There’s a new entry in the race to help healthcare organizations integrate third-party apps into electronic health records in the name of interoperability. This one, from Catalyze, a Madison, Wisconsin-based provider of cloud services for secure healthcare data transmission, focuses on making it easier for digital health startups to connect to large EHR installations.
Wednesday, Catalyze is introducing Redpoint, a platform to assist innovative companies in integrating their technology with EHRs and automate the scaling of their integrations. “Today, digital health vendors require a Sherpa, to guide them from one end of the healthcare integration process to the other,” Catalyze Co-founder and President Mohan Balachandran said in a company press release.
As Catalyze calls integration a “journey” rather than an application provider interface or a static integration engine, Redpoint streamlines and manage the process with three sets of tools: “Scripts,” pre-configured integration sets for specific EHRs; “connectors” to automate data flow between EHRs and third-party apps; and workflows called “bearings” to manage integration projects.
“This standardizes processes with a few clicks,” greatly reducing workloads, Mark Olschesky, chief data officer of Catalyze, said in a pre-launch demonstration of Redpoint. “It lowers the barrier for interoperability.”
Historically, EHR integration has required healthcare providers to invest in three different areas: security, typically through a virtual private network; expertise, in the form of consultants; and the integration engine itself. “There’s almost no overlap in that Venn diagram,” said Olschesky, a former Epic Systems employee like so many others at Madison-area health IT startups.
Catalyze, which has been in business about 2½ years, combines all three elements into one platform, according to Olschesky. The scripts follow established standards, includingHealth Level Seven International communications specifications. “We want to support standards-based integration
