The amount of data being produced/collected is growing exponentially and is predicted to reach 35 zettabytes by 2020. Instead of every company owning and maintaining physical servers, cloud infrastructure has become a popular alternative.

Health care organizations require continuous innovation in order to remain cost effective, competent and timely to provide high-quality services. Industry experts encouraging adoption of cloud infrastructure can be solution for being cost-effective and securely manage data whether for patient care, research or legal reasons.

Cloud infrastructure refers to an on-demand, self-service Internet infrastructure that enables users to access resources anytime from anywhere. Instead of buying servers to store data, online servers can be rented.

However, there are challenges facing health-care organizations in moving all their data to the cloud.

The biggest issues are:

1. Security: Organizations no longer have complete control over the security of stored information.
2. Regulations: There are different regulations pertaining to healthcare information that can vary from region to region.
3. Integration: How to piece together legacy systems while integrating into cloud infrastructure.
4. Interoperability: Issues while mass migration data from one storage system to cloud.
5. Availability: Server outage issues raise questions about availability of data during a certain point in time.

To address the above challenges Cloud service provider’s design focus should be on security principles to prevent data leaks and unauthorized access.

Healthcare Cloud infrastructure providers should care more about:

1. Data stored in the repository,
2. Ensure that data is protected in transfer to and from the cloud.
3. User management to change/modify user access permission on data etc
4. Comply with HIPAA, HITECH, HITRUST and other State/Federal regulations

In today’s world implementing effective EDI strategy is very challenging. Every enterprise needs to have visibility, whether or not EDI transactions are in compliance with established the policies and procedures to effectively manage their businesses.

With a high emphasis on compliance and accountability, every important step of the transaction lifecycle needs to be tracked, inspected, monitored and exposed to Business/IT users within the organization and external partners when required.

Handling EDI transactions means parsing, validating, splitting, processing, creating and responding at numerous stages before they reach to downstream system. The more steps the transaction goes through, the more risk for leadership (Business/IT) to lose visibility and ability to reconcile transactions.

Challenges You’ll Face Without An EDI Strategy:

1. Unable to reconcile EDI transactions to meet the required levels of service.
2. Involving technical department every time a submitter inquires about a transaction.
3. Lack of visibility into production EDI operations.
4. Lack of reporting around submitter, transaction and origination level.

In order to effectively implement the EDI strategy, the Edifecs Transaction Manager should be a leading solution for transaction lifecycle management. This helps in minimizing service costs pertaining to compliance, security, technology etc. by providing a comprehensive view of the transaction lifecycle to internal users and partners.

Transaction Manager Helps:

• Achieve Accountability Across The Entire Lifecycle:
• Leverage Transaction Lifecycle Insight to Make Better-Informed Decisions
• Improve First Pass Rates
• Help Your Submitters Troubleshoot Their Own Problems
• Reduce Operating Costs Through Management by Exception
• Eliminate IT Bottlenecks by Empowering Business Users
• Reduce Transaction Errors and Rework
• Transaction Monitoring
• Transaction Reconciliation and Response Documents
• Notifications and Alerts
• Transaction Search and Business Views
• Reporting
• Event Tracking
• Unified Trading Partner Management
• Healthcare Transaction Repository
• File Submission and Retrieval over the Web
• Transaction Validation and Acknowledgements
• Scalability and Performance

Edifecs Transaction Management works by integrating with middleware infrastructure, the messaging engine or enterprise service bus to automatically review the transactions at each point in the process; to record key events in the solution.

The captured information is analyzed and the appropriate associations between related transactions are created so that a complete picture of the entire process is obtained.

Finally this information is presented through a rich web interface that provides business/Data/Smart views and drilldowns into the data. Which allows for customized dashboards, alerts/notifications and reporting.