The Next Big Leap in Hospice and Palliative Care Software and Why You Need It
From the olden days of paper charting to our digital age of electronic charting, a lot has changed in the world of technology. Early adopters of EHRs utilized server-based systems that required extensive infrastructure, IT staff, security protocols and ongoing maintenance to facilitate the revered ability to chart electronically. These systems were heavy to support and over time have become replaced with the newer ‘cloud-based’ systems that have eliminated the need for costly servers and onsite equipment. And while ‘cloud-based’ has become the new standard in hospice and palliative care software, the next big leap is emerging. It is called ‘built for the cloud’ or ‘cloud-native’ and it is what will take us to the next level in reliability, application availability, security, assurance of data accessibility.
The Backstory and the Next Big Leap
Taking a brief look at where things have come from, when software is built in a traditional model, it requires software builders to focus on multiple layers of delivery. What this means is that every aspect of the EHR must be accounted for requiring a tremendous amount of planning to meet the scale and demand of the intended customer traffic. By doing this, the software developed is limited by the physical constraints that are created due to its operating environment.
This approach to building software can be very successful but it also can be riddled with fragility, a false sense of simplicity and strong barriers to continuing to innovate once an initial release of functionality has been deployed. In addition to those challenges, the burden of upkeep falls squarely on software engineers and operation specialists who must constantly patch, update, upgrade and protect all this hardware from external threats. This all must be done by juggling the need to manage capacity and user throughput on the systems. While this has been the traditional approach, it is extremely burdensome and honestly consumes a lot of dollars doing tasks that don’t add customer value.
Hospice software and the healthcare industry, in general, are ready for what’s next in what to expect from its software vendors and builders. And while the above approach can be migrated to the cloud and touted as being “in the cloud”, the next big jump as a technology provider in healthcare is to be “built for the cloud”.
Enter Serverless, a pathway to a cloud-native approach to design that reduces the friction of infrastructure while giving builders and designers tools to iterate quickly, deploy often and be secure and stable out of the box.
The term Serverless indicates an absence of servers, but that’s not the case. It’s more about shifting the responsibility of things like scaling, patches, maintenance and other infrastructure tasks to a trusted Cloud Provider, such as Amazon Web Services, to spend more time focusing on the process of being innovative and delivering customer value. Boiling it down to something even simpler, the software vendor chooses to let someone else take care of the undifferentiated heavy lifting to focus on the solution they are delivering to customers.
Curantis Solutions is Leading the Way with a Cloud-Native Approach to Hospice and Palliative Care Software.
At Curantis, we’ve fully embraced the idea that letting someone else deal with the undifferentiated heavy lifting is worth the benefits our software can gain by having our teams focus on delivering value. It truly allows us to focus our time and resources on rapidly developing new features and being more responsive to customer needs. This is why we’ve built our platform in Amazon Web Services (AWS) where we can take advantage of all the Serverless components that they build and maintain.
At the heart of AWS is the desire to share the capabilities that have been born out of the process of scaling and running many of the services that one enjoys daily including Amazon.com, Amazon Prime, Amazon Video and many others. Those same technologies that Amazon utilizes to deliver these key services to their customers are the backbone of the Curantis Hospice Solution and Curantis Palliative Care Solution. Curantis gains from the scale, the security and the ease of interoperability by standing on the shoulders of a well-proven platform and ecosystem.
By leveraging these capabilities we’ve been able to secure three technology patents around our system’s visit configuration and its ability to process real-time events that power our billing system. In addition, we don’t face the challenges of interoperability and FHIR compliance that other vendors do because we utilize capabilities like AWS’ HealthLake which gives us an FHIR-compliant RESTful API that can take advantage of emerging patterns like SMART on FHIR. By doing these things, your data seamlessly and securely moves through not only our platform but through our partner integrations, making interoperability refreshingly simple.
What all of this means to a hospice or palliative care agency operationally is that when software is constructed the way that Curantis Solutions has built our platform, you will experience a higher level of reliability, application availability, security and the comfort that no data is ever lost because events can be replayed or saved when failure does happen. These are baseline improvements on the traditional way of building with servers. And to extend the thinking further, old workflows can be made more efficient, data can be presented at the speed of capture and new ideas can be explored in response to a rapidly changing landscape.
Summary
We believe the future of hospice software innovation will not utilize the old server-based architecture but will require the flexibility, scalability and resiliency of cloud-native/serverless architecture. We are excited to lead the way for hospice and palliative care and make electronic health records software a refreshingly simple experience that is congruent with the technology you utilize in your everyday life as a consumer. It’s time for hospice and palliative care software to make life easier vs creating arduous workarounds and added frustration.
If you’re looking for a new software provider, look no further. Our team at Curantis Solutions is blazing new trails for hospice and palliative care to bring real efficiency, ease and balance where it’s been lost. We are built on a culture of caring and a desire to put hospice and palliative care first.
Book a discovery call today and future-proof your hospice and palliative care organization!
