Not all HIE products are created equal; some are more equal than others. At least that's according to the findings of a new Black Book Rankings report that names the top performing HIE vendors across five different categories.
The vendors were ranked based on client experience across 18 performance areas, including stakeholder alignment, accountable care support, sustainability,
interoperability, analytics, accessibility, configuration, interfaces and implementations, clinical workflow, data integrity and security.
Detroit-based technology company
Covisint took the No. 1 spot for payer/insurer-based HIE, bumping 2012's winner, Optum, down a few notches.
ICA was the highest-performing vendor in the core HIE category, replacing the 2012 winner Harris Healthcare.
EHR giant
Cerner proved its prowess in the hospital IT
EHR model HIE category, earning the No. 1 spot. Cerner was also named top in this category back in 2012.
Allscripts'
dbMotion population health management software was named the best in the ambulatory EHR model HIE, replacing 2012's winner NextGen.
And the first place award in the complex technology services HIE category went to Infor, who also snagged the No. 1 spot back in 2012.
Other report findings include:
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33 percent of multi-provider networks and hospital systems are considering private HIEs for more standardized sharing of patient data.
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82 percent of all payers and providers agree that an operational national public HIE is at least a decade off.
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92 percent of physicians, 81 percent of hospitals, and 94 percent of insurers/payers remain meaningful unconnected, in regards to intelligent interoperability.
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Nearly all healthcare organizations, 98 percent, believe that private, community or regional HIEs are the preferred choice to comprehensively achieve accountable care organization deliverables
"Private exchanges will continue to outpace public HIEs as organizations are exploring how they will effectively aggregate data to support their ACO efforts", said Doug Brown, managing partner of Black Book, in a news release. "Eventually, given meaningful use, the industry can expect to see connections between private and public exchanges emerging for the purpose of sharing public health data and to support the portability of medical records. But there is an obvious challenge of whether public, regional and state exchanges will still be around to connect to when that happens, or if these private exchanges and EHR vendors will instead connect stakeholders directly to a national exchange.”
By April 2013, hospital participation in a health information exchange was pegged at un underwhelming 30 percent, up from 14 percent back in 2008, according to a recent
HIMSS Analytics report.
Getting those numbers up will involve addressing the current lack of standards, said David Whitlinger, executive director of the New York eHealth Collaborative, the organization that launched the Statewide Health Information Network of New York, in an interview with
Healthcare IT News ths past month.
"That’s how we really are spending a lot of time and energy and money connecting together things that are not standard and getting the EHR data into HIEs is still a significant barrier," he said.
Out of the some 30 percent of hospitals and providers using HIE solutions, the top complaint came down to lack of product integration and interface.
