Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Drew Ivan, Chief Product and Strategy Officer of Lyniate (Part 1)

Interoperability is a hairy issue within healthcare. Drew addresses it eloquently.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as Lyniate.

Drew Ivan: I’m the Chief Product and Strategy Officer at Lyniate. We are a company that focuses on healthcare interoperability. Our products are designed and intended to tie together different pieces of software that need to communicate with one another.

That can be software systems within a single hospital that need to communicate, such as the electronic medical record communicating with the billing system and the laboratory system. It can be systems at different organizations as well.

These are communication systems across organizational boundaries. That might mean sending records from a hospital to an insurance company, public health, or any type of transaction involved in the communication of data.

Our focus is strictly on interoperability. We don’t try to get into any of the clinical systems. Our focus is also strictly on healthcare. We are not trying to do interoperability for other types of industries.

Our focus makes us specialists in that field because it is a complicated field with a lot of different standards and regulations. Healthcare interoperability is a little bit of specialization that we are trying to focus on. 

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go into some use cases of your customers. Walk me through two or three use cases where you are offering value and solving problems. Articulate the problem and what you do by establishing that interoperability capability. Tell us what it accomplishes. 

Drew Ivan: The first use case that we tried to address was the interoperability within a single organization. This is where the healthcare organization has installed a number of software systems. Each system does one part of the overall operation of that hospital.

You might have a system that deals with intake of patients being admitted. You might have a different system that the doctors and nurses use to chart the patient’s progress during their in-patient stay. There might be a different system for handling laboratory results, radiology results, and billing.

There could be dozens or hundreds of systems within the hospital that all need to cooperate and take care of a patient during their stay and to run the operations of the hospital even if it’s not dealing with a specific patient. These systems have different roles and functions, but they are operating on the same data, so you can exchange that data with one another.

This is a common problem in many industries. It is something that is not unique to healthcare, but it’s a bit different because of a couple of reasons. One, healthcare data is one of the most protected types of data. In the US, we have a law called HIPAA that protects healthcare data at a higher level than data in other industries.

It also needs to be very accurate. You cannot have any missing or corrected data when it is in a healthcare setting between the security, reliability, and timeliness because data has to move from point to point as quickly as the patient does. These are a special set of requirements that healthcare has that may not apply in other industries. It takes a different kind of product to be designed from the ground up.

Sramana Mitra: The use case you are describing in this scenario is where the hospital is the customer that you sell to, is that right?

Drew Ivan: Yes. 

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Drew Ivan, Chief Product and Strategy Officer of Lyniate
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