How to Introduce Microservices in a Legacy Healthcare Environment
The following was a guest blog post on HealthcareScene.com.
Healthcare as a whole is finding new ways to use technology to improve population health and patient experience. Population health is looking for a spectrum of precision in patient and provider data as well as clinical cost metrics and matching that data to patient communication, metrics and clinical outcomes. Patient experience requires streamlining information that is both timely and personalized, which is hard to accomplish with monolithic systems.
A monolithic system is usually one that has grown over many years and performs numerous functions that are not architecturally separated. These systems tend to be brittle and not easily changed. The proliferation of mergers and acquisitions in healthcare further exacerbates the complexity of operating multiple monolithic systems within a healthcare network. It is not unheard of to operate 5, 8 or even 12 billing systems in parallel, because combining them would take so much more time, and it is more cost effective to let them operate individually.
