Hunkered Down on HIE

Been pretty quiet here on the Chilmark Research site for the simple reason – we are doing one heck of a lot of research which you’ll be seeing the results of in the not so distant future.

Primary among those research efforts is the update to the 2010 HIE Market Report. The last report was extremely successful and highly regarded among those in the know. For example, a CEO from one of the top HIE vendors told us:

By far, Chilmark Research has done the best research on the increasingly critical HIE market – no one else has come close to providing the in-depth research that is contained in the 2010 HIE Market Report.

And it is not just the HIE vendors who appreciated the report as we sold quite a few to healthcare organizations who have been using the report to assist them in their strategic decisions and ultimately vendor selection process.

But the HIE market is evolving quite quickly and thus the need to provide a refresh of the report. For example, of the 21 vendors profiled in the last report, 7 will not show up in the next edition. Even with that change, there are more entrants into what has become a lucrative market (albeit still relatively small) and in the 2012 report we will have in-depth profiles of 22 HIE vendors.

To give you some brief insight into the report, following is the intro to Chapter 3.

“The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

This French proverb accurately characterizes the state of the HIE market and the vendors who serve it. In last year’s report we commented on how the market was becoming increasingly crowded and competitive. We profiled 21 vendors in that report and a third of them did not make it into this report. Some exited the market (ICW, MedPlus, MEDSEEK, Misys, PatientKeeper, Telus), others acquired (Carefx and MobileMD) and then there is the folding of the HIE assets of GE and Microsoft into the new entity Caradigm. This year we have 22 vendors profiled including: Caradigm and Microsoft (still difficult to know what will become of their joint assets, but we provide some guidance), Harris, who had acquired Carefx, Siemens, who picked up MobileMD and some new entrants including 4medica, Certify Data Systems, the young start-up GSI Health and HealthUnity. We even broke from tradition, if you can call one year a tradition, and profiled one of the leading EHR vendors, Cerner, who contrary to prevailing EHR vendor wisdom, or at least strategy, is creating an open HIE platform.

The market is as competitive as ever with a monumental shift towards the enterprise market. Some vendors have been serving this market all along, others, whose focus has been the public market are to varying degrees of success making the transition to the enterprise market. But despite this overwhelming shift to the enterprise market, the HIE market remains no less mature than it was last year. The solutions on offer vary significantly and in our interviews with vendors, consultants and end users we found a market that really has not defined a clear set of requirements for the HIE. There is always the ubiquitous desire to facilitate orders, referrals and distribution of results but beyond that, the needs of a given HCO can vary greatly, which has subsequently led to continued market confusion as to what an HIE is and is not.

With this report, Chilmark Research once again has applied its deep research methodology (see Appendix B) to provide a clearer picture of where this market and the vendors who serve it are today and where it is heading. The profiles contained in this report are not meant to provide an exhaustive analysis of each vendor’s solution and business strategy. Rather, their purpose is to provide a concise overview of leading HIE solutions in the market today, their strengths and weaknesses, what sector(s) of the market that the vendor has had particular success in and provide insight as to an HIE vendor’s future direction. Armed with this information, the reader will gain a clear picture of currently available solutions enabling one to create a short-list of those worthy of more in-depth internal review and follow-up for their own HIE initiatives.

In our opinion, we are slowly but surely beginning to enter the post-EHR era. The U.S., federal government’s push for physician and hospital adoption of EHRs, via the HITECH Act, appears to be having the intended affect. The recent Robert Wood Johnson Foundation study published in the April 2012 edition of Health Affairs has physician adoption and use of EHRs now at 57 percent. But the value of those electronic patient records is not in the data silo of a given EHR, but in how patient data can be aggregated and used to facilitate care coordination across care settings and subsequently improve the quality of care a patient receives. This is the province of the HIE and where the real value of electronically recording a patient’s health will reside, not in the silo of the EHR, but in the network of the HIE.

Please bear with us and our lack of frequent posts. We are working hard here at Chilmark Research, which can make it a challenge to find that extra bit of time to write for the public. Once the HIE Report is released (next week), we should be getting back to a more regular schedule of posts to this website. Stay Tuned.