Before Patient Record Access Hits Your Roadmap

While building or scaling a healthcare technology company, there will come a point when you need external clinical data. Maybe you're already there, or maybe it's six months or two years down the road.

What I've seen over the years is that companies don't spend much time planning how they'll get that data until the need is urgent. A customer is waiting, a product milestone is approaching, and the team needs to figure it out.

So you build the connection that solves the immediate need. Then the business grows, you need to connect to another EHR or network, and before long you've built several of them.

Keep in mind, the work doesn't stop once they're built. APIs and requirements change, mappings have to be updated, and those connections have to keep working. Your team owns all of it.

You can't predict every source of clinical data you'll need, but you can decide how much of that access you want your engineering team to own as you scale.

We're at an interesting point in interoperability. The standards work. National exchange is growing. TEFCA and QHINs are changing how organizations can connect and what data can be accessed.

There are more ways than ever to get to the data. That doesn't mean every company should have to build its own way there.

I talked more about this in the first episode of our Instant Access Series, including where I think the traditional approach starts to break down and why we need to think differently about the infrastructure behind patient record access.

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Watch Episode 1