Every provider wants to innovate to drive transformation that helps reduce variability, improve efficiency, and support optimal patient care. The question is, how disruptive, in a positive sense, is your innovation?

Most innovations in provider organizations are, in truth, iterative tweaks. While tweaks are the cornerstone of continuous improvement lifecycles, iteration isn’t the kind of transformation needed in healthcare. Real innovation creates a disruptive solution that fundamentally changes how people and processes work together, for the better.

Disruptive solutions should also lower technical and operational barriers to future innovation by giving stakeholders a base starting point, e.g., a common data set—a single-source of truth—that uses industry standard terminologies, vocabularies, and analytic definition, as well as the organization’s own lexicon, if truly special.

A healthcare DAP has but one purpose: to aggregate and organize data from disparate sources, and create a unified record that gives providers, for the first time, a complete clinical and financial view of a person’s care—whether a patient, member of health plan, or consumer.

That’s inarguably transformative. But it’s only the start of the transformation a unified health record enables. If you don’t have a DAP deployed at your organization, here are eight compelling reasons why a DAP is essential for the modern provider today.