Following up on my posting yesterday, decided to take a quick look at some of the major EMR vendors, and a couple of up & comers just to see if they are on the P4P bandwagon, i.e., are they talking about/messaging for P4P and how their solution can facilitate a practice’s tracking of quality/performance metrics? Such interest in the topic came about from my attendance at the recent P4P conference here in Boston, where surprisingly, the big HIT vendors were not in attendance.
The results – abysmal.
What I found particularly troublesome at some sites was the complete lack of any search functionality. What are they thinking? Is their website too shallow to justify a search engine? Is it something they just don’t see value in? Do they only want visitors to see what they present to them, based on their logic and not that of the prospect/future customer? Strange, very strange.
Following, in alphabetical order, are the results of this little research effort: Methodology: Go to vendor website, type P4P into their search engine and see what happens.
- athenahealth: no search capabilities on website
- AllScripts: no search capabilites on website
- Cerner: 7 P4P hits, but virtually all of them worthless
- eClinicworks: no search capabilities on website
- Eclipsys: Zero Hits, nada, nothing
- Epic: Zero Hits, nada, nothing
- GE Healthcare: Zero Hits, nada, nothing
- McKesson: Our winner with 11 hits. Mostly PRs and positioning statements towards payers, but at least there is something remotely relevant that a physician may use to research the topic. Congratulations McKesson for at least saying something on the topic!
- Meditech: no search capabilities on website
- Siemens: Zero Hits, nada, nothing
So, what is wrong here? Why are these companies not messaging to their customers and prospects on an issue that will be a growing concern for them?
Would welcome the feedback as I for one certainly can not make any sense of it.
P4P, outside of CA, is fairly nascent.
MedVantage (Medvantage.com) has a very good product and will take a high share of the Blue Plans.
Since this is a payer driven application, I am not surprised re: your findings in the hospital and provider IT world.
We’re a Meditech customer and this was the return on a KB Search for ‘P4P’:
MEDITECH Knowledge Base Search Results
0 item(s) found.
Thanks for the comments Brian and John.
While P4P has been discussed for awhile now, you are right Brian in that only recently have we seen some action and early results from the likes of CMS.
Recently attended the Boston P4P event by World Congress in early August and one thing I walked away with is that while P4P is still early in the roll-out cycle, it is gaining momentum and that’s what motivated this posting.
Upon reflection, maybe the software vendors don’t want to bring up the subject in the context of EMR, HIT, etc. in their discussions with a provider/physician as it still remains a contentious issue.
P4P is not quite ready for primetime. CMS has “implemented” it, but I don’t think anyone has seen any $$ from it as yet.
No one really knows what the “performance” is. Reporting something you already do? There is no way to measure clinical compliance by the patient, so this is really a shame to cut reimbursements….
Why should vendors invest time and money into software for something that is a bunch of B.S.
More lemmings about to jump over the cliff??