Under HITECH, physicians and hospitals have adopted EHR technology in droves but are now coming to grips with the fact that their brand new EHR is not well-suited for the new world of value-based reimbursement (VBR).
For years, healthcare providers have lived in a fee for service (FFS) world where, much like a consultant, they were paid for services rendered on a specific fee schedule. Such services were paid for as episodic events with various codes for specific procedures. To insure physicians were paid for services rendered, EHRs were architected to record those episodic events. Sad thing is that today’s crop of EHRs do not even do a very good job of that. They are often slow, cumbersome, and create a lot of unnecessary disruption to a physician’s workflow.
While the healthcare sector by and large still lives in the FFS world today – the ground is rapidly shifting towards VBR. Healthcare organizations are now coming to grips with the fact that the shiny new EHR they have just deployed is ill-suited to support an organization’s shift to VBR. In conversations with more than a few HCO executives and some of their Board members there is a common refrain: Our EHR will not be up to the task that lies ahead.
That future task is the management of a patient population, not as simple episodic points of care, but as a population whose care will be managed over time. This has and will continue to give rise to a multitude of solutions that will wrap-around the EHR in much the same fashion that wrap-around apps are now becoming prevalent in other software sectors such as ERP. Much like the ERP market, we will see a similar focus on workflow and solutions delivered via cloud-based (SaaS) models.
So getting back to that question…
Is the EHR transformational to the delivery of care?
This is an important question for us here at Chilmark. We have always had as one of our core operating tenets to focus only on those technologies within the HIT sector that are truly transformational in contributing to the quality of care delivered. Certainly HIE technology contributes to that tenet and our recent extension into clinical analytics does as well. We have also, since our founding, been keenly interested in technology that supports the ability of a patient to be more engaged in the care process – an active participant of the care team, not one who is simply subjected to it. Each of these areas (we call them Domains) will see significant research from Chilmark analysts in the coming year.
We are adding a fourth domain in 2014…
Yes, we will focus on the EHR domain, which will be led by analyst, Rob Tholemeier. So why do we believe the EHR will be transformational? A couple of reasons:
- It is the single biggest IT software expense for almost all HCOs. It will not simply go away, (though over a third will be replaced in coming few years) and will become the core system clinicians use to record patient data. It will also remain the primary lens that clinicians use to review a patient’s medical status and clinical history.
- How, when and if EHR vendors open their systems to third party ISVs and migrate to a true ecosystem platform has the potential to be highly transformative. Cerner talks a good story on this, wanting to become the “Health OS” for the industry, but their progress towards opening their system up is still wanting.
It took awhile for Rob and a few clients to convince me that EHR’s have the potential to be transformational and to be honest, I’m still on the fence. For one thing, for EHRs to be transformational they have to be actually transform themselves into becoming a much more useful and less disruptive clinical tool. Rob thinks that will happen and sees lots of glimmers of hope. But part of running a company is having faith in those that work for you. Rob is an extremely bright analyst, is no newcomer to the software industry and to boot, is married to a physician. I’m looking forward to Rob’s contributions as he leads Chilmark’s fourth research domain, that the provence of the EHR.
