Here an HIE, There an HIE, Everywhere an HIE

Posted on April 29, 2013 by John

In late March, I headed down to Belize with a bunch of high school students to do some service work. Joining the crew was a parent, Harry (not his real name), who happened to be a urologist sharing a private practice with five other urologists. We got to talking about the industry, the rapid changes that are occurring and of course HIT, where the conversation quickly turned to health information exchanges (HIE).

This urologist’s practice has been using eClinicalWorks (eCW) for several years now and despite their proficiency with using this EHR, the practice has never fully recovered the productivity it once had. Regardless, they have come to accept this hit on productivity as just the cost of doing business. (Note: In Massachusetts all physicians must adopt and use an EHR to be credentialed, regardless of meaningful use or any other programs.)

Harry spends two days a week in surgery with most operations taking place in one of four facilities: local, unaffiliated hospital Winchester (who uses Meditech), Beth Israel Deanconess (has a home-grown EHR but encourages affiliate practices to adopt eCW), Childrens’ Hospital (a Cerner shop that also promotes eCW in ambulatory) and Partners which is now moving from its homegrown EHR solution to Epic (BTW, in a recent conversation with a contact at Partners learned that they are spending $1M/day for next five years on Epic switch - ouch!).

All of these hospital organizations want a closer affiliation with these urologists in support of future value-based payments and of course just getting these physicians to do more surgeries at their respective institutions. Thus, all of them want the urologist practice to adopt their interoperability model. Harry stated that Partners, the biggest healthcare organization in metro-Boston and arguably New England, is pushing particularly hard for them to switch to Epic as Epic does not have an HIE offering (Epic Everywhere is not an HIE in our definition nor apparently in ONC’s) and encourages its customers to put all ambulatory affiliates on Epic instead. In addition to these organizations, the Commonwealth is also encouraging this practice to join the statewide HIE.

After the pain and suffering Harry’s practice went through to become proficient on eCW, they are loathed to switch to Epic. Besides, switching to Epic would limit their ability to connect with other healthcare organizations they work with as Epic does not play well with others.

Harry’s situation is not unique and is likely being played out across the country, especially in urban areas where there may be a number of competing healthcare systems each trying to establish their own HIE. In such a situation what is an independent physician practice to do?

Certainly they could sell the practice, as many physicians have already done, to the highest bidder. Not an option for Harry and his physician partners as they like their independence and plan to keep it that way.

They could turn to the statewide HIE and hope that it will provide the depth of services (interoperability) to enable them to connect and share records in support of care coordination with all hospital systems they work with. Ideally, this may be the best approach but unfortunately they’ll be waiting a very long time for this to happen, if it happens at all. Today, most statewide HIEs, including Massachusetts are focused on enabling Direct secure messaging, a simple, political expediency that those in D.C. can point to as a shiny example of information exchange for the nearly half billion dollars spent on statewide HIEs. It is unlikely that most statewide HIEs will evolve beyond Direct providing the type of deep connectivity between a practice and an healthcare system to coordinate care effectively. That’s not to say we are throwing out the baby with the bathwater as there are some states that are doing exemplary work e.g., NY, IN

Then there is the option of just staying the course and hoping that lightweight connectivity directly into eCW will miraculously occur. For Harry and his partners, both Childrens and Beth Israel currently support eCW and interoperability with the acute care EHR will be supported. Partners may be left with no other option then to purchase a third party HIE solution to connect affiliate practices in the highly competitive, metro-Boston market. As for community hospital, Winchester, this hospital is unlikely to survive as an independent and will either be acquired or eventually be forced to shut its doors.

Still Waiting…
While the vast majority of ambulatory practices will ultimately be acquired, there will be a significant number of specialists who will continue to operate independently and with a number of healthcare institutions. The current hodgepodge of HIEs being stood up in various communities and the multitude in a given urban area will put increasing strain on physician practices such as Harry’s, who like any of us, given too much choice will simply forgo a decision.

