HIStalk Advisory Panel: Wrap-Up 5/28/12

The HIStalk Advisory Panel is a group of hospital CIOs, hospital CMIOs, practicing physicians, and a few vendor executives who have volunteered to provide their thoughts on topical industry issues. I’ll seek their input every month or so on an important news development and also ask the non-vendor members about their recent experience with vendors. E-mail me to suggest an issue for their consideration.

If you work for a provider organization (hospital, practice, etc.), you are welcome to join the panel. I am grateful to the HIStalk Advisory Panel members for their help in making HIStalk better.

I previously ran the panel’s recommendations to Allscripts and a list of the innovative companies they’re working with. These are their remaining comments.

General Comments

”The coming wave of BI use that will be required for any healthcare organization to be profitable, especially if they get involved in ACO or population health management. There was such a void of these companies at HIMSS it was shocking.”

”CMS and AHIMA are pushing ICD-10, a 30-year-old coding system. Like forcing us all to buy Betamaxes.”

”We have an internal debate ongoing within our parent organization whether EHRs will become a commodity purchase in the next few years. The implication is that you would be able to buy the EHR in pieces from best-of-breed vendors and then meld them together. I would be interested in what HIStalk readers, and of course yourself, feel about this prediction. Big organizations with lots of R&D dollars haven’t been able to pull it off even with just to products to integrate. I don’t think we have the standards to pull this off for at least a decade.”

”I think the platforms being developed by Allscripts and Greenway are an important harbinger of where the industry is going — the idea of the EMR as a platform and companies building apps to sit on top of them to help fill gaps and expand functionality. Other companies talk about it, but are not ready technically. Epic says they won’t do it, but I think they all eventually will.”

Cerner

”We are getting excellent results with Cerner PowerChart on both the ambulatory and acute sides. The newer mPage technology has let us develop specific apps within PowerChart that address Meaningful Use and quality goals while also improving physician experience and adoption with the EMR. Examples include a physician-designed ED CPOE template (that only an ED doc could love) and an app for admission med rec that better ties in nursing, physician, and pharmacy workflow (for example, the physician hands off therapeutic substitution task to the pharmacy). Cerner’s tools let us optimize workflow.”

Entrada

“Entrada is an interesting little dictation and transcription service that is partnering to bring voice to data services along. They are making some noise in the ortho markets.”

”Epic is good and not great. The install methodology is good, but they rely too much on their UserWeb to send customers for information. They also do a poor job of preparing CIOs for what life will be like after the install. We don’t have time to figure out which classes we should attend so we can get an idea of how the suite works and what it takes to support it. I have asked repeatedly for guidance and am still waiting.”

GE Healthcare

”What’s up with the GE Healthcare product suite? I haven’t heard much. I fear that their ambulatory PM/billing system formerly known as IDX has seen better days. They have been historically strong products.”

”I haven’t heard much lately about what GE is doing with their ‘new product’ or how the new joint venture is going with Microsoft.”

Hyland Software

”Hyland is doing a great job for us. On time, on budget. Can’t ask for more than that.”

InterSystems

”We’re vendor shopping and you get to see many products and talk to a lot of sales reps. InterSystems gave us their sales pitch, but didn’t even pitch us their correct product. We had met with them at HIMSS and clearly they didn’t take any of that conversation into account.”

McKesson

”It was painful that McKesson announced in December that they are going to sunset Horizon Clinicals. Having stopped developing their emergency and ambulatory solutions (HEC and HAC) puts lots of things into question. We don’t use HAC, but we do have HEC in all our facilities. Moving to Paragon – really?!?!? They have been unable to execute over the last five years on what they said they would deliver on. Who would believe they could do it with this neophyte product?” 

“It might be interesting to ask of those healthcare organizations using Horizon Clinicals as their primary EHR solution how many are currently considering moving on from McKesson and not waiting on transitioning to Paragon.This question would also be interesting for those organizations utilizing Meditech 5.6 and whether they are going to move to Meditech 6.x or will be selecting another vendor.”

Oberd

”Oberd is an outcomes research company targeting ortho.”

Prognosis

”We’re opening a new hospital. An interesting EHR vendor they liked is Prognosis of Houston, TX. I haven’t seen the product, but the selection team has raved about it.”

SYSTOC

”We installed SYSTOC (now part of PureSafety), the market leader in occupational medicine. It was a very expensive mistake that destroyed productivity. They told us they supported voice recognition several years ago, and are now promising that it will come out in the fall. They have promised improvements with every upgrade and the system just deteriorates more with every release.”

Vocera

”I have worked a lot with Vocera. Great company, very focused, recent IPO is doing well. Smart guys running it. It’s a good product that works and happy customers.”