Today, McKesson Health Solutions (MHS) unveiled the McKesson Intelligence Hub, a new technology platform for enabling interoperability and sharing business intelligence among healthcare apps. The result of a multi-year development program, the Intelligence Hub is designed to connect MHS’s portfolio of automated reimbursement solutions and help streamline payment by making interoperability easy for customers, partners and vendors across the healthcare ecosystem.
Moving Beyond Data Exchange
McKesson’s vision of interoperability is not limited to data exchange, but must go beyond data exchange to the exchanging of intelligent business services. This new technology platform allows apps to be snapped together like Legos or puzzle pieces that were previously in silos to create new solutions to address the new world of value-based healthcare. The self-service platform that can be used by internal, partners and eventually outside developers to unlock the vast data stores that are the US healthcare repository.
McKesson’s strategic investment in the Intelligence Hub, a contemporary platform built on open API standards, makes it easy for our solutions to work together, as well as with our customers’ systems and third-party solutions. The Intelligence Hub is designed to help payers and providers extend the life and enhance the value of their existing core system investments.
“Interoperability is about more than just moving data from one application to another,” said Mike Wood, SVP, CIO & CTO of McKesson Health Solutions. “It’s about how applications cooperate and work together to solve problems as composite solutions. And it’s a paradigm shift in the development and business culture of our organization, in order to create an ecosystem that makes it easy to engage the business logic in historically separate, siloed applications. At MHS, we’re serious about interoperability, and that’s why we’re changing how we build and deploy our solutions, how they share application business services and how we interact with customers in the creation of an overall end-to-end solution. Our investment in the Intelligence Hub represents a new way to think about how to come at the problems we’re trying to solve as an industry, as we journey together to make full value-based reimbursement a reality.”
Interoperability Driven by APIs based on FHIR
Engineered using open industry communication standards such as HL7 FHIR, the Intelligence Hub connects with app developers and health data partners to build FHIR API-based digital services. Several McKesson solutions are already connected through the Intelligence Hub, where they simplify and automate payment through smart-shared services that exchange information and unify business processes across payer, provider and technical boundaries.
Moreover, the Intelligence Hub can help customers integrate across McKesson’s apps and services portfolio, as well as in and across third-party and vendor environments.
For IT leaders, the technical muscle behind the Intelligence Hub is McKesson’s core foundational technology for cloud services. The Intelligence Hub provides consistent API management, identity and access management, and application service orchestration within a PaaS (Platform as a Service) engineered around an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).
This open framework fosters integration between McKesson’s applications and, equally important, near plug-and-play component and services integration between McKesson’s solutions and customers’ applications. The result: healthcare interoperability with little to no custom coding required. The Intelligence Hub will also be capable of providing real-time analytics to help IT teams know how their applications are working and using shared services, so systems can be optimized for the highest cost efficiency and performance.
“Our customers are developing and implementing their own interoperability strategies, and the Intelligence Hub will help us solve problems together faster and more easily,” said Rod O’Reilly, president of McKesson Health Solutions. “Our customers want to rapidly connect applications, whether home grown or third-party, with the strategic MHS platforms they use or specific services of those applications they want to use. The Intelligence Hub is all about making interoperability virtually effortless across our portfolio and our customers’ portfolios, so we can break down silos, and make automated reimbursement as streamlined as it can be.”
