SaaS Integration: Athenahealth

athenahealth provides web-based practice management solutions for a wide range of medical practices. Founded by former owners and operators of a women’s health practice, athenahealth delivers tools for streamlining administrative procedures, improving care coordination, and increasing revenue. 

athenahealth’s product suite includes athenaCollector, a medical billing and practice management solution that automates billing procedures. With athenaCollector, users can reduce paperwork and administrative burdens while making sure that medical bills are generated and delivered in a timely manner. athenaCollector also includes a powerful rules engine that supports automatic flagging of billing errors, insurance claim tracking, denial management, benefits eligibility verification, and enrollment for claim submissions. It furthermore gives users deep visibility into billing procedures through a Workflow Dashboard.

athenahealth offers other Software as a Service (SaaS) products that can be integrated with athenaCollector, including athenaClinicals, athenaCommunicator, and athenaCoordinator. athenaClincals is an electronic medical records (EMR) system that enables users to maintain accurate and updated records through a five-stage patient workflow while remaining compliant with federal HITECH regulations. athenaCommunicator supports medical scheduling and patient messaging via web, email and mobile devices to give patients greater accessibility to information during non-business hours and improve appointment arrivals. Lastly, athenaCoordinator helps medical practitioners coordinate patient care by automating equipment orders, insurance pre-approvals, and registration with hospitals, surgical centers, and other medical facilities.

SaaS Integration Challenges

Like other SaaS applications and cloud services, athenahealth offers a number of advantages over traditional enterprise applications. Users can benefit from quick implementation, automatic updates, real-time visibility and reporting, and hassle-free maintenance, making athenahealth’s SaaS products a popular choice for medical practitioners.

The growing use of SaaS products and the shift towards hybrid architectures, however, creates new integration challenges for enterprise users. The deployment of multiple SaaS applications leads to the fragmentation of data into different cloud silos, but in order to remain efficient and agile in meeting changing business needs, companies need to synchronize data across the cloud and enterprise. The development of next-generation applications through reusable components and web services, moreover, demands seamless data transformation and integration.

athenahealth customers, for instance, might consider the following integration use cases:

• Integration with other SaaS applications, such as Vocus integration or Convio integration
• Integration with social media platforms
• Integration with desktop applications
• Integration with on-premise legacy systems

Custom SaaS Integration Solutions

Although cloud integration has become a mission-critical concern among enterprises, there have been relatively few packaged solutions that are both easy to use and comprehensive in features. Many companies have instead relied on custom solutions to integrate their SaaS applications. This typically involves delegating the task to in-house developers or hiring systems integration consultants who write code and build individual connectors.

The advantage of a custom integration approach is that companies can quickly connect different SaaS applications and tailor connectors to suit specific business needs. However, a custom approach to integration also has several disadvantages.

• Time and Cost: When you only have 2 or 3 applications to integrate, a custom solution is quick and easy. As a long-term solution, however, custom integrations become exponentially more difficult and time-consuming as additional SaaS applications and systems are added. The complexity of implementing large-scale integrations with custom connectors means that in-house developers have less time for other projects and costs increase rapidly when consultants are involved.
• Maintenance Burdens: Once the connectors are built, custom integration solutions also require regular maintenance and upgrades. Integration flows need to be monitored for optimal performance, bugs and errors need to be fixed, and modifications need to be tested and deployed. The result is that more time and resources are being devoted to custom integration projects.
• Flexibility: While custom integration solutions allow you to tailor connectors to suit specific needs, they are difficult to change, especially when your architecture grows in size and complexity. Because custom connectors create dependencies between two integrated systems, whenever you make a modification to one application, you also need to modify the other to maintain compatibility. Such a rigid integration architecture prevents businesses from responding to changing needs with efficiency and agility.

iON: Integration for the Cloud Era

Mule iON, the world’s first Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS), was developed in an effort to simplify cloud integration for a growing number of SaaS users. With Mule iON, users can quickly connect SaaS-to-SaaS and SaaS-to-enterprise without the complexity and burdens of custom integration solutions.

iON includes a comprehensive set of features, such as:

• Cloud Connectors: Out-of-the-box connectors enable Mule iON users to quickly connect the most popular SaaS offerings, including NetSuite, Salesforce.com, and more. Cloud connectors eliminate the need for extensive custom coding and are easy to use. Even non-technical users can perform integrations.
• Development Toolkit: In addition to cloud connectors, users can leverage Mule iON’s development toolkit to build custom connectors. With Mule Studio, developers can create and share integration applications (iApps). Mule Studio is a flow designer based on Eclipse and supports a configuration approach to integration, resulting in quicker “go-live” times.
• Secure Data Gateway: No packaged integration solution would be complete without capabilities for SaaS-to-enterprise integration. Mule iON featuers the Secure Data Gateway, enabling users to access data and processes residing on-premise behind a firewall without compromising security.
• Management Portal: Mule iON includes a browser-based management portal, which provides users with deep visibility into integration flows to better monitor and control integration applications. Since the management portal is browser-based, there is no need to download or install additional software.
  Essential Cloud Features: Fully based in the cloud, Mule iON users can enjoy the core benefits of cloud computing, including multi-tenancy for security and data isolation, an elastic and scalable architecture, flexible pricing, and self-service provisioning.