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Judy Calls Epic “Most Open System I Know”

After Zina Moukheiber from Forbes was declined an interview with Judy Faulkner, CEO of Epic, last year Judy decided to talk to Zina about Epic in this article “An Interview With The Most Powerful Woman In Health Care.” Zina does a nice job on the interview and raises some of the questions many people have about Epic. It’s worth a read if you like to follow the hospital EHR world.

Many people are likely going to latch on to Zina calling Judy Faulkner the “most powerful woman in health care.” I don’t think that’s really up for discussion. Judy is the most powerful woman in healthcare and so I’m really glad that Judy is starting to join the discussion about Epic and healthcare. She has an important voice in the discussion and we need her participation. Although, I’m sure she’ll hate being called a billionaire in the article. The reality is we don’t know how much Judy’s really worth until we know how much Epic is worth and I’m not sure Epic plans to go public anytime soon.

Semantics aside, the most important part of the interview was the discussion of Epic being a closed system to which Judy frankly replied, “We are the most open system I know because we’re built as a database management system, and database management systems need to allow their users to mold it to what they need.” I think she really believes that Epic is an open system and quite frankly there aren’t that many in healthcare she can look to that are more open. Sure, a number of EHR vendors have worked to be more open, but even they aren’t as open as many other non health IT software systems. Maybe Judy hasn’t looked at the APIs outside of healthcare.

The real disconnect I had when reading Judy’s thoughts on being open is her lack of understanding of how a truly open API works. In a well implemented API, you can allow any and all programmers to be able to build applications on top of your software without those programmers needing to read your code and study your internal software. I’m not saying you don’t want and need to have an application and verification process for those people who want to tap into your API. This can be part of the process, but a well implemented and documented API can be open to everyone interested in building on top of your software. The value Epic would receive from so many companies iterating and extending the core Epic functionality would be amazing.

The other facet of Epic openness discussed in the article was around interoperability. Judy offered these comments on Epic’s ability to share patient records:

As of March 2013, our customers exchanged 760,000 patient records per month; about one-third were with non-Epic systems. Based on the historical trajectory, we expect that we’re closer to exchanging approximately one million records per month. We are currently exchanging data with Allscripts, Cerner, Department of Defense, Veteran Affairs Administration, Social Security Administration, eHealth Exchange (formerly Nationwide Health Information Network), Greenway, MEDITECH, NextGen and others. We expect to be exchanging data soon with eClinicalWorks, General Electric, Surescripts, and others.

This sounds good on face, but lets consider how many records Epic is sharing. Let’s use the round number of 1 million patient records shared per month. The article says that Epic has about half of the US population on Epic, or about 150 million patients. That means that about 0.67% of Epic’s patient records are being shared.

I’m happy to applaud Epic for sharing 1 million records a month with so many different vendors. My only complaint is that they could do so much more. For example, if you can share records between Epic and Cerner now, does that work for all Epic hospitals or do you have to do the new integration with every hospital that says they want to share records with Cerner? If it was a turn key way to integrate with Cerner, I’m quite sure that instead of 1% of Epic’s patient records being shared we’d see tens of millions of patient records flowing where they needed to go.

Many might remember my surprise breakfast with Judy Faulkner at the CHIME Forum. From my personal experience, Judy is not the black widow that I’ve heard many portray her to be. In fact, I found her incredibly thoughtful, caring, and really interested in quality patient care. That’s why I hope Judy will see that she’s sitting on an opportunity to do so much more than she’s doing now. Although, it will take a shift in her understanding of what it means to be an open EHR. Right now it seems her mostly unfounded fears won’t let her see the possibilities.

Cleveland Clinic Brings Epic Smarts To NY Hospital Practices

The Cleveland Clinic is going the consulting route, this time around by working with the physician and specialty practices for a New York hospital to bring Epic up to speed.

Glens Falls is a 410-bed nonprofit which began implementing the Epic EMR in early 2012. The New York facility has 3,000 employees and 28 regional locations.

Apparently dissatisfied with its internal knowledge base on the subject, It’s now contracted with the Clinic’s MyPractice Healthcare Solutions (MPHS) to help deploy and optimize its rollout, reports the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Among the Epic products installed at Glens Falls is “MyChart,” offering a clinical and billing records portal for patients, according to the Plain Dealer.