Maybe, just maybe the efforts of the Interop Workgroup will take practices such as Harry’s to the promise land that will allow them to support coordinated care, in a simple streamlined fashion, amongst a wide range of healthcare organizations in their community irrespective of underlying HIT infrastructures. We have not heard of any such examples to date, but we remain hopeful as the current model being deployed today, while likely addressing the all too familiar 80% of the problem, still leaves a very critical 20% unresolved.

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Setting the Story Straight on CommonWell

Posted on April 12, 2013 by John

Arguably, the biggest news story coming out of HIMSS last month was the announcement of the CommonWell Health Alliance – a vendor-led initiative to enable query-based, clinical data sharing. So much has been written about CommonWell that there is little need to rehash what has been said before.

What has not been said, or at least has been sensationalized nearly to the point irrelevance is the whole controversy surrounding Epic and how they were not invited to join the CommonWell Alliance until after the announcement. None other than Epic’s own founder and CEO, Judy Faulkner, has gone on record stating the Epic was unaware of CommonWell prior to the announcement. Faulkner has gone on to question the motives of CommonWell, in an effort to subvert it, in her highly influential role on the Dept of Health & Human Services HIT workgroup committee.

That was the last straw.

It is one thing to moan and groan at the HIT love fest that is HIMSS, where vendors commonly discount the announcements of competitors. But it is quite another thing to be a part of a highly influential body that is defining nationwide HIT policy and make the same claims over again, especially when they are frankly not true.

Is there some truth to Faulkner’s claims that the vendors who have created CommonWell may have had an additional motive, stopping the steamroller that is Epic? More than likely.

But it is also true that founding members of the CommonWell Alliance do wish to lay down the swords of hoarding data to allow higher order services to be developed on top of the CommonWell platform. They all see the market changing rapidly. They know that they, on their own, cannot move fast enough to meet all the needs of the market. They understand that the next iteration in HIT is to move to a platform-based services model – that is where the value will be. As to whether or not CommonWell will ultimately be successful, that is far from certain as there are many rivers to cross before we see the query-based health information sharing that these alliance members envision take hold, if at all, in this industry.

From our vantage point, Epic, with its monolithic strategy that is more akin to Wang Laboratories than it is to Apple’s iOS, is operating on a model that while providing a seamless environment from ambulatory to acute (something other EHR vendors have totally messed up on), will ultimately hinder healthcare organizations’ ability to rapidly innovate and respond to market changes. Epic simply will not be able to move fast enough and their customers will struggle as a result.

As to whether or not Epic was invited to the CommonWell party; we have received confirmation from several sources that indeed Epic was invited to join a couple of weeks prior to the announcement. What likely occurred is that Epic saw that CommonWell’s goals, objectives, and operating structure were already formalized when the invite arrived. Thus, Epic would not have an ability to make substantive contributions to this initiative and rejected the invitation.

It is disingenuous for Epic to state otherwise and if they were a public company, they may have been subjected to an SEC inquiry. But alas, Epic is not a public company and Faulkner can say what she wishes with few, if any, repercussions. Her quite vocal denouncements of CommonWell though do show that she clearly does feel threatened by this alliance.

But a core mission of Chilmark is to cut through the BS to ensure that this industry is informed. In keeping with that mission, we felt it important to let you know what is really happening behind the scenes at CommonWell. Hopefully, we have set the story straight on the CommonWell Health Alliance and Epic saga.

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Who will regulate mHealth? Patient Engagement at Crossroads; New Alliance Takes On Interoperability

Posted on April 4, 2013 by John

We came back from HIMSS and got right to work on the March Monthly Update for Chilmark Advisory Services subscribers. As we’ve reported in a previous post, HIMSS13 afforded enormous buzz and less enlightenment regarding the state of health IT, particularly the four key areas we see as essential to this industry making a true difference in patient care. In our March update, and the reports currently underway, Chilmark Research does the opposite: provide insight without buzz. Below are abstracts from this month’s update. To find out how you can receive the full update, send an email to: info at chilmarkresearch dot com

Public vs. Private Oversight of Mobile Health
John Moore III

mHealth, known for rapid innovation and iteration, has a tendency to buck at the snail’s pace of FDA regulation. Last month, during a series of hearings considering whether smartphones and tablets with medical apps qualify as medical devices and thus require FDA approval, many charged the FDA with stifling innovation. After all, how many developers or investors want to sink resources into an industry that will be regulated in ways that have yet to be determined?

