Epic | Hospital EMR and EHR

Hospital EHR Subsidies

In response to Anne’s post on Senator’s questioning the meaningful use EHR incentive money, Gary Colvin emailed me the following comment:

I would argue for the case where the only reason some providers are in the M.U. game is due to their Hospital subsidies. Instead of paying approx $1,200/ month to lease out their Epic E.M.R., they are enjoying its benefits for under $300 per month. What happens when the subsidy goes away for good? I think you would be hard pressed to see a four doc family practice paying $4,800 / month to enjoy that system — so, when the subsidy goes away (maybe it will be extended to 2016?) it will surely have an impact on who stays in the game.

I did question Gary on his algebra of the cost of Epic per doctor and he said that he got numbers from his hospital which is a public hospital where the pricing has to be transparent. It actually makes me wonder what other EHR pricing data could be uncovered from various publicly available sources. I wonder if data geek Fred Trotter has ever worked on this.

Regardless, I think the EHR subsidies is an important topic. I’ve known many doctors that are afraid of the hospital EHR subsidy because of the lock in it creates with the hospital. However, in many areas the lock in is already there so it doesn’t matter.

I wonder if hospitals are worried what it will mean for them once the EHR subsidies are no longer available.

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.

Epic Module Targets Patients For Care Coordination

At Gundersen Lutheran Health System, executives have put together a program to target the 1 to 2 percent of those most likely to be hospitalized, seen in the emergency department or face other complications. To manage the program, the La Crosse, Wis.-based system is leveraging a feature of their Epic EMR which sifts out the patients most in need of additional care coordination, reports Health Data Management.

Gundersen Lutheran is targeting complex patients with its program, but not just those with medically-complex conditions. They’re also hoping to find patients who, while they might have simpler conditions, live alone or have trouble following sometimes difficult medical care plans. The system is using the EMR first to identify the patients, then to treat them, according to Health Data Management.

To find patients in need of extra care coordination services, Gundersen is using a “tiered scoring” module built in to the Epic platform which includes one component for medical complexity and another to measure psycho-social issues. When clinicians want to refer a patient to the care coordination program, physicians use the Epic scoring tool to see if the patient qualifies. Clinicians can also notify the care coordination team using the Epic system, in three clicks or less, noted Beth Smith, R.N., executive director of patient and family-centered care at the health system.

The patients identified by the scoring model as in need of extra care coordination are farmed out to a group of 22 nurses and social workers, whose job it is to monitor the care of these complex patients who are more likely to face adverse events.

The workload the care coordinators face is intense. Typically, care managers are supervising some 1,700 patients each, who not only stay in touch with patients but also attend office visits and follow through with specialists. Epic plays a role here too, however. Care coordinators get a special tab in the Epic EMR which pulls key elements of the patient’s history into a single view, making it easier to get a sense of the whole patient. Epic also notifies them via a message in the system if a patient shows up in the ED.

According to Health Data Management, this program has helped stabilize hypertensive and diabetic patients, with just under half showing sustained improvements over a two-year period.

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May 15, 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: Clinical Decision Support Hospital EHR Hospital EHR Company Hospital EHR Vendor Hospital Electronic Health Record Hospital Electronic Medical Record Hospital EMR Hospital EMR Company Hospital Healthcare IT

Tags:Care Coordination Epic Epic EMR Epic Systems Gundersen Lutheran Health System

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

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

Epic Installation Fuels Maine Controversy

Ordinarily, the fact that integrated delivery system MaineHealth had spent $150 million on an Epic EMR system wouldn’t excite a lot of comment. After all, say what you like about Epic, it doesn’t come cheaply, and a $150 million install is at the low-ish end of what hospitals are spending to put the vendor’s system in place.

This time, though, the health system is taking fire from the community, in part because it’s decided to close 22-bed St. Andrews Hospital in Boothbay Harbor, reports EHR Intelligence.

In an open letter published in the Boothbay Register, local selectman and St. Andrews Regional Task Force member Stuart Smith argues that the Epic install cost is “extremely high.”

Smith also notes that Maine Health has had a bad time with the installation, which was supposed to go live on December 1, 2012 and now looks as though it won’t go live until 2015. As Smith sees it, a lot of money and time is being wasted on the Epic project:

Millions of dollars have been charged to member hospitals and staff time (salaries and mileage) over the past 2–3 years with no benefit. The system failure also adds operational costs going forward that were not planned for and regional consolidation of finance will now be delayed.

As things stand, Smith notes, the planned closure of St. Andrews is part of a larger shuffle moving urgent and emergency services around which has led to roughly $2 million in losses for the facility.

With St. Andrews wobbly, leaders are considering merging it with struggling Miles Memorial Hospital, a combination which could allow its owners to keep $5 million in federal reimbursement by keeping its critical access hospital designation.

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

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

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- Hospital EHR Subsidies (3)
  - Jed Batchelder: Great topic, John. In my experience helping hospitals design subsidy programs, I’ve found that...
  - John: JennaB, But Medicare and Medicaid pay so well…oh wait, no they’re one of the lowest payers. I...
  - JennaB: What happens to those that have taken all the incentive money, and when the incentive is over, they quit...
- Judy Calls Epic “Most Open System I Know” (6)
  - FormerEpic: John, I am sure you had a thoughtful chat with Judy, but trust me, it was calculated. Everything they do...
  - Deborah C.Peel, MD: Whether other people or companies can easily develop apps for Epic systems overlooks the elephant...
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