Microservices allow a business to transcend industry boundaries, collaborating with other third parties to bring solutions faster to market. In health, microservices make it easier for organisations to adapt quickly to changing customer experience expectations. It uses a suite of tools such as application programming interfaces (APIs), containers and the cloud to break applications into simple, discrete services. Every feature becomes its own service versus being combined into a single monolithic application.

A microservices architecture provides a foundation for companies to forge partnerships quickly and easily, seamlessly integrating services while minimising friction for partners or customers.

Consider the US pharmacy, Walgreens. The company rebuilt its “healthy choice” rewards programme with a goal of expanding partnerships via microservices. The APIs built during their microservices transformation were shared with third-party developers, who could integrate Walgreens’ rewards into their own apps, offering points to customers for activities like running, testing blood pressure, and even quitting tobacco.¹ Walgreens reports that building these partnerships now takes only a few hours, as opposed to the months-long process of the past. They now work with more than 275 partners, and their prescription API fills one prescription per second.²

Healthcare organisations grappling with managing a wide network of partners can look to blockchain to simplify their collection and reconciliation of disparate healthcare and financial data. Imagine the magnitude of disconnected data from providers, hospitals, health plans and other partners. Blockchain provides the potential to connect these highly segmented data silos, adding a layer of trust through cryptographic proofs of the data’s provenance. No single organisation owns the blockchain, therefore all participants have equal access to the information they have permission to interact with.

Delegating trust to a blockchain means that businesses can pursue broader networks, onboard new partners or enter new ecosystems with ease. With blockchain-based smart contracts, businesses can capture computable terms of a given relationship, and automatically trigger transactions for any partner meeting those terms. Most health executives (78 percent) agree that smart contracts will dramatically evolve our transactional methods and enable digital trust.

Anthem, in partnership with Castlight Health, launched Engage, a next-generation health engagement platform and digital experience designed to drive better health for consumers—and better healthcare decisions. The new platform establishes a single hub for an employer’s health and wellness programs and will drive all of the capabilities together, personalising the programs offered to each user. It also uses a microservices layer to seamlessly connect to data from third-party health and wellness apps as well as health plan tools such as telehealth services, virtual nursing and fitness tracker-powered wellness programs. For example, the platform alerts a condition management nurse to connect with a user based on their medical or lifestyle needs and can help users follow their doctors’ plan of care, flagging missed lab tests and providing additional educational resources.

“Engage is enabled using the microservices and event-driven architecture that helps with easy transfer of data and actions when needed. The use of microservices and APIs for Anthem Engage and other internal apps creates a seamless integration pattern,” says Anil Bhatt, vice president of digital technologies.