There’s a lot more to software development than writing code. That’s especially true in healthcare, where integration engineers have to connect complex systems and ensure healthcare data flows reliably between them based on national standards and local implementation details. In a recent interview with Healthcare IT Today, Kevin Day, Chief Technology Officer at Rhapsody, points out that integration engineers spend much of their time finding and reviewing documentation, interpreting the requirements, doing real-world testing, and troubleshooting. While AI is getting plenty of attention for its ability to generate code, Day sees an even bigger opportunity for AI to help with all the work that happens before and after writing the code.
Rhapsody Axon is the AI behind Rhapsody’s products. It’s built in, not added on top. Axon understands the details of an organization’s environment and the external standards it has to meet.
Axon can guide engineers through building an integration in Rhapsody or Corepoint. Rhapsody Axon Broadcast, a new product for health tech companies, uses Axon to turn their technical documentation into playbooks that healthcare organizations can find and build from.
During much of our interview, Day describes the cultural and business shift available to an organization that uses AI this way. Instead of obsessing over the backlog of feature requests and bugs, they can look for new ways to serve clients and their patients. Day uses the phrase “faster time to value,” referring to producing products faster and serving new clients. The question becomes “What can we do next?”
When determining the value and costs of adding AI, Day recommends avoiding simplistic metrics such as lines of code. Instead, business leaders should measure outcomes such as time to product, or how often an engineer had to change the outcome to match the requirements.
He also warns that with faster coding and requirements processing, the organization’s bottleneck might move to testing or some other stage.
Finally, people with deep knowledge of standards and clinical concepts are still important in the age of AI. They are doing less of the clerical work of checking documents and moving up to orchestration and review.
Find out more details about how Rhapsody is using AI to make integration engineers more efficient in our interview with Kevin Day.
Learn more about Rhapsody: https://rhapsody.health/
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