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Cloud Integration Company Unveils Health IT Platform
Jitterbit, a major cloud integration vendor, is turning its attention to healthcare interoperability for patient data, connected devices, and apps.
Marie Thibault
January 26, 2016
3 Min Read
Marie Thibault
A central challenge for the healthcare industry—how to personalize patient care and improve clinical outcomes—has attracted another player from the technology and software field. Jitterbit, which offers a cloud integration platform, today announced its Healthcare Interoperability Platform and solutions. The interoperability platform is designed to help connect medical devices with patient electronic medical records (EMRs / EHRs), automate clinician workflows, improve patient portals, and enable interoperability between healthcare apps and EMR systems.
The Alameda, CA-based company has more than 35,000 customers, including well-known names like United Airlines, Sunkist, and Skullcandy. It also counts some healthcare companies, like Bayer, Pfizer, and HCA among its customers, according to chief technology officer Ilan Sehayek.
George Gallegos, Jitterbit CEO, said in an interview with MD+DI that the company's experience working with various healthcare companies led to a realization that "[the healthcare companies] need to get access to that healthcare data and be able to digitize those healthcare business processes."
Sehayek explained that there are a number of barriers to using clinical data, including the lack of a good method to link real-time data from a medical device to a patient's record, the need to manually check patient details before and after a medical procedure, and the need to create quality measures tied to particular medical therapies and procedures.
Sehayek told MD+DI:
"When you buy these new apps that need to interoperate with EHR systems, and they need to be able to access clinical data—it's not just demographics and care plans and claims—but it's also medications, observations, allergies, all the data pertaining to the patient . . . we've been working on data models and integration solutions that get to that data from EHR systems. That is very valuable to, whether it's a provider or a device manufacturer who is trying to add value with what they do with their devices, a pharmaceutical—they all need to get to that data. And they're building new apps to deal with it. So that's what we're focusing on."
According to the company release, Jitterbit's HIPAA-compliant solution includes a data model to convert medical data into a standard, compatible version accessible by other systems. Jitterbit is already working with CancerLinQ LLC, a nonprofit subsidiary of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) that includes approximately 1500 oncology practices, Sehayek said.
Of course, Jitterbit isn't the first—and likely won't be the last—technology company to enter the healthcare field. In May 2015, IBM Watson Health announced it was teaming with Mayo Clinic and Epic to increase the usefulness of EMRs using Health Level-7 (HL7) open standards. Sehayek said Jitterbit doesn't directly compete with IBM Watson Health and is looking beyond HL7. "We're really looking for the stuff that hasn't been done, and there's a lot of it," Sehayek said, adding that Jitterbit is targeting customers who are already interested in new integration solutions.
Also today, the company announced $20 million raised in a Series B funding round led by KKR. In a blog post celebrating the funding announcement, Gallegos wrote, "Since Jitterbit was founded, we've been on a mission to make it fast and easy for anyone to connect the applications they use, without writing code. This investment will let us scale and use our decade of experience to bring tailored integration solutions to new industries and technology ecosystems."
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Marie Thibault is the associate editor at MD+DI. Reach her at [email protected] and on Twitter @medtechmarie.
[Image courtesy of AREEYA/FREEDIGITALPHOTOS.NET]
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