In two recent notes, I opined that two major EHR vendors, Epic and Cerner, could not successfully graft large-scale analytics capabilities onto their current, installed EHR platforms (see: What Is Digital Health and How Does a Health System Get There?; Consideration of the Organizational and Personal Digital Health Managers of the Future). Relevant to this discussion is a recent article that quoted Cerner's CEO Brent Shafer about how the company intended to leverage Amazon's cloud storage from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and offer "intelligent predictive insights" to its EHR customers (see: Shafer: Amazon deal will help take Cerner from 'the now to the next'). Below is an excerpt from the article:
[Cerner CEO Brent] Shafer took to the stage at Municipal Auditorium to detail how Cerner's client-centric focus and partnership with Amazon will bridge the gap between the "realities and possibilities of health care." He said the digitization of health care is the first step on the journey toward Cerner's original goal: to use health IT to systemically eliminate error, waste and delay. Shafer said Cerner will focus on several key areas in its broader strategy to innovate with Amazon, including turning data into insights, increasing interoperability and usability, and rapid development and deployment.
In February, Shafer unveiled Cerner's new operating model and highlighted his hope that the company could become a curated health data source. At the conference, he introduced Project Apollo and "the modern Mission Control for health care" — the Logistics Center Dashboard. By the end of the year, Cerner clients will have a single, cohesive real-time view that Shafer said "provides intelligent predictive insights" and "shifts your view of the hospital operations from a limited picture — what's happening now to actually what's going to happen next." Shafer stressed that the partnership with Amazon is much more than moving Cerner's platform to the cloud and that the company intends to do "much more." "We all have the same goal," he said. "Health care is too important to stay the same."
The excerpt above suggests that Cerner's strategy, and perhaps that of Epic according to KLAS (see: KLAS says Epic leading advanced analytics integration, others making progress), is to provide analytics capabilities on their installed EHR platforms. My opinion is that this won't work with my reasoning detailed in my recent note (see: Consideration of the Organizational and Personal Digital Health Managers of the Future). Obviously, Cerner, Sunquest, and hospital executives are eager for this approach to succeed and thereby avoid major IT disruptions and major new costs. As the companies pursue these new goals, their press releases will undoubtedly state that they are succeeding. However, the test for hospital executives regarding these claims will be easy -- do the new proposed functionalities succeed in reducing hospital costs and improve quality?
It's fascinating that Big Tech like Amazon is being injected into this discussion. Amazon and its competitors (i.e., Google, Apple) surely have their own plans for capturing some portion of the healthcare IT and analytics market. Why would they share their top-shelf IT skills with Cerner? It's possible that companies like Amazon and Google might alternatively seek to offer their own versions of the OHMs but in the cloud. They would then theoretically make the following offer to hospital executives:
- Upload to our "OHM in the cloud" the following patient data sets from your EHR: data set #1, data set #2, data set #3, etc.
- We will then deliver to you an actionable plan to achieve, for example, the following results:
- Reduce the length-of-stay by, say, one day for patients in a particular diagnostic group(s).
- Reduce by one-half the number of patients in a particular diagnosis group(s) readmitted post discharge to the hospital (see: Identifying Patients for Remote Monitoring with Predictive Analytics; 3 Strategies to Reduce Hospital Readmission Rates, Costs).
- Improve drug therapy for patients in a particular diagnosis group(s) in order to reduce adverse reactions and increase efficacy.
- For our compensation, we will ask for a percentage of the hospital cost savings, to be determined, that the hospital achieves by executing our plan(s) (see: Strategies for Success in Risk-Based Payment Models).
Comments