Health Organizations Investing In Best-of-Breed ACO Tools

With accountable care becoming the standard for providers, more and more are seeking out best-of-breed vendors that can fill in the gaps in their health IT lineup and meet expected ACO requirements. It seems that just having it EMR in place doesn’t do the trick by itself.

That, at least, is the conclusion one can draw from the latest KLAS report , which finds that 65 percent of providers surveyed are looking at niche vendors to address emerging population health, HIE and business intelligence needs, reports Healthcare IT News.

To draw this conclusion, KLAS spoke with 73 organizations, mostly medium to large sized ID ends in hospitals to see where they are in the ACO journey.

The survey’s results surprised researcher Mark Allphin, who wrote the report, Healthcare IT News notes.

As Allphin sees it, it’s much more common these days to see healthcare organizations move towards integrating their IT properties. The idea that some are more focused on finding best-of-breed tools to address ACO needs, rather than relying on their EMRs, “tells us that the ACO market very likely still up for grabs,” Allphin said.

We’ve known all along that the ACO game was going to be an expensive one. If KLAS is right, it’s going to be a whole new independent marketplace, in which providers shop for calls that fill in huge gaps in their existing ACO toolkit. If I were CIO, however, I’d be pretty annoyed that the huge investment made situation made in an EMR can’t get the job done all by itself.

Now the question is which health IT areas hospitals and medical practices will take on first; after all, there’s lots of ways to attack the question of how to prepare for the new, bold ACO world. My guess is that tools supporting population health measures will be particularly popular, as population health management is a key capability ACOs bring to the table that health systems alone may not.

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.

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