Standardizing healthcare data is critical for addressing industry challenges, but it is often highly variable due to inconsistencies in documentation, loss of detail during transfers, and lack of adherence to interoperability standards. With health tech organizations leveraging this clinical information in their products and services, poor data quality poses a challenge. Although many tools streamline data standardization, integrating them into tech stacks can be difficult due to the scalability of large amounts of data, security concerns, and compatibility issues with existing software.
Why is it challenging to add data standardization solutions into tech stacks?
When health tech organizations integrate data standardization solutions into their tech stacks, they must ensure the solutions secure patients’ personally identifiable information (PII). According to a 2018 report, stolen healthcare records can each sell for an average of $250, while the next most targeted payment card details go for an average of just $5.40.
Health tech companies working with this data must adhere to regulations like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which sets the standard for protecting sensitive patient data. These regulations are crucial for maintaining clients’ trust. When implementing normalization solutions, organizations must ensure they will not introduce security vulnerabilities, as a single entry point can lead to the theft of millions of records.
Health tech companies handle large quantities of data from clinical notes, lab results, and patient records for their products and services. As data volumes grow, these data normalization solutions must scale without compromising speed or responsiveness, which is critical for real-time applications and decision-making. Additionally, frequent code set updates require tools that maintain consistency across multiple systems. Robust data governance and quality control mechanisms are essential to ensure data remains accurate and consistent as it scales.
Healthcare systems have been slow to adopt interoperability standards due to a lack of strict enforcement by regulatory bodies, which has resulted in fragmented patient health records and an incomplete understanding of overall patient health.
Customers often inquire about the regulatory clinical data formats IMO Precision Normalize can support, such as Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR). To address these needs, we prioritize data security, scalability, and interoperability. As a result, IMO Precision Normalize is designed to support customers’ unique and regulatory data format requirements, including FHIR.
Supporting health tech with a secure, safe, and scalable standardization solution
We believe that a deep understanding of the nuanced healthcare technology landscape is crucial in building a successful solution for a customer. IMO Precision Normalize is designed with the flexibility to seamlessly integrate into existing systems, ensuring data is standardized from diverse sources and remains usable for health tech use cases. We achieve this by:
Offering safe and flexible hosting options: IMO Precision Normalize is available as a SaaS (software as a solution) or can be integrated into the customer’s local or cloud environment. Customers can easily install these applications, reducing integration efforts and enabling smoother, faster deployment. IMO Health prioritizes data security by adhering to Protected Health Information (PHI) policies, ensuring data standardization happens safely and securely. Our solution integrates with OpenID Connect (OIDC) identity providers that support standard security protocols for authentication and authorization. And our software works with industry-standard tools for observability and monitoring.
Simplifying software integration: IMO Health provides extensive documentation, tutorials, and API (application programming interface) specifications through the API developer portal. We also publish Software Development Kits (SDKs) and sample applications on public repositories like GitHub. Our development team follows OpenAPI standards to reduce the integration burden, making it easy for our solution to integrate seamlessly into widely adopted technology tools. This enables fast and easy implementation of health tech products or services.
Real-time data processing: IMO Precision Normalize supports real-time processing with our award-winning NLP, developed by healthcare experts to extract and standardize clinical concepts quickly and accurately. We adhere to interoperability standards and regularly update codes and terminology to maintain compliance and accuracy. IMO Precision Normalize processes up to 300,000 terms per minute, ensuring reliable performance as data volume grows. Customers’ clinical data can be processed in the background as it is collected with minimal interaction via API or with our UI portal, IMO Studio, which lets users interact with the data.
