How a Large Healthcare Company Accelerated Digital Transformation With Akana

The Challenge: Competing in the Digital Age

Siloed, unintegrated, and independently operating IT is the past. Unified, digital business agile capabilities are the only way for healthcare companies to move forward.

For this large healthcare company, they needed to do more than react. They needed to be proactive in their transformation. That's because of...

Government Mandates

Meaningful Use Stage 3 states that a patient has the right to their electronic health information via API. Providing an API became a requirement for MU certification for physicians and hospitals in 2018.

Healthcare Interoperability

Interoperability is key in the digital age of healthcare. The ability to move medical records seamlessly and in real-time can be a life or death situation.

Interoperability can:

• Greatly improve healthcare outcomes.
• Reduce cost.
• Open the doors to new innovative partnerships.

Standards like HL7 FHIR are aimed at improving healthcare interoperability.

Health Insurance Shift

Patients are now customers. 

As a result, healthcare providers need to:

• Streamline their interactions with payers to ensure they get paid for their services.
• AND deliver the ultimate experience for their customers/patients.

Consumerization of Healthcare

The digitization of healthcare shifts the power to the consumer.

Consumers now expect:

• Personalized healthcare experiences.
• Access to their healthcare data anywhere, any time and on any device.

Need For Innovative Growth

The healthcare provider’s transformation was not an option.

Their business plan called for:

• Massive innovative growth.
• Addressing government mandates.
• Meeting the trend towards digitization of healthcare.
• Extensive cost cutting.

Overall, the project took on a challenging directive. The organization had vast application integrations in place. They had to do extensive rationalization of applications and infrastructure.

To realize the transformation, the organization knew they needed a better API strategy going forward. They chose Akana as their partner. 

The Solution: Akana

The healthcare provider deployed the Akana platform on premises. They also partnered with the Akana professional API management services team. Our services team helped deliver an HL7 FHIR server implementation. This was based on the open source HAPI FHIR library. Akana is a contributor to this open source project.

The healthcare provider leverages the following capabilities provided by the solution:

• Lifecycle management for service and API.
• Automated DevOps to ensure control when building and publishing APIs.
• Audit and logging to create traceability throughout the entire API lifecycle.
• Policy driven API gateway for security and control over consumption of the APIs.
• Branded developer portals to tailor the portal to each market segment.
• Multitenancy to allow for provisioning and management of new tenants. This allows the healthcare provider to have complete separation per organization or per developer audience when required. And at virtually no additional operational costs.
• HL7 FHIR Server to enable an interoperable way to access and search patients’ electronic healthcare records.

Why Akana

The healthcare provider chose Akana after an extensive RFI search. They needed to go beyond API basics. And they selected Akana because it provided:

• Complete end-to-end API management capabilities.
• Knowledge of the healthcare industry.
• Commitment to partnership.

End-to-End Lifecycle Management

The Akana platform provides complete end-to-end API lifecycle management. And it has DevOps controls for all types of APIs be it SOAP, REST, and MQ. No other vendor addresses the complete lifecycle for all types of APIs.

Audit Capabilities

The platform can audit across all stages of the API lifecycle. The audit capability is extremely important for healthcare organizations. No other vendor can facilitate an audit across the entire lifecycle.

Automated Security Configuration

The platform is policy driven. It allows for easy configuration of security and compliance policies. No other vendor provides the library of policies to support both SOAP and REST. But the Akana platform does.

Partnership

The partnership with the healthcare provider on HL7 FHIR. Akana has committed time and resources to ensure their success. And Akana works to ensure the success of HL7 FHIR in the healthcare industry by contributing back to open source projects.

Akana ensured the healthcare provider is on track with their digital transformation journey. They are able to get their solution to market more quickly.

The Results

The healthcare provider is tackling their transformation in phases. The first phase was to establish the Akana platform in a production environment that can be used by every organization. This phase was completed in March 2016. The healthcare provider on-boarded several APIs ranging from REST to SOAP and MQ.

They also needed to establish the governance strategy for APIs going forward.

Akana’s professional API management services team helped them with:

• An assessment of the current and future state.
• Recommendations for their governance strategy going forward. The recommendations covered everything from organizational structures through to technical implementation.

Be Like the Healthcare Provider

See for yourself why Akana is the best platform to deploy, secure, and scale in the enterprise. 

Akana accelerates digital transformation in the enterprise by:

• Making it easy to deploy APIs, so you can accelerate time-to-market.
• Strengthen security and enabling audit capabilities, so your business data is always protected.
• Partnering with you to develop the best strategy for your business.

Get started today with your free 6-month trial. 

REQUEST A TRIAL ▶️ WATCH A DEMO FIRST