, experience, retention and student success. 

Faster integrations enable universities to keep pace with today’s students’ expectations while taking the burden of manual work off end users. Think of all the highly repetitive and recurring processes happening every day in universities like application processes, tuition reconciliation and housing assignments — these can and should be automated.  

Unlocking the right data-driven solution 

Colleges and universities that are serious about future-proofing their business model are already leveraging innovative, data-driven solutions to modernise their IT infrastructure and drive connected experiences for students, faculty and alumni with fast, streamlined and efficient processes.  

AI-powered integration platforms use advanced machine learning algorithms to learn from millions of metadata elements and billions of data flows. Then that learning is applied to improve the speed and quality of integrations across data, applications, and business processes.  

By harnessing the power of innovative, data-driven platforms, higher education institutions also have access to data and analytics that are key to better decisioning, allowing them to compete at scale and lower costs.  

Machine learning algorithms can:

• Identify trends in student interest to guide teaching faculty 
• Proactively help students with the right resources to help them succeed 
• Predict overloading of integration resources so that you can take corrective action to maintain high availability

The result: Improved user productivity and time to value, more streamlined processes and information flow, and better outcomes and experiences for students, faculty, and alumni. 

As an example, SnapLogic’s Intelligent Integration Platform uses AI-powered workflows to accelerate all stages of IT integration projects – design, development, deployment, and maintenance – whether on-premises, in the cloud or in hybrid environments.  
The platform’s self-service interface enables both expert and citizen integrators to manage all application integration, data integration, API management, B2B integration and data engineering projects on a single, scalable platform.  

The universities getting it right 

As colleges and universities around the globe race to integrate data and apps to ensure students’ health, safety, remote learning and modern learning experience, the following three universities serve as a model for those seeking progress. 
Davidson College, ranked amongst the strongest and most selective private liberal arts colleges, partnered with SnapLogic to integrate more than 200 apps into its service catalogue five years ago. And lucky it did, because when Covid hit, the college was able to safely remain open, which was critical as 95 percent of its student body lives and studies on campus.  

Davidson College connected to SnapLogic to integrate Kuali, a low-code form and workflow automation platform for higher ed, with other applications, creating a unique Covid test and surveillance tracking system. 

“Thanks to SnapLogic, we were able to roll out the first version of the Covid-19 surveillance tracking system in less than 10 days, and that jump-started our process to keep our student-athletes, faculty and staff safe on campus at the beginning of the pandemic,” says JD Mills, digital transformation manager at Davidson College.

Throughout the Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 semesters, Davidson College completed 77,000 Covid tests. The college was able to automate the process to the point that it took just 50 seconds for a person to check in, get tested and exit, further minimising potential exposure to Covid. 

“The biggest thing that confronting this challenge did for us in IT was validate our integration strategy. This pushed us to work with real-time data and rapid response and confirmed that our strategy was on track,” says Mills.  

Then there’s Boston University (BU), which is another innovative standout in the higher ed space. Founded in 1839, it’s one of the largest private universities in the US and a leader in academia. The university believes higher education should be accessible to all. Unfortunately, challenges within its data architecture prevented students, faculty and professional staff from accessing and utilising the resources and information they needed.  

Since partnering with SnapLogic to streamline and optimise its application submission process and automate processes around research operations, class scheduling, building access and more, BU has achieved incredible results. For one, integration speed has improved two-fold thanks to quicker application integration and data migration. The student application process is faster and problem-free and improvements to information, research quality and physical security have been achieved. 

“With SnapLogic as the iPaaS platform of record for Boston University, we now have a single source of truth for all our data, allowing us to establish a faster, more reliable admissions process for prospective students. Our IT team has now become a trusted party among departments and campus organizations, which further empowers our students, faculty, and staff to effectively share knowledge across academia and research,” says Carmine A Granucci, assistant director of integration at Boston University. 

Vassar College provides a third example of data integration done right. This highly selective, coeducational, independent liberal arts college founded in 1861 knows the key to staying ahead lies in an effective data integration strategy.  

With SnapLogic’s code-less connectors, Vassar’s IT team has been able to reduce expenses and defer the costs of integrating with Workday, the replacement for its 20-year-old legacy Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. SnapLogic has also helped solved Vassar’s bookstore challenges, integrating Workday’s ERP system with the bookstore’s POS system in real-time.  

“After evaluating many options in the market, we chose SnapLogic because it was built for the cloud, supports hybrid cloud application and data integration, gives us the ability to scale by building and managing integration more quickly, and offers a user interface that is easy to use,” says Elizabeth Hayes, deputy CIO at Vassar College. 

Vassar was also able to integrate the school’s learning management system, Moodle, with student course enrolment data. This system alignment assists faculty members to quickly determine if a student has dropped a class, and lets students accurately and expeditiously track their homework assignments and grades.

“I like to think we are at the cutting edge of innovation at Vassar College. I share with my fellow CIOs at other colleges and universities that we are now able to undertake truly complex integrations, rapidly pushing them through in a standardized format,” Hayes says.

The future of education is built on intelligent integration 
The pressure is on to ensure that digitally native students are engaged with real-time access to all the information they need. But the future is exciting. There’s now ample opportunity for higher education institutions to leverage digital tools to personalise and optimise learning for students, to ensure success through a combination of classroom and online learning courses. In order to do so, they need to have access to insights to predict which classes should be offered and how to best meet the varied needs of individual students. And alumni need to be identified, tracked and continually engaged to help secure vital funding.

Without connected data and applications, all of this becomes increasingly hard to do, if not impossible. And ultimately, the experience suffers – for students, faculty, and alumni alike. That’s why integration is key to enabling universities to deliver the seamless, modern experience that students, faculty and staff not only expect but deserve now, and into the future. 

 
About the Author 
James Campbell is Regional Manager, Australia New Zealand at SnapLogic.