Category Archives: EHR

Will Surescripts Become De facto NwHIN?

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Just as Healtheway looks to ween itself off the federal gravy train, Surescripts comes along and in a couple of quick strokes looks ready to drive a stake into the heart of Healtheway or at least any desire Healtheway may have to become the Nationwide Health Information Network (NwHIN).

It all started when Surescripts acquired collaborative HIE messaging vendor Kryptiq in late August. This was quickly followed a week later with Surescripts’ announcement that it would become Epic’s vendor of choice for cross-EHR connectivity. It appears that Epic has finally succumbed to the inevitable; that it will need to open up its system (Epic’s purported Epic Elsewhere, to address cross EHR connectivity was in reality Epic Nowhere – just vaporware) to communicate in a heterogeneous EHR environment. The Surescripts Clinical Interoperability (CI) network solution will become an “Epic Unit” and on Epic’s price sheet. The details of this story were covered in our September Monthly Update for CAS subscribers. Continue reading →

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Cerner Takes a Road Less Traveled

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Cerner is embarking on a journey of transformation. That transformation, if successful, will culminate in Cerner becoming more than a health IT company to becoming a health company. They’ve tested much of this strategy internally with onsite campus clinics, health and wellness challenges, the creation of rich consumer/patient engagement tools, heck, they have even created their own third party administrator (TPA) as Cerner is self-insured. The company wishes to take these lessons learned, these solutions that have been developed, to transform their company into a health company to address not only the patient experience in a clinical setting, but the patient/consumer health experience throughout the community.

This is all a part of Cerner’s Healthe Intent strategy, a strategy we received a deep dive in during our recent attendance to the Cerner User Conference in early October. Healthe Intent is a big, grand, bold vision in an industry where there seems to be a dearth of such visions. Whether or not Cerner is successful, Healthe Intent certainly has its fair share of challenges, rests more with Cerner than any other outside force. Continue reading →

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A Layer Above it All: Healtheway’s Value Prop

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Now that NwHIN has been spun-out into the public-private entity Healtheway one has to wonder exactly what value they can deliver to market that will sustain them as they attempt to ween themselves from the federal spigot. Healtheway has no lack of challenges ahead but they intend to target one area that presents an interesting opportunity. Question is: Are they too early to market?

During a recent webinar, Healtheway’s interim executive director, Mariann Yeager, outlined the origin of Healtheway, the apparent traction Healtheway is gaining in the market and what their plan is going forward.

Healtheway got its start via funding from a variety of federal sources, all of whom who were looking for a solution to address their unique problems. For the Social Security Administration it was the need for a nationwide network to facilitate processing of disability claims. For the VA and lesser extent DoD it was the need to enable military personnel to receive care in the public sector and insure that their records were complete. Health & Human Services led most of the development effort leading to NHIN CONNECT, a less than stellar technology platform built by beltway bandits (who else), that hit the market with a thud.

One of the things the feds did get right though is a clear and comprehensive policy for data use sharing across disparate entities. The DURSA (data use and reciprocal support agreement) remains one of the key differentiators in Healtheway’s portfolio. Healtheway’s intent is to leverage the DURSA as the “unifying trust framework” and build upon that with a common set of technical exchange requirements (standards) to facilitate exchange with eHealth Exchange (this replaces the former NwHIN Exchange). Healtheway has also enlisted CCHIT to perform testing of technology vendors solutions to insure they comply with the technical exchange requirements that will allow for HIE-to-HIE connectivity.

That last sentence is the kicker. Healtheway and its eHealth Exchange is not intended to be an uber-national HIE but a set of policies and technical specs that will allow HIEs, be they public or private, to share information across institutional boundaries. Therefore, Healtheway will not get into the current rat’s nest of looking to on-board the multitude of ambulatory EHRs into an HIE but sit one level above that facilitating exchange across HIEs. This is something that many regional and state HIE programs are looking to facilitate, thus it is not surprising to see that a significant proportion of Healtheway members come from such organizations.

There will be a need for this functionality at some future point in time, but not today and likely not tomorrow either. Three key challenges stand in their way:

1) Getting buy-in from healthcare organizations and technology vendors. While membership has indeed grown, Healtheway is offering membership at a discount (likely a loss) to gain traction and unfortunately they still do not have significant traction as many brand names in healthcare are missing.

2) A tainted history with more than its share of missteps. Slowly coming out from under the wing of federal politics as a pseudo independent organization (Board still has plenty of government influence), Healtheway may begin to act more as an independent organization, more like a business. Unfortunately, due to a likely continual need for government funding that independence will likely be limited.