The Cleveland Clinic has had Epic in place for more than 10 years, making it one of the first healthcare systems in the country to install the vendor’s product. Having learned from that experience, Cleveland Clinic MPHS now brings project management and implementation expertise to other facilities.

I think this is an interesting business model for the Cleveland Clinic, and I’d be curious to see what other consulting agreements it has put into place. (So far I wasn’t able to turn up any others but my guess is that they exist.)

It seems to me that hospitals who have tamed Epic — Kaiser Permanente comes to mind — might very well go into this line of business, as the need is great. Not to mention that if I were making a decision as to who I’d hire to wire my medical practice into my hospital, a successful institution would have a very strong pitch to make.

Can any of you readers share other examples of hospitals/clinics who are turning their Epic experience into a consulting revenue stream?

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May 13, 2013 I Written By Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies.

Filed Under: Community Hospitals Hospital EHR Hospital EHR Company Hospital EHR Vendor Hospital Electronic Health Record Hospital Electronic Medical Record Hospital EMR Hospital EMR Company Hospital EMR Vendor Hospital Healthcare IT Hospital IT Systems

Tags:Cleveland Clinic Epic Epic EMR Epic Systems Glens Falls Hospital

Survey: Confusion Slowing Meaningful Use Compliance

While Meaningful Use is likely to spur improvements in health IT, confusion over regulations — and the need to pursue other pressing HIT projects — are slowing down MU compliance, according to a new study.

The survey was conducted by Stoltenberg Consulting, which spoke with health IT managers, clinicians, HIT vendors and government agencies that attended this year’s HIMSS event.

Researchers asked which areas in which HIT will achieve the biggest improvements over the next 12 months. The biggest group (35 percent) named Meaningful Use, while 19 percent said health information exchange, clinical integration and mobile health were due for the most growth.

When asked what might hold them back from meeting Meaningful Use requirements, 29 percent said confusion and/or ambiguity in the regulations were a challenge. Others named competing health IT projects (23 percent) and a lack of key resources such as funding, IT skills, talent and time (17 percent).

The survey also asked respondents what issues were likely to dominate HIT discussions this year. Respondents favored health information exchange (62 percent), followed closely by mobile health (58 percent) and clinical analytics (54 percent).

As part of the survey, Stoltenberg also asked survey respondents which problems HIT executives would most likely attempt to solve with the help of a specialized IT consulting firm. The responses included ICD-10 (25 percent), Meaningful Use (25 percent), clinical and business intelligence (23 percent), cloud computing (21 percent) and CPOE/clinical systems implementation (20 percent).

Is Epic Stifling Health IT Innovation?

In many ways and definitely based on the buzz, Epic is at the top of the hospital EMR market. According to one estimate, about 40 percent of the U.S. population has its medical information stored in an Epic EMR, a stunning number given the level of competition in the hospital EMR space.

The question is, what impact is that having on the EMR marketplace? According to one piece posted this week by Medical Economics, Epic may be stifling health IT innovation due to its nearly-unassailable market lead.

As readers probably know, Epic has established an empire built around antiquated technology (MUMPS), which essentially forces any company that hopes to interoperate to bear its MUMPS core in mind. We’re talking the blunted edge here.

Perhaps more importantly, now that Epic has such a dominant market share, if it chooses to keep a closed system in place, customers will only get what innovations are driven internally by Epic. If hospitals want innovations emerging outside the Epic bubble, they’ll have to consider the staggering costs — in some cases in the hundreds of millions of dollars — of switching outright to another vendor. If that doesn’t stifle innovation I don’t know what does.

This situation hasn’t been lost on healthcare industry leaders, some of whom have begun to balk at Epic’s rise, Medical Economics reports.

As the piece notes, Epic has attracted outspoken critics that question whether Epic’s’ market dominance is bad for the health IT world as a whole. One of those critics is Paul Levy, former CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, who has taken shots at the EMR giant from his “Not Running A Hospital” blog.

Levy, who Medical Economics cites as one of Epic’s toughest opponents, has been known to compare customers’ relationship with Epic to Stockholm Syndrome, a condition occurring when hostages begin to sympathize and identify with their captors.

