McKesson Health Solutions Introduces The Intelligence Hub

Innovative interoperability platform supports the pace of change in healthcare by enabling rapid innovation and application connectivity

Recently McKesson Health Solutions (MHS) unveiled the McKesson Intelligence Hub, a new technology platform for enabling interoperability and sharing business intelligence among healthcare applications. The result of a multi-year development program, the Intelligence Hub is designed to connect MHS’s portfolio of automated reimbursement solutions and help streamline payment by making interoperability easy for customers, partners, and vendors across the healthcare ecosystem.

The pace of change in healthcare is fast and getting faster, making it difficult if not impossible for any one organization—payer, provider, or vendor—to do all the jobs that need doing, and solve all the problems that need solutions. To innovate at the speed of healthcare today, organizations must be able to forge new solutions quickly by connecting disparate health IT systems in a simple, cost-effective, and open way.

McKesson’s strategic investment in the Intelligence Hub, a contemporary platform built on open standards, makes it easy for our solutions to work together, as well as with our customers’ systems and third-party solutions. The Intelligence Hub is thoughtfully designed to help payers and providers extend the life and enhance the value of their existing core system investments, while helping our customers innovate faster to achieve their strategic goals.

“Interoperability is about more than just moving data from one application to another,” said Mike Wood, SVP, CIO & CTO of McKesson Health Solutions. “It's about how applications cooperate and work together to solve problems as composite solutions. And it’s a paradigm shift in the development and business culture of our organization, in order to create an ecosystem that makes it easy to engage the business logic in historically separate, siloed applications. At MHS, we’re serious about interoperability, and that’s why we’re changing how we build and deploy our solutions, how they share application business services, and how we interact with customers in the creation of an overall end-to-end solution. Our investment in the Intelligence Hub represents a new way to think about how to come at the problems we’re trying to solve as an industry, as we journey together to make full value-based reimbursement a reality.”

Engineered using open industry communication standards such as HL7 FHIR, the Intelligence Hub makes it easy to connect applications, services, and systems quickly to meet strategic business objectives. Several McKesson solutions are already connected through the Intelligence Hub, where they simplify and automate payment through smart shared services that exchange information and unify business processes across payer, provider, and technical boundaries.

Moreover, the Intelligence Hub can help customers integrate across McKesson’s application and services portfolio, as well as in and across third-party and vendor environments. In fact, a number of McKesson customers are now using the Intelligence Hub to connect corporate applications with McKesson services.

For IT leaders, the technical muscle behind the Intelligence Hub is McKesson’s core foundational technology for cloud services. The Intelligence Hub provides consistent API management, identity and access management, and application service orchestration within a PaaS (Platform as a Service) engineered around an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).

This open framework fosters integration between McKesson’s applications and, equally important, near plug-and-play component and services integration between McKesson’s solutions and customers’ applications. The result: healthcare interoperability with little to no custom coding required. The Intelligence Hub will also be capable of providing real-time analytics to help IT teams know how their applications are working and using shared services, so systems can be optimized for the highest cost efficiency and performance.

“Our customers are developing and implementing their own interoperability strategies, and the Intelligence Hub will help us solve problems together faster and more easily,” said Rod O’Reilly, president of McKesson Health Solutions. “Our customers want to rapidly connect applications, whether home grown or third-party, with the strategic MHS platforms they use or specific services of those applications they want to use. The Intelligence Hub is all about making interoperability virtually effortless across our portfolio and our customers’ portfolios, so we can break down silos, and make automated reimbursement as streamlined as it can be.”

About McKesson

McKesson Corporation, currently ranked 5th on the FORTUNE 500, is a healthcare services and information technology company dedicated to making the business of healthcare run better. McKesson partners with payers, hospitals, physician offices, pharmacies, pharmaceutical companies, and others across the spectrum of care to build healthier organizations that deliver better care to patients in every setting. McKesson helps its customers improve their financial, operational, and clinical performance with solutions that include pharmaceutical and medical-surgical supply management, healthcare information technology, and business and clinical services. For more information, visit www.mckesson.com.