Advisory Panel: Favorite Vendor

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 developments 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 hospital or practice, you are welcome to join the panel. I am grateful to the HIStalk Advisory Panel members for their help in making HIStalk better.

This month’s question: Who is your favorite healthcare IT-specific vendor (product or services) right now and why?

IMO, Intelligent Medical Objects. They have a team that we’ve seen be proactive in finding ways to help ease our physicians’ jobs. Their products are cost effective, especially when we point to amount of provider happiness they return. We’ve partnered with them for at least one beta partnership and are currently considering another, in part because of how easy they are to work with.

I’m pretty happy with Allscripts right now. It’s a completely different company under Paul Black vs. Glen Tullman. Now that I’ve said that out loud, I’ve probably jinxed the relationship. 

Epic delivers an adequate documentation system that automates workflow, can be integrated with other clinical and administrative systems, and scales to our very large care delivery system.

Epic. Sorry, that might not be the politically popular answer. But they are continuously focused on making their products better and making their customers successful. And the idea that they are trying to block interoperability in some way is frankly nuts. The recent back-and-forth in the press on interoperability and who is the best or the most committed is mostly posturing in advance of the impending DoD contract. Could Epic do better in this area? Absolutely. Could Cerner and the rest of “CommonWell?” Absolutely. We need a common standard.

Epic. They are the most focused on healthcare reform and the most ready to adopt and support the changes.

I don’t have a favorite company right now as I am dealing with too many that I would like to get rid of.

Favorite is Wairever. They offer Plexina, which is a content management tool that we use for developing and managing order sets. The tools they provide are fantastic and their responsiveness has been great.

Fortified Health Solutions. They partner (and I do mean partner) with us to provide security monitoring and consulting. We’re much safer than we were a year ago because of their recommendations and guidance.

My favorite vendors lately are Vocera and small nurse call vendor called Critical Alert Systems. They have been extremely engaging and get it – they both have engaged individually and collaboratively to figure out how we achieve our desired result. They have been candid, direct, and honest. I wish larger vendors would get off their high horse and act like they did when they were half their size. Every CEO should ask themselves: how did we act when we had half the customers and market share? My favorite services company lately is Beacon Partners. Ralph is easy to do business with, easy to interact, with and hasn’t let me down yet!

Cerner is my favorite vendor as they are rescuing Siemens from the mud.  (I am a Siemens customer.)

EClinicalWorks. They have many shortcomings, but are delivering a usable ambulatory EMR at a decent ROI. Their support folks respond and often can help solve problems.

I am absolutely overwhelmingly impressed with Salesforce.com. They are not an HIT vendor, but they have shown me an ability to provide a malleable platform along with a team of leaders who really get it.

Meditech. Provides the best level of support, especially with their task management system. Meditech has also become more proactive and letting clients know about software issues and severity of the issues. The stability of the system is still topnotch, with no unplanned downtime in our environment in over two years. Meditech also has a lower maintenance cost then many of our other vendors. Not that you asked, but the vendor that we struggle with the most is eClinicalWorks. Communication with eCW is very, very difficult and they don’t use their task management system very well.

Microsoft Azure and Office 365. Removes a heavy load of keeping the lights on. CommVault — best solution to backup to Azure and have the ability to preform legal/investigative searches.

There are two I would highlight. The first is the best staffing firm in the world, iMethods Inc out of Jacksonville, FL. They are the only firm I have worked with that realize that is a person with a resume versus a resume that happens to come with a person. The other company is dbMotion. We are working on a project with them right now where we will connect all of our community data and make it actionable at the point of care, where it is needed most. Great stuff there that will put our community in a great position for the future.