Enter Happtique and its Health App Certification Program. Happtique intends to complement the work of the FDA, and has introduced a set of standards for health apps that fall into the grey area between apps that are clearly medical and those with a clear consumer focus. This could herald a new age of credibility for mHealth. However, as both regulator and marketplace for many of the apps that it regulates, Happtique could end up in a very sticky situation. They will need to tread carefully to maintain their objectivity in both certifying apps while at the same time providing a marketplace for mHealth apps.

The March Toward Better Patient Engagement
Naveen Rao

The open question in health IT these days is whether patient engagement will gain traction or if it will suffer the same fate as PHRs. One thing is certain; healthcare needs far better patient engagement methods, processes and techniques than what one finds today as most current efforts in engagement have very little to do with helping a patient manage a condition. Time and again in our discussions with healthcare institutions of all sizes we find the same scenario being played out – engagement today is focused on building patient/customer loyalty to the institution – they are simply no more than marketing efforts.

Stage 2 meaningful use is requiring a deeper level of patient access to their records via view, download and transmit requirements and there is even a requirement for some email messaging between provider and patient. But there is a bigger issue at play, payment reform wherein providers will be taking on more risk for the patient populations they manage. Without deeper engagement with the patient regarding a chronic disease, providers will struggle with these new payment risk models.

Several related markets, such as telemonitoring and wearable tech are taking off. Chilmark analyst Naveen Rao spent near-exclusive attention to the patient-engagement tracks, vendors, and sessions at HIMSS13. In his article for the March update, Naveen identifies three factors that will define if and how well the patient-engagement market will stay afloat in the coming years.

CommonWell Alliance Intends to Tackle Interop
John Moore

The announcement of CommonWell Health Alliance was likely the biggest story to come out of HIMSS (Allscripts acquiring longtime HIE partner dbMotion may have been a close second). The group’s stated purpose is to enable interoperability across the five founding members’ EHRs. For starters at least, this includes: Allscripts, athenahealth, Cerner, Greenway, and McKesson’s RelayHealth division. In its simplest form, CommonWell will establish a set of standards and services that enable query-based health information sharing in a heterogeneous EHR environment.

Part of the challenge with interoperability within a community of heterogeneous EHRs is that standards are useless when it comes to things like patient matching, consent management, or locating records, all of which are fundamental to interoperability and all of which require standardized services model. CommonWell founders know this and have plans to address it. The greatest challenge facing CommonWell, however, may be the market itself as adoption of HIE tech within the ambulatory sector remains a challenge.

Each month, subscribers to the Chilmark Advisory Services (CAS) receive an update of our research on the most transformative trends in the healthcare IT sector. Exclusive to CAS subscribers, monthly updates are part of the continuous feed of information and analysis we generate to keep subscribers on top of the rapid-fire changes in this market.

Caradigm Kills eHealth, Partners with Orion

Posted on March 27, 2013 by John

Today, Caradigm and Orion Health announced their partnership wherein Caradigm will go to market with Orion Health’s HIE solution suite and likewise Orion Health will take Caradigm’s analytics solution, Caradigm Intelligence Platform (CIP) to market to its existing and future customers. Existing Caradigm customers (~20) who are now on the eHealth platform will be put on life-support and encouraged to make the transition to Orion’s solution in the coming year.

Orion Health has had a long relationship with Microsoft, including acquiring Microsoft’s Amalga HIS solution and partnering with Orion to combine the then Amalga UIS with Orion’s HIE solution. Shortly after this announcement was made though, Microsoft threw in the towel on the clinical market combining its assets with a collection of those from GE which resulted in the NewCo, Caradigm.

