Healthcare can reduce data costs with composable applications

Composability has made its mark. Creating applications from business-centric, modular components will be a top technology trend over the next three to five years. Composable applications make it easier to use and reuse code, speed up development time and release enterprise value.

Gartner’s 2022 CIO Agenda, based on a survey of more than 2,000 IT executives, found highly composable organizations to be best positioned relative to competitors in terms of improving business performance, reducing risk and operating costs, and increasing revenue. 

“Business composability is an antidote to volatility,” explained Monika Sinha, research vice president at Gartner. As the disruption wrought by COVID-19 subsides, healthcare CIOs will weigh resuming delayed initiatives vs. new technology adoption. Highly composable organizations – those with the ability to adapt and rapidly respond to market demands — are most likely to succeed. Practically speaking, that translates to less spending on legacy infrastructure and data center components and heightened investment in areas such as data analytics and enabling technologies outside of the core EHR system.

At the same time, however, Gartner’s research shows slow uptake among healthcare providers on key aspects of composability. Hospitals and health systems often view change as a risk, as opposed to actively mastering the risk that comes with accelerating change. The latter entails building enterprise architecture that optimizes adaptability, with systems and processes no longer serving a predetermined use case or purpose. 

“Composability needs to extend throughout the technology stack,” according to Sinha, to support fast integration of new systems and workplace innovations that foster idea exchange. 

Fortunately, that’s not a farfetched scenario. Consider, for example, how effectively healthcare responded to the pandemic-driven need for virtual care models. Telemedicine platforms and remote patient monitoring tools quickly established their value, but in many cases operated outside of existing clinical workflows as dedicated point solutions and were not designed to be scalable. A composable clinical platform leverages the progress already made by incorporating formerly separate patient monitoring, care management, outcomes reporting and decision support functions into a unified clinical platform, customizable as needs change.

Healthcare executives should be heartened that composability expedites business processes by moving data from overburdened processing hardware to storage systems designed to provide data on-demand. Further, low- or no-code tools allow for intuitive improvements to be made by frontline workers who know what they want to achieve — without having to call in dedicated data experts. Industry forecasters see these advancements reducing overall data management costs, ultimately freeing up more of the healthcare enterprise’s budget and staff to support patient care.

Frank Irving is a Philadelphia-based content writer and communications consultant with specialties in healthcare, technology and sports. When not following those beats, he writes creative fiction.