Meet the people fixing interop in healthcare at Lifen
Welcome to this two-part article explaining who are the people behind the interoperability at
. In the first part, we saw what interoperability is in the first place, and how we are fixing it with our Cloud Integration Engine. Today we’ll meet our Interoperability Product Managers, Interoperability Experts, and Interoperability Developers behind this engine.At Lifen, we are building an integration engine that enables digital health apps to implement our Standard Fhir APIs once, and be one click away from deployment in hundreds of organizations:
Interoperability Product Managers & Interoperability Experts
Understanding sometimes dated and often lengthy documentation on standards designed to be able to model health data, supporting every exception along the way, is no easy task. One has to live, eat and dream about Health Data Models to master these notions and be able to forge a personal opinion along with experience from the field on how some parts of these standards should be implemented. Because yes, there ARE some different ways in which these standards can be interpreted and there ARE many ways in which they are implemented.
Enter Health Interoperability Experts! At Lifen, they wear several hats, from being an internal information gold mine to being a Lifen Interop Evangelist in meetups, and finally actively participating in administration committees of these standards to help them evolve with the industry.
Distilling their experience and knowledge to product managers, they help us navigate the intricacies of this (sometimes obscure) world, and to achieve compliant, best-of-class interoperability, in line with our caring together philosophy.
Explain, Advise, Influence, Evangelize: it’s the full circle of interoperability 2.0!
Learning from these pundits, our Product Managers are figuring out how to digest this into our products and roadmaps. As an interoperability PM at Lifen, you have all the responsibilities of traditional PMs, plus the complexity of dealing with complex standards. This impacts many work areas:
- Interoperability means an increased number of stakeholders and personas. App Developers, Clients on the business & tech sides: CTOs, CDOs, Healthcare Practitioners, Internal tool users.
- If the experts are our gold mine, PMs act as silver mines for the developers and QA. They must catalogue, simplify, and prioritize implementations for developers and draft stellar specs that boost developer and QA productivity.
- They must explain and simplify these notions to other internal stakeholders (business development, account managers, marketing …)
Thanks to all that, we can be proud of our platform offering, and its ever-extending roadmap that’s needed to solve interoperability at a global scale (yes, we’re here to stay !)
Interoperability Developers
As we’ve seen, the healthcare software ecosystem is complex, there are a lot of competing standards, protocols, and many implementations. This complexity means that interoperability is a key property of the systems we design.
Lifen wants to enable innovation, and interoperability allows us to connect healthcare actors to improve their processes and benefit from state-of-the-art digital tools.
As such, Interop Team developers have a strong belief: interoperability is better than incompatibility. And we mean it: our APIs allow systems built in the ’90s to communicate with applications built on modern web technologies.
Doing so requires us to solve interesting challenges because we have to cope with technical choices outside of our reach.
Interoperability software engineers are involved in many different aspects:
- Balance between the product we want to build, the standards we have to conform to, and the tech stack we chose.
- Communicate with many actors internally: Product Managers with whom we design our product, Solution Engineers who have expert knowledge on how to deploy our solutions, but also many other actors about specifics of how software A interacts with software B through Lifen.
- Work on a system integrating many external components using a variety of protocols.
- Ensure that the data connections we maintain are in a good shape both from a quality and a performance point of view.
These aspects require interoperability developers to think outside the box and tackle architecture challenges not often offered to junior developers. As more and more partners rely on our systems to deliver quality care to patients, we must design a system that is resilient, robust, scalable and secure.
Resiliency means our architecture has to be fault-tolerant, with mechanisms to quickly reboot, or catch up with the accumulated delay. We rely on an asynchronous queue-based event processing system that provides straightforward ways to monitor our system.
Robustness means our architecture has to be well tested, even though it is partially deployed on-premise in complex environments. We rely heavily on E2E testing as well as custom testing tools to achieve high coverage on our codebase.
Scalability means our architecture has to be able to handle hundreds of millions of events per month. To do that, we apply data engineering concepts and solutions to our system.
Security means we work closely with our infrastructure and security teams as we are handling sensitive data, carefully designing Access Control Lists to filter out events for the multiple partners accessing patient data.
This is a thrilling journey where one can learn a lot and grow quickly in a fast-paced environment. We’re always looking for smart people to join the collective effort.
Interoperability QA & Operations Manager
Quality Assurance and Operations Management are two roles that might be lesser-known, but that are nonetheless crucial to our operations. They are what make our Jenga towers withstand the test of time, scale and quality.
The more complex your system is, the more complex it is to assess that it functions according to the specs. This is true, even before it is deployed on the battlefield.
QA work daily with PM to review and challenge product specifications to make sure it accurately translates customer needs. They write test scenarii to verify new features are consistent with specifications, trying to anticipate edge cases or potential bugs during the development phase.
We are investing heavily in automated tools to perform tests designed by QA at a large scale, to be able to check for regressions for every update.
Collaboratively with Interoperability Experts and PM they must apprehend the obscure standards to be able to speak the same technical language.
Operation managers, on the other hand, are our guardian angels for everything which is already in production. They work daily with product managers, QA, escalation managers, and developers to ensure the service is running well. Of course, we have automated monitoring and alerting systems, however, different clients behave differently and our alerting systems need to be properly fine-tuned with that input to be efficient and avoid alert fatigue.
This knowledge from the production environment, coupled with a deep understanding of underlying systems and standards is also an extremely precious input to help our teams improve our integration engine.
Solution engineers
Solution Engineers also have a wide range of expertise. Not only do they have to master our products, from interop connectors to FHIR APIs, they also need to excel at setup technicalities and server stuff for numerous production environments. They are involved from the first contact with new clients to production monitoring and support for live products. Their job is to understand client needs and translate them in a Lifen context to enable fast and painless deployments at scale.
As technical referrers on these aspects for both internal and external stakeholders, they support different teams, from pre-sale to support:
- Pre-sales and sales: Solution engineers support our business developer teams, and are the default technical touchpoint for our clients, protecting the time of our product teams.
- Project Outline, Configuration and Validation: Solution engineers study client needs to address them with on-the-shelf solutions or by reporting new needs to our product teams. They are doing the back and forth with clients to validate that fits their needs during the first steps of the project
- Monitoring and Support: Collaboratively with our Operation Managers, Solution engineers monitor the availability of the different products and data streams, and proactively contact our clients if needed.
Solution engineers interact with a lot of different personas, from healthcare organizations CIOs and their IT & interoperability teams, to Apps CTOs & their dev teams. It requires vulgarisation abilities along with a deep technical background to navigate the whole stack, from server stuff & SFTP, to high-level API abstractions of medical concepts. It’s also a job where you get to travel a lot and meet our clients in real life!
It takes the expertise and know-how from a lot of different experienced (and junior) people to get interoperability right. We’re trying hard to provide better communication in the healthcare IT ecosystem (we just raised 50M€ to do just that !), and we’re always looking for motivated people to join in. If you would like to contribute to changing healthcare and experience hyper-growth in the process, we’re hiring! Come, check out our Open Positions.