All that being said, at the moment, there’s little critics can do to change Epic’s business practices or development plans. Perhaps the Federal Trade Commission will step in at some point if it appears to staff there that Epic’s market control is anti-competitive. In the mean time, though, Epic seems to have a lock on the hospital marketplace — and a disproportionate role in shaping the future of EMRs generally.

Only Incentives Will Make EHR Interoperability Happen

Today we had a really interesting #HITsm chat about interoperability, data hoarding, and sharing healthcare data. Tomorrow we’ll have a post on EMR and EHR that summarizes some of the key tweets from the chat. Although, there was one theme that really struck home to me during the chat.

The biggest barrier to EHR interoperability and data sharing is incentives.

During the chat multiple people including myself made the observation that the reason EHR vendors don’t share data is that there’s no incentive to share data. I can’t say I’ve ever seen a hospital choose to not go with an EHR because it couldn’t interoperate with another EHR vendor. The incentive isn’t there for the hospital and therefore the EHR vendor.

Think about the EHR interoeprability announcement of CommonWell. While the CEO’s of the five EHR vendors can sit there and say that they’re doing it because it’s the right thing to do for healthcare, these public company CEOs also have a legal responsibility to do what’s best for the shareholders of their company.

The reality is that CommonWell would have never happened if there wasn’t an incentive for these companies to put CommonWell together. Rather than beat around the bush, these EHR companies came together to stick it to Epic and to give them a strategic advantage over other companies that can’t or won’t share data. You can certainly make an argument for why doing this is good for healthcare as well, but if there was no outside business incentive to CommonWell then the healthcare benefit wouldn’t have been enough.

As one person tweeted during the Twitter chat, If there were money paid for sharing data, all the fear and issues would suddenly disappear and solutions provided.

When thinking about incentivizing EHR interoperability, Farzad Mostashari’s words at The Breakaway Group event at TEDMED come ringing into my ears, “Incentives and money aren’t always the same.” Cash or otherwise, EHR interoperability needs some incentive.

CommonWell Alliance Goals Challenged By ONC

As virtually everyone in health IT knows, HIMSS saw the dawning of a new EMR vendor alliance which proposes to make health data exchange simpler. The group, the CommonWell Alliance, includes McKesson, Cerner, Allscripts, Greenway and athenahealth, plus McKesson’s connectivity business RelayHealth.

Now that the PR fairy dust has settled and we’re talking serious business, it’s a good time to consider exactly what these vendors hope to accomplish, as we’re talking about enough vendor muscle to have a serious impact on the way health data is shared.

This week, ONC released a report doing just that, according to a piece in Government Health IT. At a meeting of the Health IT Policy Committee on April 3, National Coordinator for Health Information Technology Farzad Mostashari, MD and other committee members discussed the report, which raised some hard questions about the Alliance.

According to Government Health IT, the report outlined the following as CommonWell’s chief goals:

Enabling providers to unambiguously identify patients – but not with a national patient identifier;
Providing a way to match patients with their healthcare records as they transition through care facilities;
Using existing unique identifiers (salted/hashed) such as cell phone number, email addresses or driver’s licenses for identity management;
Enabling patients to manage consent and authorization;
Creating a HIPAA-compliant and patient-centered means to simplify management of data-sharing consents and authorizations, focusing initially on the most common treatment situations;
Helping providers to find the location of patient records across care locations via a secure nationwide records locator service;
Enabling providers, with appropriate authorization, to issue targeted (directed) queries that provide for peer-to-peer (e.g., EHR to EHR) exchange.

Unlike most standards-setting efforts, members of the group are going to have to pay if they want to participate, a nice little detail that wasn’t made clear when CommonWell was announced.

Though it will be at least a year before CommonWell pilots its approach, members of the Committee are quite appropriately wondering now about the impact of such an effort.

Dr. Mostashari argued that the key question is whether the service will work as an optional overlay across a regional exchange, or whether it requires exclusive participation. Other committee members agreed.

The bottom line for committee members, Government Health IT reports, is that they’re willing to take a wait-and-see approach. As for us out here in the peanut gallery, I believe we should challenge the heck out of this thing.

Members of the Health IT Policy Committee are well advised to wonder whether this coming together of powerful HIT vendors could undermine broader efforts to foster interoperability. There’s a lot to look into here, even if the allmighty Epic never joins.