3) The HIE market, both from a technology, policy and implementation/deployment perspective is still primitive. The broad market is simply nowhere near the point of needing what Healtheway intends to offer for a few years to come, at least as it pertains to the exchange of clinical data. Good idea, too early to market. That being said, tehre will be value on the transaction side, e.g., SSA and disability claims processing.

Hopefully the future will prove us wrong on this one and Healtheway will indeed prosper and contribute to the maturity of the HIE market. But our advice, don’t bet on this horse just yet, give them six months than take a second look.

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Limits and Lags in Healthcare Productivity

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In a recent Health Affairs blog, Alex Goldsmith does a back-of-the-envelope analysis of the peculiar economics of healthcare. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment in healthcare increased by 1.149 million people from 2007-2011. He contrasts this increase in employment (read increased cost) with declining hospital admissions, low single-digit growth in hospital outpatient volumes and declining physician office visit volume (read declining economic output). A New England Journal of Medicine article published in Oct. 2011 also showed a net percentage decrease in productivity growth (see figure below).

Over this same time period there has been steadily increasing investment in IT for hospitals and doctor’s offices much of it as a result of the HITECH Act that was passed in 2009. Compared to ten years ago, more healthcare workers are doing less healthcare with more information technology. And little over a week ago a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Stephen Soumerai and Ross Koppel pulled no punches, calling the savings to be gained from IT in healthcare “chimerical.” We have known for a long time that providers themselves insist that productivity drops after installing an EHR and there is little evidence to refute such claims and plenty of evidence to support them.

The absence of productivity improvements or cost savings after big IT investments is neither new nor unique to healthcare. Way back in 1987, Nobel laureate and MIT professor Robert Solow famously said, “We see computers everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”  For the next ten years, economists leveled forests (this was a pre-internet time after all) trying to explain away the Solow productivity paradox. While the dotcom boom rendered productivity paradoxes as interesting as bell-bottom pants, few would now contest that increased use of IT drives productivity improvements. It is just a long journey to get there with some successfully surviving the journey and others not. There are plenty of examples in other industry sectors of companies that did not effectively adopt and use IT, ultimately contributing to their downfall.

The EHR Incentive Program and all of the other IT-related ONC and CMS programs have a host of now familiar policy objectives. The fact that IT is at their center says loudly that CMS is trying to coax incremental productivity improvements from a reluctant system.

So where are the productivity improvements in healthcare? While we are only one year into the meaningful use (MU) saga, we would argue that we are seeing three things: 1) the limits to IT as a productivity-boosting panacea, 2) a lag between the investment in IT and a productivity payoff and 3) an existing reimbursement model that does not effectively support IT adoption that is in alignment with meaningful use objectives.

Providers that invest: Most of the current incentives for IT adoption are aimed at the point of the healthcare spear: CMS is willing to pay most frontline clinicians in private practices, clinics and hospitals to adopt IT. These same frontline clinicians, however, are increasingly frustrated and burned-out by the fee-for-service treadmill. Simply getting a primary care physician (PCP) to meaningfully use an EHR will not allow her to suddenly double her patient load. If anything, it will likely decrease office productivity for at least a year as all staff members become familiar with and effective in using an EHR.

Measures like the Stage 2 MU objectives build on that basic EHR to let that same PCP leverage work done in other parts of the healthcare system to deliver more coordinated care. The PCP still can’t double her workload but she might be able to accomplish more in each encounter. In this instance, we see the lag between the investment in a basic EHR and the enhanced productivity of a more interoperable EHR, a time lag measured in years.

Providers that do not invest or under-invest: These incentives are not available to some segments of the provider community (e.g. skilled nursing facilities, behavioral health facilities). The limit is that non-incented providers presumably will invest modestly or not at all in EHRs, interoperable or otherwise. In this instance, the lag may well be a very long time.

Further, incentives are voluntary. Eligible providers can IT-up and take the money — or not. Nearly half of eligible hospitals have collected something under the EHR Incentive Program. The ranks of qualifying EPs, while still low, continue to grow and we will likely see a majority of EPs sign-on to this program.

The Wall Street Journal op-ed claims that ONC and providers are captives of the healthcare IT vendors.  The authors suggest that vendors, presumably in an effort to protect their markets, blocked efforts to make EHRs more interoperable, effectively blunting cost or productivity improvements. This is a fair criticism, probably true, and a clear limit to what we could expect from Stage 1 MU.

