Cerner, Intermountain Form Major Development Partnership

Normally, when I read the news of a vendor partnership, it’s a major snoozefest. After all, marketing deals and customer wins may be important to the vendor, but they don’t change our life much.

This time, though, I’m willing to go out a limb and say that the following is an important deal. Cerner, one of the leading players on the enterprise EMR front, has struck an agreement with healthcare chain Intermountain Healthcare under which the two will partner long-term on activity-based costing.

Intermountain, the largest health provider in the Intermountain West region of the US, is making a huge Cerner buy, Information Week reports. As part of its agreement with Cerner, Intermountain is tearing out its existing systems, including two EMRs, two billing systems and desktop integration system, and replacing them with Cerner technology.

In this deal, you can certainly chalk up one more win for Cerner, which has been gaining ground in the 200+ bed hospital segment of late. According to KLAS, the ratio of Epic-to-Cerner wins has fallen from 5-to-1 in 2010 to 2-to-1 in 2012 in this segment, according to the research firm.

But the agreement goes well beyond being a mere sale. Once the new, integrated Cerner system is in place, it will serve as the foundation for the long-term project partners have in mind.

Intermountain chose to partner with Cerner because of its system’s open architecture, which will allow for the addition of new content Intermountain plans to provide, CIO Marc Probst told Information Week.

The partners plan a closely-integrated relationship which involves the movement of several Cerner executives and staffers to Intermountain’s headquarters in Salt Lake City. Their work will include development of care process models, connectivity-based costing, advanced decision support and clinical workflows, IW reports.

Getting this work done requires little short of a wedding. ” “We’re looking at 20 plus years of collaboration. We have shared interests in making this be a great success,” Probst told the magazine.

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

1 Comment

  • […] Epic and Cerner Separate Themselves – This has certainly been happening for a couple of years, but 2013 is the year I’ll remember that everyone agreed that for big hospitals it’s a two horse race between Cerner and Epic. There’s still an amazing battle brewing for the small hospital with no clear winner yet. However, in the large hospital race the battle between Cerner and Epic is on. Epic had been winning most of the deals, but Cerner just gave them a big left hook when Intermountain chose Cerner. […]

Click here to post a comment
   

Categories