Adopting cloud platforms will improve federal healthcare agency interoperability and customer experience

Technology Innovations and Virtual Consultations Drive the Healthcare Industry Transformation by 2025

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Across most government agencies, there is a rising emphasis on modernizing shared services and the cloud to drive down costs and be more effective. Many organizations are building integrated data platforms to bring in data and become the system of record or another read/write type of data repository, data lake, or data warehouse to manage all of the data and break down any existing silos. Eventually, strategies will focus on interoperable and cyber-secure platforms that can serve single transaction business models concurrently.

Frost & Sullivan’s latest virtual think tank executive brief, Creating a Knowledge Hub: Integrate Disparate Systems for Organization—Wider Interoperability, Collaboration and Transparency, examines the elements of data systems that need to be brought together to create a knowledge hub.

“Cloud enablement has helped agencies bring greater access to their users,” observed Patrick Riley, Brand & Demand Principal Consultant at Frost & Sullivan. “With cloud and platform enablement, there is more interoperability and shared utility across all government agencies. For example, at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), there is an initiative called Strides where the goal is to leverage cloud services to give every stakeholder equal access to data and be able to ideate on top of that data for innovation.”

“As the federal government looks for modern, digital tools to enhance the services they are providing to both citizens and employees, establishing a knowledge hub can ensure that agencies serve as brokers of these solutions rather than specialists of any particular technology,” noted Jonathan Alboum, Principal Digital Strategist for the Federal Government at ServiceNow. “Adopting cloud systems will ensure that agencies of all sizes can fuse the power of data harmonization with cybersecurity awareness to avoid redundancies and deliver modern, consumer-like experiences for all customers.”

Some of the outstanding benefits of knowledge hub technologies are:

• Immediate cloud enablement: The COVID-19 task force created an infrastructure for bringing in datasets and having stakeholders agree upon their use. It also opened eyes to data management and who would get access in terms of data integrity.
• Interoperability and shared utility across all government agencies for cross-agency collaboration: Recently, everything was being done in silos within each agency. However, with a national outbreak, every agency needs to know how they can talk securely to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR), and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
• Accelerated creation of a universal data knowledge hub for government agencies: The private/public partnership approach used for COVID Operation Warp Speed is the new standard. The federal government is now more willing to reach out to dominant players in the private sector and make a mutual commitment to pilot technologies and approaches.