We named our organization Altera Digital Health to convey our vision of elevating healthcare to new heights. Far more than a tagline, this vision reflects feedback from countless client partners around the world: Leaders are looking for a change in the way healthcare is managed and delivered.
Today’s healthcare organizations require solutions that go beyond traditional applications, through new experiences and new infrastructure, to improve patient care. And their users are demanding faster response times, increased flexibility and simpler tools.
Our answer to this void in the market is the Platform of Health.
This scalable, flexible and intuitive platform is a gateway to a new era of health IT, one in which organizations can focus more on patient outcomes and provider wellbeing while reinvesting in innovation and supporting bottom lines.
Here’s how we’re making that happen.
New infrastructure, lower costs, faster delivery
Healthcare organizations historically have operated with razor-thin margins. The toll of the pandemic combined with rising inflation have only added more financial pressures. As organizations reassess their budgets and enterprise software, the Platform of Health will enable leaders to reduce their overall costs without sacrificing the quality of care.
As Altera develops new technology experiences, we are building web-based applications which progress beyond the legacy client-server applications of the past. As a result, we will remove the reliance on traditional delivery tools such as Citrix, which is a major expense for our clients. We will further reduce costs through quality initiatives and automation of the testing, packaging and delivery of our tools. This will give clients more time to leverage new features that will be easier to adopt.
These web-based applications will also enable Altera to deliver solutions and upgrades with near-zero downtime. This is not just a major change for our product lines, but also the health IT industry altogether.
More accessible data, enhanced interoperability
Accessing a longitudinal medical history for a patient has remained elusive since the introduction of electronic health records (EHRs). This status quo places enormous burden on clinical decision-makers and puts patient lives at risk. It does not have to be this way.
All the applications Altera offers are adopting the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource (FHIR) to both send and receive clinical data. Our solutions are leveraging containerized services, which support quicker development, standardized interoperability and the ability to add or modify services without impacting production solutions. This will enable the Platform of Health to pull in standardized data from Sunrise™, Paragon® and the Altera TouchWorks® EHR, as well as external EHR systems, Carequality and other national initiatives leveraging FHIR.
In real time, the platform will connect to all those systems, extract the data and harmonize it across all our applications to power a truly community-aware clinical decision support (CDS) engine. This will remove the need for clinicians to manage multiple applications or move between different windows. Instead, the Platform of Health will deliver a complete patient view, at the point of care, so providers can make decisions accurately and quickly.
Reduced cognitive burden
Given that people’s health and lives are on the line, healthcare has inherent stressors providers deal with daily. However, there are several factors beyond actual care delivery that affect clinician wellbeing. Traditional EHRs in particular are a major source of frustration for providers as they often must conform to IT workflows that run counter to their intuitions, experiences or clinical best practices. In fact, a study published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings found that physician users gave EHRs an F grade using the System Usability Scale (SUS), a technology industry standard for measuring usability.
The Platform of Health is a proven exception to this pattern. Sunrise™ Air, the first application to leverage the Platform of Health experience, received a SUS score of 87.5% in our user testing—better than 99.5% of all other enterprise software.
All new development at Altera will leverage Human-Centered Design (HCD) principles. Following this methodology, our design teams not only account for individual users’ experiences with our solutions, but also their broader experiences as humans, how those humans interact with others and the organization that connects them.
Throughout the entire design process, we conduct “co-create” sessions, bringing together physicians and providers from client partners, internal clinicians, designers, developers, product owners and more. The team identifies any problems and looks at new possibilities for the next iteration. After several of these collaborative meetings, the final result is the “right product,” built with clinicians, for phones, tablets and laptops.
Collaborative development
In addition to the collaboration underpinning our co-creates, we will also take a collaborative approach to development across all Altera business units, so our efforts do not benefit just one product. For example, as we reimagine the ambulatory experience, we will look at Sunrise, Paragon and TouchWorks EHR to identify or build reusable services and web components. This will enable Altera to deliver our solutions faster, so clients can get them up and running sooner.
Healthcare organizations have been calling for leading-edge technologies that truly support their life-saving efforts. It is time for health IT to deliver on this.
We are excited to lead this revolution in support of our clients, their patients and their communities around the world. Learn more about the power of the Platform of Health here.