Overcoming Data Integration Challenges in Healthcare – 2023

Data integration challenges are a significant barrier in healthcare. What are the challenges that need to be recognized? It is crucial to recognize the challenges of data integration in order to improve business operations and achieve success in the long run. Here are some helpful tips to help you improve your data usage.

Successful companies are driven by data-driven decisions. Companies are better able to recognize challenges, manage challenges, and improve the overall buyer experience by successfully integrating data into a single platform.

Data integration presents its own set of challenges that can prevent your business from utilizing data at the right time, place, and format.

What is Data Integration?

As a result of data integration, a team can gather data from different sources, transform it into useful information, filter out useless data, and then load that data into a single interface for easy understanding by different team members. Extraction, transformation, and loading, or ETL, is the same process.

Various sources of data can be used by your business, including your own. The data includes the following:

• Customer service data
• E-mails
• Data points about a customer, such as their gender, age, marital status, employment title, and number of children.
• Detailed logistics reports
• Figures for human resources operations
• Information about customer relationships, or CRM
• Indicators of key performance

How is data integration important in healthcare?

Integrating your data is crucial for understanding your business in a broader sense. Imagine that only half of your subscribers read your newsletter. Your newsletters are also tracked by a separate tool, along with what ad or graphic is being used in them.

Data integration makes it impossible for marketers to know which graphics are working for which customers, and whether their newsletters are being opened as a result of the graphics.

For better customer experiences and buyer journeys, it’s crucial to integrate data effectively and get a holistic view of how to improve your business operations. Investing in a robust data integration solution can help improve patient care and outcomes, and meet regulatory requirements.

Considering how important data integration is, why do so few companies take the time to integrate their data successfully and utilize it effectively? The following are some of the most common challenges associated with data integration.

What are the challenges of data integration?

If you are aware of these challenges (as well as their solutions), you will be able to propel your business forward and access vital data while it is still available.

Lack of Planning

Data is only as valuable as the operations that are performed on it. If you don’t make use of the information, such as the number of sales during Christmas, for improving your business during the off-seasons or for future sales, what is the point of collecting it in the first place?

You should ask yourself these questions before you begin your data integration:

• What am I integrating?
• How do I combine different formats?
• What can our company do with this data?

Data integration can help businesses achieve their goals, but many are unaware of the importance of data integration or the tools needed.

You will be able to improve your business by asking yourself these questions first and foremost.

Healthcare professionals might benefit from integrating claims processing information with budgeting and more using tools like Informatica.

Low-Quality Data

A data integration tool will be unable to analyze or integrate poor quality or erroneous data.

Data quality management is a simple solution to this data integration challenge. Quality management ensures that the food you serve or the products you use are safe for your consumer, just as data quality management ensures your data is accurate.

Ataccama is a great tool for managing data quality, allowing users to:

• Identify your data’s state
• Make sure your data is valid before loading or transforming it
• Data quality can be improved
• As a result, you get only usable data and avoid errors during the loading and transformation processes.

With the help of a trained data quality management specialist, you can still perform quality assurance checks if you run a smaller business and rely on manual integration. Although this can work for so long, it cannot catch all errors 100 percent of the time because it is too time-consuming and repetitive.

You should also investigate tools for data quality management and data integration.

Duplicated Data

It is estimated that 94% of businesses suffer from duplicate data. Customers’ information is believed to be inaccurate, duplicated across different platforms, and erroneous.

CRM and data integration are all about having a single view of your customers to improve buyer experience, which is the exact opposite of data duplication.

Your company can lose time and money due to duplicated data for a variety of reasons, including:

Marketing efforts that are duplicated. When you’ve tried one marketing campaign that failed to engage customers, you might try the same campaign again without success.

Repeated contact with customers increases labor costs and man-hours. Suppose your sales representative continues to call a customer even though they have already been contacted.

Having too much data leads to unnecessarily increasing storage space and creating lag times. This can be solved by streamlining their data management tasks, consider implementing a specialized self storage software that can automate these processes and improve business efficiency.

Prioritize data deduplication to help resolve these issues. A platform like Hubshout, for instance, provides lots of deduplication features, including data merging, quality checks, and missing information detection.

Data In The Wrong Format

It can be challenging to integrate data stored in different formats into your ETL process, similarly to data duplication. If your sales department saves phone numbers under 000-000-0000, your human resources department might store them under (000) 000-0000.

In companies that use metrics, volume, and other numbers-related data, these types of formatting problems become even more pronounced.

It is important that data formats are consistent across platforms, so make sure to stress this to all departments.

The data wrangling process allows you to transform data between different platforms into one, usable base language. Tools for dealing with data, like Talend, can transform raw data into valuable information.

Using Manual Data Integration

Data integration relies heavily on manual spreadsheets (such as Excel or Google Spreadsheets), as identified by 50% of respondents, while 14% said they were completely true!

Manual data integration can be beneficial to smaller businesses by using pivot tables and filters in spreadsheets, but it presents significant data integration challenges, such as the following:

• The methods of data integration you use today won’t work when your business grows
• Human error is common
• Data sharing confusion between departments (if silos are used)
• Spending a great deal of time and money on data integration
• Data integration tools that collect data in real-time, process it so you have it ready when you need it, and provide an automated process will be more efficient than manual data integration methods.

Lack Of Scalability Ability

It doesn’t matter how well-automated your data integration tools are, if they are not scalable, they will not be able to help your business grow.

In larger businesses, this lack of scalability makes handling influxes of data impossible. Using a data integration tool that is scalable from the beginning is the solution.

When it comes to designing and implementing data integration tools, some of the best IT experts recommend scalability.

