Straight outta Red Hat Summit: 3 tips to transform health IT with open source

Open source is fueling innovation across all aspects of healthcare today. As we shift toward value-based care, healthcare organizations (HCOs) are finding innovative ways to leverage new and emerging technologies to employ DevOps principles, expedite time-to-market for new applications and transform high-performance computing in their research environments.

There was no better arena to showcase these medical advancements than Red Hat Summit. From start-ups to a Fortune 500 companies, hospital systems to government agencies, HCOs took center stage and shared the spotlight with Red Hat executives in a testament to how both open source and Red Hat are transforming health and patient care. Here are three tips for HCOs looking to jump start their digital transformation.

1) Don’t start with technology

Digital transformation shouldn’t be solely IT-driven. Take a more holistic approach to innovation and examine your people, process and patient needs. This approach will make it easier to find products and solutions that are a fit for your organization.

Case in Point: easiER AG, a Swiss-based startup, is led by doctors looking to make an impact on the healthcare industry. Frustrated by long wait times at the ER, the founders of easiER challenged the status quo by looking for a way to provide a more positive experience to customers and patients when searching for urgent care. Featured during the keynote address, easiER highlighted how they were able to quickly ramp up the development process and rapidly reduce the time it takes to bring their app to market by using Red Hat technology and collaborating with the Red Hat Open Innovation Labs.

2) Focus on your people

In order to change the mindset of your developers, it’s important to incorporate a variety of ways to engage them.

Case in Point: Optum, part of UnitedHealth Group, took center stage to present on their use of platform-as-a-service and cloud technologies and to highlight a number of events and tactics that they regularly employ. From DevDays to hack-a-thons, using portals to share and reuse code internally and technology development programs to hone their staff’s skills, Optum works diligently to ensure that their staff is engaged, learning and applying new methods to adapt to an ever-changing healthcare landscape.

3) Find ways to explore

As many hospitals move to SaaS-based health records such as Epic, you may find that your team and infrastructure are now freed up to innovate in new ways.

Case in Point: Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), part of Partners Healthcare, found itself in this exact situation. Their biggest issue was that their corporate provisioning process was not well-suited for exploratory development. MGH turned to OpenShift to help protect patient information while allowing for proper data governance and compliance. As an added bonus, they were able to embrace containers to reduce VM-sprawl in their research environment. Watch their session and learn how.

As we wind down from Red Hat Summit, HCOs should continue to come together and form a community to allow for more rapid innovation and acceleration of advancements in healthcare. As the leading provider of enterprise open source technology, Red Hat can help you better collaborate to jump start your digital transformation in a secure and holistic way. Learn more at www.redhat.com/health.