However, providers in a pure fee-for-service world have rarely found sufficient value in adoption of EHRs to justify the investment, thus the need for incentives. As the market slowly shifts reimbursement to value-based metrics, the justification to invest in an EHR begins to look more attractive to a PCP. Coupling this with future, MU Stage 2, certified EHR solutions that will better support care coordination across a heterogenous EHR landscape in a given community, the potential for true improvements in productivity appear promising. There is even a potential silver lining for providers that do not invest or under-invest as even the left-behinds have at least have a fax machine and a browser and may begin to enjoy some of the productivity gains of a reformed, networked system.

The network effect that kicks-in over time may like a rising tide, lift all boats. But this is a very slow tide that will rise over many years. Now the question is: How many of those boats have holes in them and will forever rest on the ocean’s bottom or does the tide simply rise too slow and others just pull their boats out of the water?

Note: This post has been authored by our newest analyst, Brian Murphy a former employee of Eclipsys, IBM and others as well as a former analyst for Yankee Group. Find out more about Brian on our About page.

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The Promise of a Little Blue Button

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Yesterday, I was in Washington DC to attend ONC’s Consumer Health IT Summit. While having high hopes for some breathtaking new developments, ultimately walked away disappointed as this event ultimately devolved into a Blue Button promotional event. Now I have nothing wrong with some promotion, after all my background is heavily steeped in marketing. What I do have a problem with, as an analyst, is major hype around any concept, technology, etc. that is not balanced with some serious, thoughtful critique.

There were times when I thought this event felt more like a channeling of a Health 2.0 event with the clarion call of “Give me my damn data” being chanted. At times like that I had to pinch myself to remember, no, I’m in the grand hall of the Hubert Humphrey Building. Of course the multiple, large portraits of past HHS Secretaries hanging from the walls was also a clear reminder of exactly where I was.

But despite some shortcomings, the event was focused around what may be the government’s (VA & CMS) finest contributions to promoting patient engagement – the Blue Button. The Blue Button was first released in 2010 by the VA to allow veterans to gain access and control of their personal health information (PHI). CMS later released their own version of Blue Button that allowed beneficiaries access to their claims data. The VA thought Blue Button would be a success if they saw 25K Vets use this capability. The VA passed that number long ago and now, two short years later, the doors have literally been blown off that original estimate with some one million patients now using Blue Button to gain access and control of their PHI.

That is a phenomenal rate of adoption especially when one considers what they actually have access to.

A Blue Button download does not give one a well formatted easy to read file of their PHI. No a Blue Button download is nothing more than a simple ASCII text file and when you look at such a file dump, it isn’t pretty. Thankfully, ASCII has been around since we were hunting the great wooly mammoth during the ice ages so just about any piece of software (e.g., legacy EHRs and claims data bases) can easily create an ASCII file and developers can likewise take an ASCII file and repurpose that text into something fairly legible.

One company doing just that is Humetrix who I first met at the HDI Forum in June. They were also present at this event where they gave me a quick demo of their latest version of iBlueButton – a nice piece of mHealth software that takes the ASCII file from a Blue Button download and reformats it into a very easy to read and decipher file that a consumer can share with their care team. There is even an iPad version designed specifically for physicians, which gets to my next point.

Whenever I am in the company of physicians, I often ask them how they are coping with the changes taking place and specifically adoption of HIT. Had one such conversation Sunday while I was doing the charity Jimmy Fund Marathon walk for cancer research. On this walk there are always quite a few oncologists and nurses and seeing as you’re walking for a good many miles, plenty of time to talk.

I asked one oncologist about HIT adoption at Dana Farber and meaningful use to which he quickly replied: “Meaningful use is the bane of our existence right now.” So I asked further: What problem could HIT really solve for him? He had a ready answer: “Rather than a new patient showing up with a mound of paper records that I must laboriously review, I want a digital version of a new patient’s record with labs, pathology, images, meds, etc. all readily laid out so I can make a more rapid assessment to define a treatment plan for that patient.”

Now we could wait until all the HIEs are in place, all DURSAs are signed resulting in frictionless data flows between healthcare institutions. We could wait until every certified EHR for Stage Two is deployed and physicians start using Direct messaging. We could also wait for patients to request under Stage Two that their provider transmit records to another (still not sure how complete those records need to be to meet Stage Two). Or we could enable Blue Button, educate the public and let them take direct control of their PHI and share it with whom they see fit. Plenty of options but if we really want to change healthcare, the last one is the most impactful, the most viable, but unfortunately like the others, it will take some time, though likely less than getting those DURSAs signed.

Getting back to yesterday’s event and my disappointment, following is what I would like to see in the future:

Honest and frank discussion on giving patients access to their records. The American Hospital Association was in vehement opposition to the Stage Two rules on patient access to their records. Let’s put them on stage to explain why, to give that contrarian viewpoint, to provide balance.