Aside from preparing for expansion and anticipating your data integration needs, you should also prepare for business expansion. Consider integrating the strongest data points from another business ahead of time if you are anticipating your company will acquire another one.

When you know how your acquisitions’ information will integrate with your own, or that of your new customers, you can avoid lag time and poor customer service.

What Are The Benefits Of Data Integration?

Health care providers face a number of challenges due to the fact that data can come from a variety of sources. The following is a simple example:

When a patient has a medical problem, they visit three clinics in their area for advice. Each clinic has its own EMR system for storing patient data. Four data points are collected after the patient visits the pharmacy to pick up a prescription. A wearable device’s heart rate data or virtual doctor visits will generate additional health data points that will be stored separately.

Consolidating data from multiple databases, even in this simple case, makes sense, as it saves time connecting data points. The data integration process comes into play here.

The process of combining data from different sources into one unified set is known as data integration. During the integration process, data is cleaned and transformed to ensure accuracy. Integrating disparate sources of data provides business intelligence that is invaluable.

What Are The Steps In Data Integration?

You can take a few steps to make sure your data integration plan goes smoothly if you are facing any or all of these challenges when developing a data integration strategy.

Clean Up Your Data

The first step towards integrating your software ecosystem is cleaning up your data. Taking a look at your existing databases is the first step you should take:

Duplicates need to be cleaned up. Use a tool like Dedupely to de-duplicate your files. There may also be an option in your applications for scanning and merging duplicates. A contact management tool like Google Contacts has this feature.

Make sure that your tools are up-to-date and valid. Emails that bounce back from email marketing tools, phone numbers with invalid formats, and contacts with misspelled names are all examples of bounced emails. You don’t need this data – get rid of it!

Evaluate how you collect data and look for ways to optimize it. Take a form on your landing page and remove all unnecessary information fields, so you collect only the data you actually need. Further, ensure that you comply with any data protection policies, including the General Data Protection Regulation.

Even though cleaning up your databases can take a lot of time, it can be done once if you set up an integration tool. You will be able to integrate data seamlessly and effectively if you take care of this.

Introduce Clear Processes For Data Management

The next step is to introduce standards for the entry and maintenance of data across the organization. Ownership of your data is essential: this means assigning responsibility for its quality and management to one team or individual. It will be their responsibility to ensure that everything that goes into your system is up to code and in accordance with company policies.

Your team members should be trained on how to correctly enter and update data, as well as how your tools interact, if this isn’t feasible for your organization.

The amount of low-quality, outdated, and duplicate data in your system can be significantly reduced by implementing company-wide protocols for data entry and management.

Backup Your Data

The backup of your data is a crucial step before moving on to the actual data integration. Your software provider may already provide a backup option for your applications. Make sure this is possible. In case you want to be extra safe, you can back it up to the cloud as well as to a physical hard drive.

Cleaning up and backing up your data is the first step in the actual integration.

Choose The Right Software To Assist You With Data Integration

A good integration software can make a huge difference to your business. This software automates a large portion of data management tasks and synchronizes data between your software stack, eliminating manual data entry, combining data formats, and reducing the chances of errors.

Your stack is held together by integration software. Data is continuously flown between different applications, ensuring that the right information is available to each team at the right time.

The following questions should be answered before choosing an integration solution:

• Integrating what kind of data is required?
• What are the applications you need to integrate and how?
• What should the organization’s data flow look like?
• Is two-way or one-way communication needed?
• How often do you need to sync data in real-time or do you want trigger-action data pushes?

Different types of integration platforms are best suited for different uses. Integration platforms or Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) providers may be able to help you, either by providing in-app integrations or by providing a third-party integration platform.

If you determine what your integration needs are, you’ll have a much easier time selecting the right software. It’s a good idea to start with tools that already have native integrations that satisfy all your requirements.

A great alternative if those don’t fit your needs is to deploy an iPaaS tool. There are several platforms available to automate workflows, including Zapier, Tray.io, and Automate.io. Using these platforms, you can automate your entire software stack with trigger-action workflows.

You should use a tool like Operations Hub if you need continuous, real-time synchronization of your customer data. Your contacts are synced two ways and in real-time between Operations Hub and your databases, so any changes you make or updates will be reflected in your other apps as well. As well as data created before the sync, this is true.

If you need to synchronize customer information across your tools, you may want to use a combination of integration software, such as Zapier and Operations Hub.

Manage And Maintain Your Data

By using healthcare IT services, you can automate many parts of your data management strategy and ensure your healthcare organization has consistent, current and valuable data to make better data-driven decisions by implementing these steps.

Data management, however, is an ongoing process: you should always check on your databases to make sure they run smoothly, to make sure your team follows the correct processes, to make sure your existing tools are working properly, and to determine whether you need to update or alter any elements of your strategy. You will need to adapt your data integration strategy to meet your business’s growth as well if it is growing.

You’ll be in a better position to collect, analyze, and make actionable the data at your disposal by being aware of these challenges and knowing how to address them.

Data Integration Challenges: Why We Should Consider Them

An organization’s success depends on data-driven decision-making and the challenges of data integration.

These tips can help you overcome these data integration challenges, improve your business operations, and improve the customer experience by recognizing challenges, being prepared, and knowing how to overcome them.

Conclusion:

Through data integration, organizations gain access to accurate, enriched, and valuable information about multiple aspects of their business. As a result, company employees are able to access information about marketing performance, sales, and customer satisfaction.

To make actual data-driven decisions, your business needs data integration to have a 360-degree view. There is a goldmine of untapped data sitting in the systems of most companies, according to a survey conducted in 2019.

Data integration allows you to link all the pieces of software in your organization so that data moving across it is continuously and effectively, ensuring that all key players, both inside and outside your organization, have access to the most relevant data whenever and wherever they need it most.