How Better made the Gartner Market Guide for Digital Health Platforms
Better was recently named a Representative Vendor in the 2022 Gartner® Market Guide for Digital Health Platforms.
We are proud to be recognised by such a well-respected organisation, and we are committed to continuing to improve our digital health platform to provide the best possible healthcare experience for citizens as well as health and care professionals.
We believe that our innovative approach to healthcare data and technology is changing the game and making healthcare more accessible and patient centred. We are thrilled to be recognised for our efforts and look forward to continuing to push the boundaries of what’s possible in digital health.
In this article, I explore why healthcare providers are increasingly adopting a digital health platform (DHP) approach. I will also look at how Gartner defines a DHP, and dive inside the Better DHP to understand how its technical capabilities helped it make the Gartner market guide.
Why adopt a DHP?
One thing the pandemic taught us is that accelerated digital transformation in healthcare is possible. Those organisations that were able to respond quickly to the initial wave and subsequent variations were often those who had the technology platforms that enabled innovation in areas such as patient engagement, data analytics, and virtual care.
The reason technology platforms enabled organisations to do this was independence. Well implemented platforms put organisations in control of their transformation without being dependent on third party vendors for change. Typically, good data was at the core of this, with supporting platform tools that allowed organisations to use this data — in a secure, governed way — to quickly solve business problems.
However, as we move into a post-COVID era, it’s clear that the pandemic was just the tip of the iceberg, with demand on front-line services at a record high and an under-resourced workforce facing growing pressure.
To address these challenges, healthcare provider CIOs needed to accelerate the pace of clinical and business transformation and are increasingly adopting a DHP approach to support this.
What is a DHP?
Gartner introduces a digital health platform as “a new architectural approach to deploy digital capabilities using modern cloud services rapidly”¹. They highlight that while it represents a major shift in how organisations will build and buy applications, it will allow them to realise value faster when responding to “strategic imperatives and external uncertainties”.
They go on to outline how DHP-enabling technologies combine three key elements:
- An Integrated Data Fabric — “A healthcare data fabric that provides data connectors and clinically relevant data models that help liberate siloed application data from operational systems”¹.
- Packaged Business Capabilities — “A library of prebuilt software components, application modules or packaged business capabilities (PBCs) that providers can leverage to create new digital experiences and composed applications”¹.
- Composition Tools — “tools that enable providers to build tailored digital experiences across a broad range of stakeholders”¹.
This is summarised in the reference architecture below.
Integrated Data Fabric
The core goal of the integrated data fabric is to liberate siloed application data from operational systems, bringing it together into a common healthcare specific data model that is ready for business use.
Gartner calls out a range of features that an integrated data fabric should have, including health data connectors, data curation and enrichment tools, metadata management, a health care data model, and privacy and consent controls.
This is an area where the Better DHP really comes into its own, with Gartner commenting: “Open standards are in Better’s DNA, and they can be clearly seen within its product portfolio, especially around openEHR”¹.
The Better DHP has been built from the ground up to be based on open standards and open specifications. All clinical data is persisted in a vendor-neutral, openEHR-based repository, with demographic and administrative data held within a FHIR-based repository. This approach ensures consistency, maximises data re-use, and enables real-time read and write of data for all services connected to this layer.
To support data modelling, we provide a modelling tool (called Archetype Designer), which is Better’s clinical modelling environment for openEHR archetype and template development. It delivers an open standard specification-based alternative to proprietary methodologies and tools used to specify and implement clinical models. Better offers free access to this tool to the openEHR community.
Out of the box, the Better DHP provides several healthcare specific data connectors, supporting inbound, outbound, and event-driven flows, using standards such as HL7, FHIR, openEHR, and XDS. Additionally, an OEM agreement with Lyniate allows Better customers to leverage the full capability of the leading Rhapsody Integration Engine for extended capability and flexibility.
This is summarised in the diagram below:
We also recognise that not all data within any healthcare organisation is structured. Some recent studies² suggest that the proportion of unstructured data is about 80% or higher. We believe that to unlock the value in this unstructured data you need to understand it, otherwise you will be constrained to simple “full text search” techniques.