As part of the establishment of Caradigm, GE contributed eHealth, its HIE solution suite that was co-developed with Geisinger and Qualibria, a quality management platform developed in conjunction with InterMountain. With the death of eHealth and a product which has yet to see the light of day (Qualibria) its beginning to look like GE brought very little to the Caradigm relationship.

Back to the Orion-Caradigm partnership…

As we have written in the past the core services that HIE vendors offered in the past are quickly being commoditized by such things as Direct secure messaging being embedded in future certified EHRs for stage two meaningful use requirements. With the recent announcement of CommonWell Health Alliance, even query type services may also become commoditized.

Clearly, to stay competitive and relevant, HIE vendors need to move to what we term as HIE 2.0, providing more advanced services that leverage the data flowing through the “pipes” of an HIE to more effectively manage the health of a given community the HIE serves. This is particularly important for enterprise clients ( a market Orion is now targeting) and can also assist public HIEs (Orion’s traditional market) in providing value-add services that may help them reach nirvana (sustainability). With CIP, Orion can provide a more compelling offering. The big challenge here for Orion will be in effectively pricing and deploying CIP, (Amalga UIS was notoriously expensive and difficult to deploy. Caradigm has rebranded Amalga Version 3, a much improved version architecturally, as CIP to distance themselves from the stigma of the Amalga brand).

While the relationship provides value to Orion, it may provide even greater value to Caradigm, a company that has stumbled to gain traction in the market. Orion provides a ready channel to market via Orion’s existing broad HIE customer base – one of the world’s largest. Orion also provides Caradigm an effective exit from directly participating in the HIE market with a solution that frankly was not up to the task. The announcement also claims that Orion has agreed to develop applications for the CIP which contributes to Caradigm’s goal of being perceived as a platform play in the market. What those apps may be is still an open question. Based on the language in the PR, it looks like not a lot of thought has gone into that aspect of the relationship yet.

Now we’ll just have to wait and see how this plays out in the market.

What to watch:

Joint customer wins – who and where.
How many existing eHealth clients transition directly to Orion or jettison for another HIE vendor entirely.
Apps that Orion builds for CIP.
Existing Orion clients that purchase CIP and whether or not we see accelerated growth in such purchases or an initial surge followed by stagnation.

Both companies have something to gain in this relationship and will strive to make it work. But such partnerships can be extremely difficult to manage in the field. It will require close collaboration, a significant degree of trust and a willingness to give. Despite its large size and massive parents (MSFT & GE), Caradigm will need to give more to make this truly work.

Editor’s Note: A more in-depth deep dive into this partnership and its implications will be a part of our April Monthly Update that will be distributed to Chilmark Advisory Service clients.

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Finding Few Answers at HIMSS’13

Posted on March 13, 2013 by John

Last week was yet another HIMSS, this time in the Big Easy – one of my favorite cities, despite the unfortunate decay occurring on Bourbon St. As with the many HIMSS I have attended before, this is the seminal event of the year where one has the opportunity to reconnect with friends, acquitances and countless others all in the hope of gaining a pulse on the healthcare IT (HIT) industry.

Having been barraged with countless invites in advance of the show to meet with this or that vendor, I winnowed down the number of meetings to a select few and even then, had far more on my plate then I could reasonably consume over the three plus days that I was there. And of course, there were the countless press releases I received during the week of HIMSS, nearly all of them barely worth the digital type and bandwidth used to create and distribute.

So easy to get lost in all this noise. I just can’t fathom how a healthcare executive is suppose to wade through it on their own, let alone the staff that reports up into them.

This year’s HIMSS pilgrimage was to seek knowledge within four core areas:

State of innovation in HIT,
Greater understanding on the state of analytics adoption,
Market maturity with regards to population health management and
Is the industry finally taking true patient engagement seriously?

Following are findings and musings on these four.

