The effect of COVID-19 forever transformed the digital infrastructure of the healthcare industry. The pandemic highlighted why healthcare organizations must accelerate their investment in technologies that advance a virtual strategy and let hospitals implement practices like self-triage and virtual care. Prudent organizations will ensure these investments are their long-term strategies as they make the shift from reactive to proactive care.
When MedicaSoft needed a database that could move data quickly to fulfill medical record requests, they turned to Couchbase for a highly secure, available, and scalable solution. MedicaSoft is an independent company that provides cloud-based, HIPAA-compliant software solutions and Health IT services to healthcare providers, payors, and health information exchanges. Their flagship product, the NXT Platform, parses, cleans, normalizes, transforms, and enriches large volumes of clinical and claims data in real time.
The data used by the NXT Platform is received from disparate sources in multiple formats and converted into a data repository that uses the Health Level Seven (HL7) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) format. Use of the HL7 FHIR standard ensures that healthcare organizations are interoperable – that they are able to store, retrieve, update, and share patient data in an efficient and secure manner while ensuring that it’s usable for everyone who is authorized to access it.
Providing disparate data quickly and affordable
With the passage of the 21st Century Cures Act, HIPAA legally entitled patients to the timely release of their medical records. Typically, covered organizations must respond to each request a patient makes for their medical records within 30 days of submission.
To handle these requests in a timely manner, MedicaSoft needed a secure, high-performance database. It also needed to be able to handle many feeds of clinical data while being highly secure, available, and scalable. Cost was another key consideration. Since many of the organizations MedicaSoft supports are nonprofits with limited budgets, economical service delivery is crucial to the value proposition.
A highly flexible NoSQL database in the cloud
Storing and processing clinical health data is transaction-intensive and MedicaSoft recognized that Couchbase on Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the best option to provide the support they needed. Since then, as Medicasoft has expanded its solution to benefit additional customers, including hospitals and clinics, Couchbase’s flexibility and scalability have been essential elements as the volume of data stored and processed by MedicaSoft has experienced exponential growth.
Data is stored within JSON documents to make it easily accessible via customers’ APIs. The ability to capture data accurately enables MedicaSoft to keep patient data safer and catch clinical errors effectively. Peer-to-peer exchange allows different providers to access records more easily when a patient switches providers. MedicaSoft’s platform also supports sophisticated analytics capabilities.
High performance at a low price
MedicaSoft’s goal with the NXT Platform is to provide a longitudinal record for every patient with an electronic record. For example, if a patient gets blood work done at a lab, X-rays done at a different clinic, visits various specialists, and has a different provider for primary care, the platform will aggregate all the data from these different sources into one complete record under that patient’s unique medical record number. This allows any provider to see the patient’s complete clinical record over a period of years.
Typically, MedicaSoft’s customers collect 50-200 feeds of clinical data from all of the healthcare providers in a given state, comprising a total of 100,000 to 2 million documents per day. The number of JSON documents across all clients is roughly 100 billion, with record sets based on a unique identity totaling 70 million.
Before the data is fully ingested into the system, it undergoes significant normalization and enrichment processing. Once ingested, the data can then be accessed by healthcare providers in real time as needed. One of the main benefits to providers is MedicaSoft’s high-performance FHIR API, which offers providers the ability to get data in and out of the database quickly.
In healthcare, the landscape changes quickly, including constantly shifting requirements of new regulations. With Couchbase at its core, MedicaSoft’s NXT Platform is well-equipped to continue offering providers and payers the capability to see their patients’ complete medical history and the opportunity to use that information to achieve better outcomes and improved efficiencies.
-
- Read the full MedicaSoft case study to learn more.
- Sign up for Couchbase Capella DBaaS and start testing the cloud, no commitment required.