Sutter Health Ready To Deploy HIE, But Can It Succeed?

Sutter Health doesn’t have a great reputation when it comes to EMR implementation. Late last year, when we reported that Sutter’s Epic EMR crashed for an entire day, comments came pouring in about the company’s questionable approach to training its staff on using the system.

According to Epic consultants who’d been involved in the project, Sutter leaders decided that Epic experts were there to “facilitate” training done by inexperienced in-house teams, rather than actually teach key users what they need to know. The result was strife, disorder and anxiety, according to several consultants who’d been involved. Since then, Sutter has connected its EMR to five medical foundations and 17 hospital campuses; by next year, it expects the EMR to connect to information on 3 million patients. But there’s no reason to think it’s changed its training strategy, which could cast a bit of a pall over the new project.

Now, Sutter Health is building out a health information exchange, working with Orion Health, which will tie together hospitals and doctors both inside and outside of its network across northern California. Sutter plans to begin deploying the HIE in phases this summer, starting with data integration with the Epic EMR and extending to testing exchange of inbound and outbound data. If the project works out, it seems likely that it will be a plus for every provider that does business with Sutter.

The question is, will Sutter do a better job of managing this process than it did in rolling out its EMR? While it’s easy to boast that your plans are going to be a “gamechanger” for the market, it’s hard to take that claim at face value when your EMR implementation hasn’t gone so splendidly.

Certainly, Orion is a reputable HIE vendor which has been praised for having strong products and service. And Sutter certainly has the financial wherewithal to see such an effort through. The thing is, if Sutter leaders (seemingly) took a wrongheaded approach to the all-important issue of EMR training, who knows what curveballs they might throw into the process of rolling out an HIE? Even if its EMR has stabilized and Sutter has somehow gotten past its training hurdles, its past missteps don’t inspire confidence.

If I were with Orion, I’d draw a firm line where training was concerned, as Sutter’s past strategy only seems to have cast its last major HIT vendor in a bad light. If not, I’d make sure the contract had a workable bailout clause…or be prepared for some serious headaches.

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.

   

Categories