From Silos to Ecosystems

A fundamental shift from siloed systems to integrated ecosystems is beginning to permanently change the way healthcare is delivered, presenting new opportunities for partnership within the sector. At TigerText, our clients are leading this transformation by innovating in the fields of collaboration and mobility. Together, we are unlocking the value of EHR deployments, streamlining care coordination, and ultimately improving patient outcomes. And these efforts require new change management strategies, new products and platform resources — such as our open API framework for integrations, and new partnership models to support this ecosystem approach.

This shift — from a closed, segmented system to an open, collaborative ecosystem — is one that healthcare technology companies that are exploring partnerships would be wise to embrace (and more quickly than we all may have predicted).

FOCUS ON ECOSYSTEMS TO BREAK DOWN SILOES AND IMPROVE CLIENT OUTCOMES

The trend toward an ecosystem approach has been widely documented. It can be seen in the growing movement toward patient- or outcomes-centric care models, such as Integrated Delivery Networks (IDNs) and Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs). These models incentivize siloed organizations to form cross-organizational ecosystems to achieve a common goal. The transformation has also been observed in the push and pull of standards bodies and regulations that promote Interoperability. Interoperability creates ecosystems that liberate data from political, financial, and technical silos.

However, at the partnership level, this transformation from siloed systems to ecosystems is probably less documented. TigerText is proud to partner both with the cutting-edge startups that are leveraging new ideas like chatbots to improve care, as well as the established technology vendors that that are migrating from on-premise solutions to cloud-based installations and power the medical records for millions of patients. We find that most technologies companies are somewhere on the journey toward the ecosystem approach. Some have accepted it begrudgingly, while others embrace it as a new initiative with enormous potential for growth opportunities.

PARTNERSHIPS AND PLATFORMS DRIVE ECOSYSTEMS

TigerText has adopted an ecosystem model for our partnerships to support this transformation from end-to-end. Our engineers have built a suite of developer tools that our partners can use to integrate with or even embed into their solutions for new offerings. Our partnerships models are similarly open: we work with hundreds of different companies to deploy, support, and improve our offering to our clients.

Perhaps that last point is really one of the key drivers of this transformation from a siloed to an ecosystem model both for partnerships and for the broader healthcare market. Our health system clients are already working with an ecosystem of partners; it’s our job — at TigerText, as a partner to other vendors, and more importantly, as an industry — to make our clients’ jobs easier by building flexibility and collaboration into our platforms and our partnership models.

To learn more about TigerText’s partner program or to contact us about a new partnership idea, click here

Originally published at www.tigertext.com.