Innovation – Where is it?
For all the talk of innovation in this sector, it is astonishing just how little there truly is. I searched high and low for real innovation and came up dry. Even went to the Venture Fair on Sunday to see what a number of young companies are bringing to market and found little to capture my imagination. Either this is a sign that I have been in this market too long or maybe a sign of just how challenging this market can be for those who wish to truly be innovative, to be disruptive. Walking the halls of HIMSS, one certainly gets the feeling that this is a show that is not about leveraging HIT for disruptive purposes, but to maintain the status quo.

One of the few glimmers of hope for future innovation may come from an unlikely source; the consortium of five EHR vendors that have committed to the CommonWell Health Alliance. While one must be cautious in throwing one’s support behind such an initiative, I threw caution to the wind in a brief interview after the announcement.

Why the enthusiasm?

If CommonWell succeeds in its mission to create an information sharing platform across these five vendors – and others should they join – we’ll finally, as an industry, move beyond competing on data silos ultimately providing a higher level of functionality to the end user. On top of this sharing platform, we may then begin to see true innovation occur – innovation that taps the data that flows across the CommonWell network. Of course this is all dependent on just how “open” CommonWell will be and that is something we will not know for at least a year. – Yes, healthcare moves slow.

Analytics – Why is it?
The market for healthcare analytics has been hyped beyond imagination but beyond the hype is what appears to be a complete lack of why this industry is even pursuing analytics. There appears to be very little underlying justifications as to why a healthcare organization should be doing analytics in the first place.

Time and again, in one discussion after another, we found a very immature buyers’ market for analytics solutions. Most buyers cannot answer, with any degree of specificity, the simple questions: Why do we want an analytics solution? – What is the business case? And its not just the buyers as many vendors complained of the horrible RFPs that they are receiving which were drafted by some big name consulting firms. One vendor told us point-blank:

“We are no longer responding to RFPs as they are such garbage and a waste of time. If we can’t connect at the most senior strategic level of the organization, then we know that they do not have the maturity of thought to begin the conversation, let alone the journey.”

As most of you already know, Cora is working on the report: Analytics for Population Risk Management that will be released in April. It is our goal to help clear the air and educate this market and if anyone can do it, it is Cora.

Population Health – What is it?
And to think, I though analytics was an over-hyped market. Analytics has nothing on the next big market buzzword, population health management (PHM). Much like the fable of the blind men and the elephant, population health is whatever you wish to make of it or whatever part of the healthcare elephant you happen to be attached to.

What a mess. Despite all the hype on PHM, which comes under many guises including Accountable Care Solutions, Systems or Suite, I did not come across a single vendor that had a complete solution suite. Even those vendors that have significant pieces of a PHM solution, still have not knitted their portfolio together to be a seamless offering. Buyers of such solutions will be spending a lot of money on services to stich these things together for the next 2-3 years.

In the second half of the year, Chilmark Research intends to devote a significant amount of resources to fully flesh-out what is meant by PHM, what are the critical components to enable such and where one might go to find them. Stay tuned.

Patient Engagement – How is it?
Anyone who has followed Chilmark Research and my ramblings for more than a couple of years knows that I have a soft spot for patient engagement. It was within this broad category that I got my start with the publication of the iPHR Market Trends Report in 2008. While that market has not developed sufficiently to support a full-time analyst, it is still an area we track closely and in addition to myself, both Cora and Naveen keep tabs on this market. Naveen will give some of his HIMSS impressions next week wherein he’ll focus specifically on patient engagement.

Waiting with bated breath for this market to take off is fraught with futility. Despite the quite vocal efforts of ONC to push patient engagement to the forefront, I still see most programs at healthcare institutions being funded by marketing departments. It is not about engagement, its about loyalty. Even HIMSS seems to recognize this as they had a number of screens scattered throughout the convention center that flashed four screens: 1) Healthy Patient, 2) Connected Patient, 3) Informed Patient, 4) Stronger Patient which left me wondering…

Where is the engaged patient?

