VA ProdOps and Data Quality Engineering

Enhancing Healthcare Interoperability with HL7 FHIR: Ensuring Data Quality and Reliability Through ProdOps Practices

We stand at the forefront of technology that promotes well-being and longevity. We have moved beyond the era of sporadic “check-ups and hope for the best” healthcare. Patient Generated Health Data (PGHD) empowers proactive care by identifying potential problems before they escalate. PGHD, such as a smart watch health monitor, organized into a standardized format, translates your unique health experiences into a universally understood language. This enables seamless communication about your care among your caregivers, practitioners, and insurers. The level of personalized care made possible by PGHD is the realization of a centuries-old dream.

In the ever-evolving healthcare landscape, interoperability is crucial to providing seamless patient care across various platforms and systems. HL7 FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) is a data standard specifically designed to facilitate this interoperability in a healthcare context. As digital health continues to grow, PGHD is becoming an increasingly valuable asset in clinical settings. However, to be effective, PGHD must meet stringent data quality criteria, including reliability, traceability, and integrity. This is where ProdOps Observability and Data Quality Engineering come into play.

The Role of Data Quality in Healthcare Interoperability

For PGHD to complement clinical data effectively, it must adhere to rigorous data quality standards. Ensuring data quality in a healthcare context involves several critical components:

• Reliability: Ensuring that data is consistent and dependable.
• Traceability: Maintaining a clear history of data origins and changes.
• Integrity: Guaranteeing the accuracy and completeness of data.

At About Objects, we leverage ProdOps Observability and Data Quality Engineering to achieve these standards. Our focus on proactive monitoring, data-driven decision-making, and continuous improvement ensures the reliability, performance, and scalability of HL7 FHIR API services while maintaining the highest levels of data quality, security, and compliance.

Helping to Ensure Service Uptime and Reliability

To maintain the integrity and availability of HL7 FHIR services, we emphasize the following:

• Extensive Testing: Rigorous testing is conducted across all releases and environments. This includes smoke tests, regression tests, and performance benchmarks to ensure that FHIR API services function optimally under different conditions.
• Proactive Monitoring: Utilizing observability tools like Kibana, Kiali, and Grafana, our ProdOps team visualizes, searches, and monitors service mesh health, traffic flow, and other critical metrics. This proactive approach helps identify and resolve issues before they impact users, ensuring consistent service uptime.

Upholding Data Quality and Validation Standards

Data quality is critical in healthcare, where even minor inaccuracies can have significant implications. To help ensure high standards, our team has devised a comprehensive strategy that involves:

• Data Validation and Cleanup: We use Mirth Connect for data transformation, cleansing, quality scanning, and reporting. Data validation rules are implemented to maintain data integrity and quickly identify anomalies.
• Validating Specific Data Types: As new data types flow through the system, we help ensure their accuracy, completeness, and adherence to required standards.
• Error Handling: Robust procedures are put in place to identify and correct data errors, helping to maintain high standards of data quality.

Performance Monitoring for Scalability

To support the growing demands of healthcare data interoperability, we focus on performance monitoring and optimization:

• Statistics Gathering and Scalability: Our team tracks resource usage, collects performance metrics, and conducts scalability planning to ensure our system can handle increasing volumes of data.
• FHIR Code-Specific and Request Pattern Insights: We break down performance metrics by FHIR resource types and API request patterns. This allows us to gain valuable insights into optimizing performance and scalability.
• Operational Dashboard: Our daily operational dashboard provides a clear “green/yellow/red” status of API traffic, and our daily issue report, generated by analyzing and summarizing logs, offers a real-time snapshot of the service’s health. Together, these reports provide a vital daily check on the system’s well-being.

Building a Foundation for Reliable Healthcare Interoperability

Overall, we have developed an approach that demonstrates a strong commitment to maintaining the reliability, traceability, and integrity of patient-generated data within HL7 FHIR API services. Our proactive monitoring, stringent data quality measures, and performance optimization initiatives, combined with a focus on validating diverse data types, provide a solid foundation for a robust and scalable system that meets the needs of healthcare interoperability.

By prioritizing data quality and proactive monitoring, our approach ensures that PGHD can be effectively integrated into clinical settings, making meaningful contributions to healthcare outcomes while adhering to the highest standards of security and compliance.