Health Samurai

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a technical specialist for a large research hospital.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Health Samurai?

We had an in-house clinical data repository that works with fast healthcare interoperability resources (FHIR), but it was a burden for us to maintain ourselves. We needed a vendor to help us with it.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We’re developing an application that provides a way to build clinical forms rapidly, working with Health Samurai to create data mappings to FHIR. That will mean any forms we create have common data models. They’ve set up their solution as an on-premise database for us, and provided resources to help us integrate with the solution and map out the data to it.

We will eventually phase out our current in-house system. The old system is a burden to manually maintain so Health Samurai came up with a complete solution where they can maintain the service and the database, and we can focus on our clinical workflow. They’ve provided a solution so that it’s easy to map out the HL7 v2 feeds to FHIR and adjust them into other clinical document architecture (CDA).

What is the team composition?

We first interacted with Pavel (CEO, Health Sumurai). Eventually, we got assigned a direct contact for technical work.

How did you come to work with Health Samurai?

We started looking at vendors and chose Health Samurai because they provided a solution around the general problem of working with an FHIR data repository. The feature they offered was better than the other company we interviewed.

How much have you invested with them?

We've spent $25,000–$50,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in March 2018 and the work is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

It’s been a wonderful experience for us as they're very easy to work with, and they’ve been very helpful and responsive.

Their product did well with our solution, and they took care of setting it up on the premises themselves. They even priced some quotes for us for integration. We’ve been very happy with them. We also haven’t run into bugs. Anytime we have problems, we communicate with them.

How did Health Samurai perform from a project management standpoint?

They have good communication. We use Slack and get responses within an hour, as well as email and daily standup video calls. We’re going to meet with them in person next week at a conference, and previously, I met with Pavel once when he was in Toronto.

What did you find most impressive about them?

We’re impressed with how easy their solution is to work with. They provided an online demo to test out the solution and see what the features are. Their benchmarks mean we're fairly confident with the amount of data the solution will be able to process. When they set it up, it matched our expectations from the demos.

Are there any areas they could improve?

There haven’t been any problems.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

I recommend knowing what your requirements are. Communicate what the scope of the project is and what you’re intending to do. This will allow them to collaborate more easily.