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April 8, 2013 I Written By Anne Zieger

Filed Under: Health Information Exchange HIE Hospital EHR Hospital EHR Company Hospital EHR Vendor Hospital Electronic Health Record Hospital Electronic Medical Record Hospital EMR Hospital EMR Company Hospital EMR Vendor Hospital Healthcare IT

Tags:Allscripts athenahealth Cerner CommonWell Alliance Epic Greenway McKesson

EMR Vendors Need To Get Their Act Together

For quite some time now, EMR vendors have gotten away with selling products that aren’t very usable and may even pose safety risks. But that’s the price enterprise EMR buyers have been willing to pay to jump in and automate. Very soon, though, vendors may be held to a higher standard, a new report from KLAS.

KLAS recently held a bake-off comparing Allscripts, Cerner, Epic, McKesson’s Paragon, Meditech 6 and Siemens’ Soarian EMRs head to head where it comes to usability and efficiency, SearchHealthIT reports. The study looked at how the products worked for individual users, and then looked at how they meet organizational quality of care demands.

Some of the EMRs – and I wish SearchHealthIT had told us which ones — took a full month for physicians to learn. In some cases, physicians who were willing to take that month ended up with a richer experience than those which were easy and quick to learn, while in other cases, the darned thing still wasn’t usable. Of course, those with long learning curves and unimpressive features suffered from low physician adoption, the publication notes.

This is all interesting enough, but what grabbed me about the story was a provider quote from an end user, supplied by KLAS:

“As suggested by the new 2014 certification standards, vendors should take more responsibility for both the usability and safety of their products. These responsibilities shouldn’t be the sole purview of healthcare organizations and providers like they have been until now.”

Could it be that providers have finally gotten to the point where they’re no longer going to put up with unusable products and bring the hammer down even on giants like the big-shouldered group listed above? After all, so far providers have swallowed hard and accepted a lot of ugly technology.

Maybe Meaningful Use demands are finally giving health organizations the backbone they need to stand up to Jabba the Hutt vendors?

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March 22, 2013 I Written By Anne Zieger

Filed Under: Hospital EHR Hospital EHR Company Hospital EHR Consulting Hospital EHR Vendor Hospital Electronic Health Record Hospital Electronic Medical Record Hospital EMR Hospital EMR Company Hospital EMR Vendor Hospital Healthcare IT Hospital IT Systems

Tags:Allscripts Cerner Epic KLAS McKesson MEDITECH Siemens Soarian

Epic Not Invited To CommonWell Interoperability Alliance

Well, well, well. Far from refusing to participate, it looks like Epic may have been caught off-guard when a group of EMR players announced at HIMSS that they’d formed an interoperability alliance, according to a story appearing in Forbes.

For those who haven’t heard, Cerner, McKesson, Allscripts, Greenway Medical Technologies and athenahealth announced this week that they were forming the CommonWell Health Alliance, a non-profit dedicated to promoting interoperability between their products. Epic was conspicuously absent from the list of participants.

At the announcement’s outset, commentators like yours truly assumed that Epic, in its imperial way, had refused to join the party. After all, McKesson CEO John Hammergren had told the press that “everyone in the industry” had been invited to take part in the club.

But no, apparently this isn’t the case. “No, we were not asked to join,” Carl Dvorak, COO of Epic told the business magazine’s Zina Moukheiber. “We found out about it when you guys did.” Perhaps Epic wouldn’t have joined anyway — Dvorak is more of a fan of existing interoperability standards — but leaving a $1.5 billion EMR company off of the eVite list is pretty conspicuous too.

In the article, by the way, Dvorak repeats Epic’s often-made claim that their product isn’t a closed platform, stating that one-third of Epic EMR transactions are with non-Epic systems. In fact, he says that Epic can already connect with Greenway, Cerner and Allscripts, as well as NextGen. I’m not sure everybody reading this will take that statement face value.

Invited or not, Dvorak doesn’t miss the chance to get off a shot at the CommonWell guys nonetheless. He argues, as I have, that CommonWell may be more of a PR play than a real forward movement for interoperabiility. “It’s a marketing opportunity [for vendors],” he told Forbes. “They create the perception of leaders in the space, where they’re followers.”

