I think that we have turned a major strategic corner. Dr. Toby Cosgrove CEO at Cleveland Clinic, has been reported as cautioning an audience not to "tell Judy Faulkner" that EHR interconnectivity will be happening across the country in three or four years (see: 'Don't tell Judy Faulkner'). The reason that this comment is so important is that no healthcare CEO has ever been willing push back on Faulkner or Epic on this issue (or any issue, for that matter) in public. Below is an excerpt of the article from Healthcare IT News:
The topic at the Cleveland Clinic annual summit Monday was healthcare innovation – what's impeding it, what more is needed to foster it and the innovation milestones taking place today. It may come as no surprise: Health IT came up a lot at this year's event....Among those speakers was Toby Cosgrove, MD, chief executive officer of the Cleveland Clinic, who said what's really going to be the healthcare game changer pertains to the interconnectivity of electronic medical records. The Clinic, as he pointed out, has already developed an API that will make this possible. And on a larger scale? "I think that in the next three or four years we're going to see that happen across the country," he said. "Please don't tell Judy Faulkner that. She'll get very upset," he joked with the audience....The Clinic chief was also joined by Julie Vose, MD, professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center and president-elect at the American Society of Clinical Oncology, who echoed similar sentiments. What Vose called, the "biggest bang for your buck," was "healthcare IT that's interoperable between systems, being able to make sure that we have the data from patients that are from different institutions, different states," she said. That, she continued, proves to be the "biggest issue actually in taking care of patients today." ASCO, as Vose explained, is in the midst of a large initiative called CancerLinQ, a "very large" healthcare IT platform that pulls together all of ASCO practices' data and provides analytics and real time clinical decision support. Officials expect the platform to launch in 2015. By taking that big data and transforming it into something usable, actionable, Vose said it "will help us understand (cancer) treatments that are done every day."
An interesting question is why now is Cosgrove is now willing to "joke" about Epic's lack of enthusiasm for EHR interconnectivity. First of all, he's a national leader in healthcare innovation and so Epic's lack of enthusiasm for interconnectivity, documented extensively in Lab Soft News, is a major barrier to progress (see: Revisiting EHR Interoperability; Standardized Content and Vendor Strategy; Epic Retains Lobbying Firm to Improve Its Interoperability Image on Capital Hill; More on Epic's (Non)-Interoperability and the Recent NYT Puff Piece; Judith Faulkner, EMR Interoperability, and Washington IT Politics). Secondly, EHR interconnectivity or lack thereof, has been all over the news with Congress members openly criticizing Epic on this score. Thirdly, Cosgrove realistically understands that that he has the prestige and position to stand up to the Epic bullying that make other CEOs shake in their boots. On this particular occasion, he had a strong ally in the form of Dr. Vose who is the president-elect of ASCO. Lastly and not coincidentally, the article drops a hint that the Cleveland Clinic "has...developed an API that will make...[interconnectivity] possible." Moreover, ASCO expects a launch of its CancerLinQ product in 2015 that will aggregate cancer data across multiple institutions. I blogged recently about the SureScripts product to promote interconnectivity that has been widely accepted (see: E-Prescribing Giant, SureScripts, Provides EHR Interoperability Solution).
So how will Faulker and Epic react to chain of events? If smart, they will probably say roughly the following: We have always been an ardent supporter of EHR connectivity. We cannot understand how prominent executives in U.S. healthcare and the U.S. Congress (with the exception of the Wisconsin elected officials) could have continuously and mistakenly misinterpreted our actions for years in support of this noble goal. So to prove our good intentions, we will immediately change all of our rigid corporate policies that favored our own client base and appeared to inhibit progress in this area.
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