Enlist providers to discuss the benefits and challenges of giving patients access to their records. How does patient access to records change the conversation of care? How does it impact the workflow of a practice? What fears may physicians have and how do we address them?

Fewer panels of talking heads and more real world perspectives. The event had a wonderful moment when a Vietnam veteran talk about his healthcare challenges and how Blue Button contributed significantly to his self-management. Let see more of that, e.g. a Medicare patient using Blue Button.

And my biggest disappointment of all had nothing to do with this event – it had to do with Stage Two.

If indeed the feds really believe in the Blue Button the same way they believe in Direct then why the h*ll did they not directly put it into the certification criteria for EHRs. Clearly something went amiss and it is unfortunate.

Thankfully, many vendors have stated they will support Blue Button in a forthcoming release including Allscripts, athenahealth, Cerner, Greenway, and many others. Our last HIE report also found just over 25% of vendors profiled intend to support Blue Button in 2012. There is momentum here already, now we just need to on-board physicians to talk to their patients about the value of having access to and control of their PHI for as we move to more capitated models of care, the engaged patient may indeed be the miracle drug to rescue our healthcare system from financial collapse.

Addendum: Have received feedback regarding Stage Two and patient access to their records so let me clarify. Stage Two does indeed grant a patient the ability to access, view and transmit their records. This is incredibly powerful, especially with the push towards standards and the transmitted file being in a CDA standard format. As Keith Boone so clearly articulates, the content package that is transmitted under Stage Two is a fairly complete, summary document of care received and an individual’s health status. But Stage Two does not support an ability to transmit a full and complete longitudinal record. It is my understanding that the Blue Button, at least the instance at the VA, allows a patient to download their complete record thus why I took the argument down the path I did. 

In time it is my hope that the Blue Button becomes a symbol, as Keith puts it, “a verb,” that all will understand instinctively – click this, get your data and move on. Other services will take that data dump, transpose it the way you want it for the purposes you intend. The technology and standards behind it will simply become irrelevant to the user. It just works. Getting there will be the task of the S&I Framework workgroups. I wish them God’s speed in accomplishing that task for the benefit of all citizens.

Many in both the private and public sectors are working hard on that vision – keep up the good work!

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Struggling to Understand or Data Does Not Equal Empowerment

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Recently upon leaving my doctor’s office I was presented with a print-out of my visit summary. Knowing I worked it the HIT space my doctor proudly stated that this was one the ways that they planned to meet one of the menu objectives of Stage One meaningful use (MU). This is great I thought, until I began looking over that visit summary.

A significant portion of the summary listed the basics such as who I was, why I paid them a visit etc., all pretty boiler plate – nothing new. Then I turned the page to see the lab results of the routine blood-work – YIKES! nothing but acronyms, values and acceptable ranges. I think I was able to decipher about 10% of those lab results and I work in this industry! I can only imagine how difficult and mind-numbing these figures may appear to an “ordinary” patient/consumer.

So seeing some out of range values I began asking my doctor:

What does this acronym stand? Why is this out of range? Is this something I need to worry about?

Being the great doctor that he is, he took the time to explain my results (some of those out of range values are the result of meds) but also expressed a certain level of frustration stating: “I’m not a big fan of passing this information on to a patient for I worry that they won’t understand results such as these and then I need to take time out to walk the patient through their results which can be quite time consuming. Is this another contributor to physician burnout I wondered?

Now I am all for patient/consumer empowerment and do believe that providing patient’s access to their personal health information (PHI) as a critical component of such empowerment. But does providing a patient a visit summary really empower them or does it simply make them confused (as I was) and resigned or worse endanger?

Stage 2 meaningful use rules released last week state that an eligible physician or hospital will be required to:

Use Certified EHR Technology to identify patient-specific education resources and provide those resources to the patient.

But what will that “patient-specific education resource” look like? Will it solve the problem I encountered?

I want more than a generic here is what these type of acronyms and values mean that litter the internet. I want personalization. I want a system that will take my lab results, my problem list, match it up with my meds, allergies etc. and provide me with personalized knowledge of what these results mean to me and my future health. I then want to be provided suggestions as to how to improve those values? This is what I see as true patient/consumer empowerment.

Unfortunately, what I have actually experienced as a result of this grand HITECH effort under Stage One falls far short of empowerment, if anything, it is closer to disempowerment.

Getting a bunch of data in a visit summary without putting it into context is not meaningful, it is meaningless.

My hope is that there are some novel, creative solutions now being developed that will leverage the new concept in Stage Two, the Base EHR, and provide a module that automatically digs into a patient’s PHI and presents the patient with an empowering visit summary. This is one of the ultimate intents of the HITECH Act, I now want to see it happen.

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