To support this, we have developed a Natural Language Processing (NLP) engine SNOMED CT linker to extract SNOMED coded clinical concepts, such as illnesses, disorders, medical procedures, and other clinical entities, from unstructured text. To allow a computer to understand this content, we form links between the terms and concepts, creating a powerful tool that can be used to solve a range of problems, including healthcare analytics, digital dictation, and clinical decision support. The screenshot below illustrates how the raw NLP pipeline results are visualised. Further information can be found in this blog and this research paper.
The integrated data fabric from the Better DHP has been used to support over 150 healthcare customers, including OneLondon, The Christie NHS Foundation Trust, and is a foundation of the Slovenian national Backbone.
Packaged Business Capabilities (PBCs)
PBCs are modular components that can be quickly discovered and assembled to deliver new application experiences. PBCs can be created by vendors, partners or customers, and are intended to facilitate re-use and accelerate adoption.
At Better, we believe PBCs provide the opportunity for a community and eco-system to emerge where healthcare specific content can be shared and re-used. As all content is built around a standards-based data fabric, compatibility and governance issues can be more easily managed.
To support the adoption of PBCs, Better has recently launched a marketplace called Better Content Manager — an environment where healthcare content can be easily published, discovered, and shared. Customers can choose to share content locally with users who work within their organisation, or they can make it available to other organisations that use Better Content Manager.
Out of the box, the Better DHP includes a wide range of content created by Better — including Widgets for visualising data, Patient Lists for managing patient cohorts, and entire applications such as Dynamic Care Planning and Better Meds. Additionally, we have published a specification (see this link) that will allow customers to create and publish their own content.
Composition Tools
The composition layer is focused on how to deliver citizen and professional facing experiences for a specific use-case or group of users. Traditionally, tools available in this layer have been adopted by technical IT professionals and not their business peers. However, the market is rapidly evolving towards low-code platforms that make composition tools more usable by a broader group of technology and business users, often referred to as “citizen developers”.
At Better, our low-code platform (called Better Studio) has been designed from the ground up to specifically support citizen developers working in healthcare. Everything we do works up from the openEHR and FHIR-based data fabric outlined above. This is in contrast to many low-code tools, which start with the UI and then work back to the data, creating many challenges, including those around data management, governance, and sharing. This approach may work in other industries but in healthcare, the complexity of data and the need for data longevity, necessitate a data-first approach that is based on a robust modelling framework.
With Better Studio we want to create an environment where citizen developers can quickly and easily solve complex healthcare problems in a way that is not only simple to use for end-users but is safe, secure, and compliant.
To support this, we have established a design system to ensure that all the forms and applications created by citizen developers follow a defined set of patterns for how they behave and how they look. This consistency helps to reduce the training needs for end-users and ensures they are delivered in line with patient safety requirements. Check out this blog for more details.
Better Studio has been used to deliver end-to-end services for some of our biggest customers. Most recently, OneLondon used Better Studio to create their Universal Care Plan application (see this link for more details), and The Christie used Better Studio to drive the modernisation of their Electronic Health Record (see this link for more details).
In summary, the Better Platform is a high-performance digital health platform designed for user interaction, low-code application building, and storing, managing, querying, retrieving, and exchanging structured and unstructured healthcare data based on open standards. It can be used as a clinical data repository, low-code application development platform, and a dynamic care planning and coordination platform.
As we look ahead to the future, we believe the need for a Digital Health Platform has never been greater. We are committed to the ongoing development of the Better DHP and will continue to focus on making it easier for organisations to get control of their data while providing the services and tools that allow them to use this data to quickly solve business problems.
Please get in touch if you are thinking about realigning your enterprise strategy by promoting composability and the DHP architectural approach. The Better team would be delighted to discuss the opportunities that this approach and the Better DHP can offer for innovation and for creating new digital capabilities within your organisation.
Sources
1. Gartner, “Gartner Market Guide for Digital Health Platforms”, 7th December 2022, “https://www.gartner.com/document/4021986”
2. Kong, Hyoun-Joong, “Managing Unstructured Big Data in Healthcare System,” US National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, 31st January 2019, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6372467/
