Integration love triangle: Redox, applications, and health systems

With the often complex landscape of legacy EHRs and IT systems used at hospitals and clinics across the country, we take pride in helping the most innovative solutions in the industry get their products live and integrated quickly. The purpose of this article is to overview the typical business and working relationships between applications, the health systems who purchase them, and Redox.

When/how to talk about Redox

As an application vendor, it is typical to position Redox as your “integration partner.” Because of the specialized nature of the work, health systems are used to collaborating with integration partners and often breath easy upon hearing you're working with experts who do nothing but application interoperability. We’ll work with you to put together a customized integration strategy before we approach any health system. This strategy includes:

A thorough description of your integrated workflow
Interface scoping document based on your required workflow, including any HL7 or other necessary interfaces from the EHR.
Implementation project plan
Task list and responsibility matrix

When we approach your health system customer with a fully-baked integration strategy and project plan, they’re much more confident about integrating your product and kicking off the project. Additionally, we’ll work to enable your business development team to thoughtfully explain your integration strategy and answer common questions from prospective customers.

Set up a meeting if you’re ready to build your integration project plan.

Health system work effort during implementation

We strive to minimize the work required on the health system side in order to present a simple and easy integration project. This requires thoughtful planning, prescriptive project management, and using our engine that takes on the work of transforming legacy interfaces into the modern API you’ve built against. Our Customer Success team leads up the integration project and works with both your team and the following health system employees throughout an implementation.

Security Officer (or equivalent): the health system will require a thorough security review to ensure that both Redox and your application are keeping sensitive information secure and encrypted. We’re well equipped to help you prepare for this meeting and build confidence on the health system side. Here’s an overview of Redox security.
Network Analyst: sets up the secure VPN between the health system’s data center and Redox.
Interface Analyst: this person manages the health system’s on-premise interface engine. We’ll work with her to obtain sample HL7 messages and message specifications for bi-directional communication.
EHR Application Analyst: if your integrated workflow changes an EHR user’s workflow, it’s often necessary to work with the EHR Application Analyst to validate the new workflow and “build” any needed configuration into the EHR. If your integration is simply reading data from the EHR, there’s a possibility we won’t need to work with the EHR Application Analyst.

Contracting and Business Associate Agreements

The health system is your customer, not ours. Redox acts as a subcontractor in your business relationship with the health system. We designed our service to work like this as it minimizes the legal and contracting effort at each site you integrate with. In short, we don’t want to get in the way of you closing deals. We include subcontractor Business Associate Agreement (BAA) language in our standard contract to place us in the liability chain between you and the covered entity (the health system). That being said, health systems will often ask us to sign a BAA directly with them as well. We will work with you to get our contracts in place before working with your customers.

Integration optimization, maintenance, and support

A go-live is really just the beginning. Integrated products are often stickier and can spread across a health system enterprise because of their streamlined workflow. Whether we’re adding new locations or data models, we expect to work with you to optimize your integration to ensure your users are getting the most out of your product.

Many of the software solutions we support are critical in delivering quality and efficient patient care. That being said, consistent performance and system stability are core qualities of our engine. Redox provides 24/7 monitoring, notification, and on-call support engineers to address any issues with the highest level of urgency.

VPN Connectivity: we monitor VPN connection via socket status on the VPN host, as well as a heartbeat ping from Redox's cloud to the health system interface engine/web server.
Message Activity: we monitor message activity and will provide alerts if message volume is outside of expected ranges.
System Utilization: our engine is designed to automatically scale with fluctuations in message volume. We monitor CPU, throughput and application performance, and have automated notifications in place to our on-call engineers if anything approaches unsafe levels.
API Availability: we proactively monitor API availability.
Application Connectivity: if application servers are not responding after multiple automated retries, we will notify your support path and begin a collaborative investigation.

A healthy love triangle

From integration strategy to implementation, support, and maintenance, we’ve designed our product and services to simplify your working relationship with your health system customers. It’s our goal to get you integrated faster and make life easier for both your team and the health system. If you’re not already working with us, we’d love to get started.

You can schedule a quick meeting directly with us here to answer any of your questions answered and get going.