Without engagement folks we are dead in the water for only an engaged patient will take the necessary steps to actively managed their health.

Wrap-up
HIMSS is what it is, a large conference that gathers just about everyone interested in the HIT market in one place. But in such a gathering, a significant amount of noise is created leaving one wondering: Does this conference provide real enlightenment and clarity to the market and the solutions therein, or does it just create greater confusion?

Reflecting on the conference and reviewing my notes for this post I find it is some of both, with a weighting towards noise and confusion. In the coming months, as we release our reports on HIEs, Analytics and later this year, those on population health and patient engagement, we intend to provide the clarity that all stakeholders need to have informed discussions and ultimately make informed decisions. That in a nutshell is the purpose of Chilmark and what guides us our research agenda.

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Reorg at McKesson, Will Docs Trust Predictive Analytics & Med Rec

Posted on March 7, 2013 by John

What a crazy week it has been. Yes, it was the week of all things HIT related with the big confab of HIMSS a the Big Easy. I’m literally still trying to sort out all that I saw, all the conversations I had to make some sense of it all. Needless to say, at times it seems that rather than providing enlightenment, the incessant noise of HIMSS just sweeps over one like a tsunami leaving behind debris of all matters.

But we’ll get to HIMSS next week – I promise.

In the meantime, below are just a few of the topics that we covered in our most recent Chilmark Advisory Service (CAS) Monthly Update. The research notes contained within this monthly provide you with a glimmer of some of our current areas of research interest. For example, the reorg at McKesson is but one example of the massive trend (which was readily apparent at HIMSS) of companies repositioning themselves for population health management in support of financially-linked communities of care (e.g., ACOs). Cora’s research in analytics has brought to light some of the challenges that well-meaning executives may face when trying to get clinicians to adopt and use predictive analytics. While Brian’s story delves into the vexing problem of medication reconciliation within a distributed healthcare community.

The abstracts below provide provide a few more details. But far better than abstracts is of course – drum roll please – becoming a subscriber to CAS where you not only receive a wide range of research content from us over the course of a year, but also direct access to our top-notch team of analysts. Want more information? Just drop us a line to info@ChilmarkResearch.com and we’ll be in touch.

Reorg at McKesson Points to Broader Repositioning
In early February, McKesson Technology Solutions went through a major reorganization and the primary beneficiary appears to be RelayHealth. Historically, RelayHealth has seemed little more than a staging area for McKesson-acquired HIT assets that did not fit logically into any other area of the broader McKesson Technology Solutions Group. With the reorg, RelayHealth not only grows in size, it finally appears to have been given a clear and overarching mission: to become McKesson’s solution to enable population health management. ACOs would be wise to take note.

Will Providers Ever Trust Predictive Analytics
Analytics vendors are approaching the clinical market with predictive models as end-alls for population health risk management. However, doctors, nurses, and case managers have their own ideas about what clinical variables really matter, and they can identify their highest-risk patients practically from memory — no fancy models needed. While there are reasons to be optimistic about PA adoption, vendors should brace themselves for a tough market in which clinical intuition will clash with statistics. One option will be to integrate provider-identified variables into vendor models, an approach that will likely infuriate the statisticians but could go a long way in overcoming clinician misgivings.

Medications Reconciliation Continues to Challenge HIE Vendors
In best-case scenarios, medications reconciliation can help avoid adverse drug events by pointing out discrepancies such as missing medications, unneeded medications or incorrect doses at patient discharge. Yet even now that HIT solutions built to support safe hand-offs have been widely deployed, the AHRQ attributes 770,000 deaths per year to ADEs. Meaningful use gives PCPs the responsibility for post-discharge medications reconciliation and as of yet, insufficient tools to do so. Thanks to inconsistent process and technologies across providers, the medications lists PCPs have to work with are riddles with irrelevant medication data, (e.g. a three-year old prescription to treat foot fungus) and missing information (e.g. medications paid for out of pocket). Before medications reconciliation lives up to its promise, serious gaps like this will need to be addressed.

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