Verato Creates More Connected Care with Rhapsody on AWS

Patient-centric, connected models are gaining ground as the ideal state for the future of healthcare. Modern technology, software-defined solutions, and the cloud are key to achieving this. However, healthcare providers tend to be resource constrained, and find it challenging to manage a complex network of providers, hardware, and diverse systems of record.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Verato’s cloud-based enterprise master person index helps healthcare organizations deliver better patient care with improved identity matching. Verato software delivers a 360-view of each patient by connecting unique patient data across disparate data sets in electronic health records, customer relationship management (CRM) software, patient portals, and multiple departments and providers. Joaquim Neto, chief product officer at Verato, says, “Healthcare organizations are integrating more data sources and working towards the goal of treating patients as valuable customers, and this is driving them towards our services.” 

To connect to Verato’s software as a service (SaaS), customers use Verato’s native RESTful APIs. However, many healthcare organizations don’t have the technical expertise to achieve this. This led to Verato spending a lot of time on data integrations, which became a drain on its team’s ability to innovate as the company scales.

“We needed a solution that would translate data from whatever state the customer presented to our RESTful APIs, without impacting performance,” elaborates Jeff Shaw, solutions architect at Verato. Furthermore, the timeline was tight for solution implementation. Verato had enterprise clients waiting in the wings to onboard, each with millions of patient records to integrate.

Some of Verato’s team members had previously worked with AWS Partner Rhapsody on similar data integration projects. Rhapsody offers data interoperability solutions used by over 1,700 global healthcare systems on AWS Marketplace. This informed Verato’s choice of Rhapsody as a Service (RaaS) on AWS to solve its integration challenges. “Our familiarity with Rhapsody and their experience with other healthcare organizations reassured us that we could implement an agile solution despite our short timeline,” Neto says.

He adds, “As a rapidly growing startup, the ability to quickly onboard new customers and respond to their needs were critical. RaaS gives us the confidence to meet our customers’ integration requirements, which eases our onboarding process.”

RaaS is hosted on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and relies on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) with Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) for data storage. With Verato’s software on the AWS Cloud, it found a partner that could move at the same speed.

Verato implemented RaaS within three weeks from its first engagement with Rhapsody. “Competitors offering master patient indexing through an on-premises model typically take months to onboard a new customer,” Neto explains. One of Verato’s differentiators for its master patient index service is that customers can deploy the cloud-based SaaS within a couple of days.

Simon Murcott, development manager at Rhapsody, highlights the shared AWS foundation as a key success factor for the project. “With Verato on AWS, we could easily work out the connectivity between our products,” he says. Neither connectivity nor performance has been an issue for Verato since its RaaS implementation in early 2020. Even though RaaS is an additional layer between Verato’s software and customer/patient data, Verato maintains sub-second latency, along with robust scalability.

Like Verato, Rhapsody and its solutions are HIPAA compliant and security updates are part of quarterly software releases. Michelle Blackmer, chief marketing officer at Rhapsody, elaborates, “Because RaaS was built on AWS, this reinforces our credibility in terms of security.”

RaaS uses multiple AWS Regions to comply with data sovereignty rules for its global customers, and an infrastructure as code approach brings less risk from human intervention. Encryption with integrated key management is part of the solution deployed for Verato in its own AWS account, ensuring all data remains private. “AWS provides a range of useful tools to encrypt sensitive data at all stages across the network and storage layers,” Murcott adds.

Compliance assurance comes with RaaS. In addition to HIPAA compliance, Verato is also HITRUST certified. It primarily uses the HL7 international data communication standard to transfer patient data across systems of record. In the future, the company envisions the need to comply with Fast Health Interoperability Resources (FHIR)—an evolving communication protocol. RaaS supports HL7 and FHIR, offering Verato the flexibility to adapt as regulatory compliance drives global industry trends.

In addition to adaptability, Verato can also easily expand its business while maintaining performance targets, thanks to the scalability of RaaS. Verato strives for 99.999 percent uptime, which it has maintained since implementing RaaS. Because Lyniate and Verato power critical data flows, the slightest downtime could have drastic impacts on the quality of care a patient receives. “Our aim is to make sure the right data is there, when and where people need it,” Blackmer relates.

Verato sees the footprint of RaaS growing within its organization as it continues to onboard new, and larger customers. “With Rhapsody Integration Engine on AWS, we’re confident our software can reliably perform and scale as our customers and business grow,” Neto concludes.

 To learn more, visit aws.amazon.com/health.

Rhapsody partners with healthcare organizations around the globe delivering its adaptable Interoperability Suite to reliably connect, classify, and clean data. Rhapsody health solutions power the applications and workflows that improve clinical, operational, and financial outcomes today while helping teams respond to and prepare for changes on the horizon. Rhapsody is committed to empowering people throughout the healthcare ecosystem, from specialty clinics to large care networks, from public health to health technology, and everything in between. Visit https://rhapsody.health to connect.