John Lynn, who blogs over at EMR and EHR, had this to say recently about a company called Emdeon (see: Emdeon’s EHR Lite)
I’d been meaning to do a post about Emdeon‘s EHR lite ...since I first heard about it at MGMA. While I think that EHR Lite might be some good branding, I’m not sure you can really classify Emdeon’s EHR as lite. I’m sure they’re just trying to differentiate themselves from the 300+ EHR companies out there....I think I found the thing that most differentiates Emdeon from many other EMR companies. it’s their network. Here’s a summary they sent me of their network. Emdeon’s network encompasses:
- 340,000 providers
- 1,200 government and commercial payers
- 5,000 hospitals
- 81,000 dentists
- 60,000 pharmacies
- 600 vendor partners
....I strongly believe that healthcare will be a very heterogeneous environment. ...EHR software is still going to have to connect with hospitals, pharmacies, labs, payers, government entities etc. An EHR is going to be key to integrating with these other heterogeneous software as I do believe the EHR will be the “Operating System of Healthcare.” Today a silo’d version of an EHR is not an issue at all. However, the writing on the tea leaves that I read is that healthcare providers that have a well connected EHR are going to be at an advantage. We’ll see if Emdeon can use their current connections as an advantage in this way.
It's quite clear that hospitals need to be interconnected via multiple networks for the exchange of both clinical and financial information. Whether or not the leading EMR companies will move in this direction and function more as as "operating systems" is another story. Epic, for example, might appear to function as an HIE with its Care Everywhere module (see: Sharing Medical Records across Hospitals with Epic's Care Everywhere). However and given that this interconnectivity is provided only to Epic clients, the software would be better called Care with Epic Clients.
In my opinion, Epic has little interest in mobilizing healthcare information electronically across hospitals within a region that are not its clients. The company is all about domination of the higher end of the hospital market and modules like Care Everywhere have been developed to provide additional client functionality and not to serve as a HIE utility across all hospitals in a region (see: A Fresh Look at Epic from a Financial and Strategic Perspective). Epic's business model can be described as a "walled garden" whereas, I think, Cerner is envisioning the development of an interconnected community with its Winona project as one prime example (see: A Different Paradigm for Analyzing the Competition between Cerner and Epic; The Winona Project: Is This a RHIO Success Story?; Cerner's Winona Health Project Featured on the PBS News Hour).
I have posted notes before about the need for a national, agnostic lab network (see: Interpreting the Tea Leaves: Ten Hot Trends in Healthcare, Lab Medicine, and Pathology Informatics; Predicted Migration of "Some" LIS Functionality from Pathology to Central IT). For the labs, a national network is useful for the exchange of lab data but also as a means to access expertise and talent which may be lacking or insufficient locally. Community hospitals labs, and even academic departments, have always turned to regional and national reference labs to provide esoteric testing services that they can't supply. Any lab or hospital national network needs to be agnostic in the sense that it's open to a variety of companies and service providers. Such an approach stimulates competition on the basis of quality and price and is the antithesis of the walled-garden, vertically-integrated approach which is all about domination of the market by a single company (see: iPhones, Physicians, and the Dilemma of the "Walled Garden").