HD Labs : Data Orchestration | Inspiring new ways to improve people’s lives through technology

Use Case 1: SEND in Education

Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) is becoming more prevalent in education. A SEND child’s details will be recorded within organisations, such as schools, local authorities, and healthcare providers.

Any data pertaining to a child’s care might be stored across multiple systems. It will become more important than ever that all of this data is secure but also easily accessible at the right time and place.

Through innovation, it is possible to bridge data from different systems. This means professionals can access all the required information so SEND children get the full benefit of informed support and personalised care.

Use Case 2: Integrated Care needs Integrated Data

Electronic health records and other health information systems are typically only optimised to help an individual provider deliver their care. In reality though, patients access health and care services across several providers. Often, information given to one provider is required in the next care setting. This means information is often recaptured multiple times. Healthcare providers may also have to request information from other providers. This typically introduces delays and takes valuable time and resource away from treating patients.

Frequently providers have to manually capture medical history directly from the patient at each healthcare encounter. This also introduces the risk of human error. All these factors can lead to suboptimal outcomes and frustration for both patients and healthcare providers.

The role of the Data Orchestration Ecosystem (DOE)

The DOE enables healthcare organisations to access data in multiple systems across the Healthcare landscape. This promotes joined-up care and a reduction in errors due to missing information. It saves time and resources spent on data collection. And that time can be dedicated to patient care instead.

The Data Orchestration Ecosystem provides a powerful data pipeline for data streaming, management and enrichment:

It provides a single terminus for the ingress and egress of data and links previously distinct and siloed data
It uses real-time event streaming and other near-real-time methods to securely transfer data between systems
It transforms message formats to the standards required by the consuming system. For example FHiR standards to HL7
It integrates with other systems to use additional data items to enrich the data being passed to the consuming system negating the need for additional work by the consuming system
It will validate ingress data using standard or custom routines. This ensures the data is correct and valid before passing it into the consuming systems
It provides a visual front-end management interface for managing data contracts. This simplifies the building and management of these contracts between the source and consuming systems. The visual interface provides authorised users such as Information Governance leads the ability to manage data contracts and the flows

The DOE is vendor-neutral and built using Open-Source components, you have complete flexibility to build your own components and reuse others wherever necessary, whenever you need them.

Technical description

The DOE platform ingresses data in either real-time or near real-time from “Satellite” systems and runs workflow operations providing validation, enrichment and transformations before Egressing data to other satellite systems. All connections and workflows are based on the establishment of Privacy by Design (PBD) contracts which are controlled and governed through the visual management interface.

The platform itself is based on established Open-Source architecture and components and is an orchestration of microservices providing key workflow actions through Kubernetes pods giving high availability. The solution utilises Apache Kafka that serves as an events-based messaging system and utilised to quickly process event streaming data and by leveraging its internal state system to integrate real-time datasets providing the organisation with near real time data.

For live real-time communications between satellite systems the API gateway provides a wrapper for the external system API’s allowing standards and authorisation to be managed in a single platform, now a single request can trigger further requests to obtain enrichment information from disparate systems and bring it together as an enhanced data message.

All of this is underpinned by a visual management interface that creates and manages the contract between the systems, inbuilt within this is the Audit Control and Approvals process meaning that information governance teams have sight of the actual data flowing and the ability to start and stop flows which previously would have been out of reach and the preserve of the development teams.