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March 7, 2013 I Written By Anne Zieger

Filed Under: Hospital EHR Hospital EHR Vendor Hospital Electronic Health Record Hospital Electronic Medical Record Hospital EMR Hospital EMR Company Hospital EMR Vendor Hospital Healthcare IT

Tags:Allscripts athenahealth Cerner CommonWell Health Alliance Epic Systems Greenway Medical Technologies McKesson

Top Inpatient EHR Vendors – 2013 Black Book Rankings

I think that most of you know how I feel about the various EHR ranking systems. They all have their issues, but they are another interesting data point in the search for the right EHR. Plus, the EHR ranking trends over time can be interesting. Not to mention, it’s hard not to look at a post that has rankings. It’s almost un-American not to look.

So, I figured I’d post some of the Black Book Rankings over the next week. The following are the Top Ranked EHR Vendors for Inpatient Hospital Systems, Chains and IDN (in alphabetical order).

4MEDICA
ALLSCRIPTS
CPSI
EPIC
GE HEALTHCARE
HCS EMR
HEALTH MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS
HEALTHLAND
INFOMEDIKA
KEANE
MCKESSON
MEDITECH
NEXTGEN
PROGNOSIS HIT
QUADRAMED
SEQUEL
SIEMENS
UNI/CARE
VERSASUITE

Not too many surprises on the list. Was their any Hospital EHR vendor that you think should have made it on this list? I think this list would be more interesting if it just ranked the top 5 Hospital EHR vendors.

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February 22, 2013 I Written By John

Filed Under: Hospital EHR Hospital EHR Company Hospital EHR Vendor Hospital Electronic Health Record Hospital Electronic Medical Record Hospital EMR Hospital EMR Company Hospital EMR Vendor

How Danish Leaders Are Choosing Their EMR

This is something you don’t see every day. Courtesy of my always-on-top-of-things colleague John, here’s a look at the process by which Danish government authorities are selecting an EMR for the Capital Region of Denmark.

As the TBKConsult blog notes, this is a big decision. The authorities expect to spend 135 million euros on the EMR, which will have 40,000 IT users and need to support up to 12,000 clinical and administrative users at 17 hospitals and 54 other healthcare institutions simultaneously. Once installed, the system will support a region serving 2.5 million patients.

Once chosen, the EMR will be implemented with a pilot in the Capital region and eventually, by the end of 2016, rolled out throughout Eastern Denmark.

The selection process has already narrowed down the list of possibilities to five prequalified vendors: Systematic, Epic, Cerner, Cambio and Siemens. None of the vendors have submitted official proposals yet.

What’s interesting about this isn’t the shortlist, but the means by which the authorities have decided to narrow the list down. Here’s their list of fourteen criteria by which TBKConsult expects them to do so:

Installed base and references
Clinical reputation
HIMSS/EMRAM level 6/7 certifications (Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model)
Fit for purpose – clinical processes
Fit for purpose – PAS
Fit for purpose – external integration
Software scalability – current installed base
Software scalability (SIG test)
Software maintainability (SIG test)
Price/Performance
Implementation capability
Product strategy and influence
Political preference
Staff perks and community participation

TBK Consult has also ranked the importance of each of these criteria, assigning the most weight to “Fit for purpose-clinical processes” (25 percent), “Fit for purpose-PAS” (15 percent) and “Fit for purpose-external integration” (15 percent). They rated “Implementation capability” at 10 percent and most of the rest of the criteria at 5 percent.

By their weights and ranking, vendor Cambio comes in first, Systematic second, Epic third, Cerner fourth and Siemens fifth. Intriguing. I wonder how close TBK will be when the actual results are announced?

Judy Calls Epic “Most Open System I Know”

Cleveland Clinic Brings Epic Smarts To NY Hospital Practices

Is Epic Stifling Health IT Innovation?

Only Incentives Will Make EHR Interoperability Happen

CommonWell Alliance Goals Challenged By ONC

EMR Vendors Need To Get Their Act Together

Epic Not Invited To CommonWell Interoperability Alliance

Top Inpatient EHR Vendors – 2013 Black Book Rankings

How Danish Leaders Are Choosing Their EMR

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