In the latest edition of CIO 100 Magazine, EVP – Integration Dhaya Sivakumar was featured talking about our company’s transformation of program. Please see below for an excerpt from the article.

“This is an exciting period for us as we create and build the functionality necessary to enable the predicted ‘health data explosion’”, says Dhaya Sivakumar, executive vice president – integration, for Orion Health.

The company currently manages over 110 million patient records for its customers across the globe. “We anticipate that in five years, most of these records will be stored in the cloud, and a vibrant ecosystem will exist, enabling a variety of apps from both Orion Health and accredited third parties”, says Sivakumar.

He explains this is the business driver for Orion Health’s migration of its global customer base to public cloud, Amazon Web Services. Sivakumar cites this ongoing migration as a key business transformational programme for the company.

He says to enable this migration, the Orion Health Delivery Engineering Team successfully ran AWS Direct through AWS’s Well Architected Framework to get a sense of how AWS Direct measures up to best practice. The Well Architected Framework measures deployments on AWS against a whole series of best practices in the areas (pillars) of security, reliability, performance efficiency and cost optimisation. To achieve Well Architected status, at least 75 per cent alignment with the best practices must be achieved for each one of the four pillars, and have no critical issues in any of them.

“In short, it sets quite a high benchmark that is designed to encourage better practices when using AWS,” says Sivakumar. “It is no mean feat for Orion Health to have achieved Well Architected status from AWS.”

He points out Orion Health does more than enabling the storage and viewing of large amounts of data. “We also create applications that make meaningful use of data for clinicians and their patients,” he says. “This is an ever-expanding field as we not only create new applications but we expand the use of those products already in the market.”

An example is the launch of Orion Health Medicines which enables health professionals to view the list of medicines a patient has been prescribed. The next phase of that development is to enable the inputting of more information and sharing this within the patient’s “circle of care”. The latter may include the community nurse, pharmacist or family member.

In addition to building new applications in-house, the open APIs enable third-party innovation, he says. A key focus is launching the Orion Health Developer Program, which will enable developers to leverage the power of Orion Health’s Open API.

“We are at the cusp of precision medicine,” he says. “Science is continually making new medical discoveries.” An example of how this will impact their work is the estimate by the American Academy of Microbiology estimates that there are 100 trillion ‘microbiomes’, the name given to the bacteria living in all of us. “What if you could map every microbiome and use that data to improve a person’s health outcome? How large would a data file containing 100 trillion microbiomes be? That’s the kind of challenges our technology teams are grappling with,” he says.

Read More