If you’re reading this post, you already know that healthcare data is really messy. Whether it’s via mismatched codesets, endless duplicates, or unstructured PDFs, this lack of interoperability dampens innovation and worsens the experiences of patients, clinicians, and developers. As a result, clinical teams typically spend a significant amount of time before each patient appointment manually gathering prior medical records however they can. Then, any data that was successfully collected needs to be entered into the patient’s profile in the electronic medical record (EMR) to make it usable for their clinician. 

These manual processes can be so time-consuming that many Zus customers previously hired full-time employees whose sole responsibility was to track down external data for their patients – we have seen this even with customers that serve just a few hundred patients. In the worst case scenario, clinicians go into their appointments with no external data and spend 30+ minutes collecting their patients’ medical histories live with the patients or reviewing the answers from the waiting room clipboard. All of this points to a sad reality: poor healthcare data interoperability costs hours of valuable clinician time every day and makes it much harder for providers to deliver holistic, well-informed care for each patient.

Enter Zus: the only shared health data platform designed to accelerate healthcare data interoperability by providing easy-to-use patient data at the point of care via a standalone app, embedded components, API, and direct EHR integrations. 

 

Zus’ Guiding Principles for Patient Data Usability

  • Comprehensive: We have built connections to national healthcare networks that together cover 99% of Americans, including CommonWell, Carequality, and Surescripts, and have also established innovative relationships with ADT and labs data vendors to offer elevated event notifications and more comprehensive history than many other solutions on the market.
  • Easy-to-use: Our robust data enrichment efforts ensure that the data we aggregate from national networks is de-duplicated, semantically normalized, and summarized with clinical logic, meaning that this data is immediately accessible and usable for clinicians.
  • Workflow ready: Clinicians and developers at high-growth provider organizations barely have time to think, and Zus makes it as easy as possible to integrate our data into your tech stack wherever clinicians are already spending the bulk of their time – whether that’s in the EHR, a proprietary app built in-house, or a standalone Zus application. 

With the above capabilities, teams can unlock meaningful value across employee efficiency, patient care delivery, and go-to-market priorities.

 

Translating the Zus Aggregated Profile (ZAP) Into Value for Healthcare

  • Clinician time-savings: Instead of spending time sifting through unstructured patient data, clinicians can leverage summarized, de-duplicated patient history lists with access to the full audit trail – for instance, our data suggests that an estimated 26% of medication statements returned from a large national health exchange are duplicates. 
  • Developer time-savings: Building connections to 5+ data networks and intelligently cleaning this data is no small feat when it’s core to your business (we would know!), but the opportunity cost is much greater for provider organizations whose value prop is innovative care delivery, not data cleansing. With Zus, your developers are free to focus on building what makes your organization special.
  • Better outcomes: Having access to relevant data at the point of care and in between live appointments ensures that all aspects of a patient’s health are incorporated into care planning and facilitates proactive outreach to prevent conditions from worsening. For example, provider organizations that use statewide HIEs like California’s Manifest MedEx have reported up to a 50% reduction in patient hospital readmission rates since joining the HIE.
  • Improved sales cycle: Given the overwhelming number of health solutions, employers and health plans want to know how your solution fits into the broader care delivery ecosystem and avoids additional burden on clinicians. Zus seamlessly connects your organization to your patients’ external providers and takes tasks off of your providers’ plates, thus boosting your value proposition to potential customers.

Even better, it’s quick and painless to get started on Zus – once you decide to work with us, we can get you up and running in just a few hours with dedicated support from our implementation team. You can also sign up for a free sandbox account to dive into the data and developer experience firsthand. 

If you’re an innovative digital health startup that wants (or needs) to elevate your data capabilities, we’d love to connect – let us know how we can help here.