Intermountain Healthcare – The Health Care Blog

HIMSS Takeaways: Size Doesn’t (Always) Count, Johnny Appleseed and MomGPT

Apr 24, 2023

By MICHAEL L. MILLENSON

Live and in-person once again, HIMSS 2023 attracted more than 30,000 attendees to the exhibit halls and meeting rooms of Chicago’s sprawling McCormick Place. Although no one person could possibly absorb it all, below are some harbingers of the health care future that stayed with me.

Size Doesn’t Count. Exploring the remote byways of the cavernous exhibition areas, it became clear that it’s not the size of the booth, but the impact of the product that counts. At a pavilion highlighting Turkish companies, for instance, R. Serdar Gemici stood in front of a kiosk that might fit into a walk-in closet.

The display listed an impressive roster of clients for a chronic care management platform, prompting me to stop to learn more. The smartphone user interface for “Albert,” the namesake product of Albert Health, the company Gemici co-founded and leads, immediately impressed me as one of the simplest and yet comprehensive I’d seen. (Indeed, the company website boasts of the “world’s simplest health assistant.”) Albert Health has begun working with England’s National Health Service and large pharmaceutical companies, though I found myself wondering how the name resonates in the Turkish- and Arabic-language versions the company touts.

Another far-off cluster of kiosks hosted a company called Dedalus, which promised an interoperable, whole-person care platform. A demo included a graphic showing a breadth of holistic personalization and collaboration capabilities I’d not seen elsewhere. It turns out that while Dedalus only entered the U.S. market in late 2021 – which explains why, as the nice woman showing me the presentation noted, Americans mostly haven’t heard of it – Italy-based Dedalus Global’s software and services are used in more than 40 countries by over 6,700 health care organizations.

Oh.

Size Does Count. When I sat down with Dr. Jackie Gerhart, Epic’s vice president of informatics, and Seth Hain, senior vice president of research and development, at their very large and very busy booth, I had in mind Epic CEO and founder Judy Faulkner’s reputation as a tough, my-way-or-the-highway businesswoman. But Gerhart and Hain were so nice and down-to-earth, earnestly extolling the company’s culture of collaboration, that it was initially as disorienting as watching Elon Musk help a little old lady across the street. (A colleague assured me that, yes, this is actually the way many Epic employees act.)

Nonetheless, Epic remains a 500-pound gorilla, with a third of the hospital electronic health record (EHR) market. Its Cosmos platform, containing records from over 184 million patients and 7 billion encounters in all 50 states, is the largest integrated database of clinical information in the nation. The company is currently working to integrate Microsoft’s ChatGPT generative AI with Cosmos’s data visualization capabilities, which presents fascinating possibilities.

Ask around, though, and you’ll discover that not all hospitals are comfortable with Epic’s control of information. There will certainly be competitors, perhaps including the Mayo Clinic Platform.

A colleague related that many years ago big tech firms marketing their own EHRs warned prospective customers that choosing Epic meant relying on a company that might not be around very long. Instead, those competitors aren’t. Underestimating all those nice (and perhaps some not-so-nice) people at Epic would be a serious mistake.

It’s the System, Stupid: Reversing the Law of Unintended Consequences

Feb 5, 2013• 6

By Edmund Billings, MD

We should have seen it coming, really. It was entirely predictable, and the most recent RAND report proves it.

We incentivized comprehensive IT adoption, making it easier to bill for every procedure, examination, aspirin, tongue depressor, kind word and gentle (or not) touch without first flipping the American healthcare paradigm on its head, if such a thing is even possible.

According to analysis by the New York Times, hospitals received $1 billion more in Medicare reimbursements in 2010 than they did five years earlier. Overall, the Times says, “hospitals that received government incentives to adopt electronic records showed a 47 percent rise in Medicare payments at higher levels from 2006 to 2010 … compared with a 32 percent rise in hospitals that have not received any government incentives …”

To paraphrase the mantra of Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 presidential campaign: It’s the system, stupid. More specifically, it’s the business model, stupid, the fee-for-service system in which electronic health records are enabling tools.

It’s also the law of unintended consequences. You know … you take action, planning on this but instead you get that.

Like the introduction of cane toads in Australia to kill beetles (they couldn’t jump high enough). Like letting mongooses loose in Hawaii to manage the rat population (they preferred native bird eggs). Like Kudzu, the insatiable vine that’s devouring the South.

According to the authors of the RAND report, the problem is with the incentive structure that encourages more tests and procedures. Well, of course it is. Doctors and administrators have a clinic or hospital to run. They have expensive invoices from Epic and Cerner to pay. They can now track and bill for all this stuff they used to not get paid for. Are we surprised?

And meanwhile, fee-for-service leads us down a contradictory rat hole of massive healthcare costs and lousy public health.Continue reading…

Set National Standards for Health Information Systems

Nov 12, 2012• 11

By Marc Probst

A recent report issued by the Institute of Medicine – titled “Best Care at Lower Cost” – calls for a dramatic transformation in health care delivery, saying “America’s health care system has become far too complex and costly to continue business as usual.” Its first recommendation (“The Digital Infrastructure”) focuses on the importance of health information systems and highlights a crucial aspect of their development that is too often overlooked – the issue of interoperability. Will the individual systems that are created be able to work together efficiently?

It’s an enormously important issue for health care broadly, and it will determine how effective those systems can be on a national level. At present, health care providers across the country are creating or enhancing their health information systems. In some cases, like ours at Intermountain Healthcare, those systems have a long history; we began instituting electronic medical records 40 years ago. Others are early in the journey. But all are being developed essentially for their own internal needs. Interoperability is low on the priority list.

Five health care providers who have been in the forefront of using electronic medical records have been collaborating on the creation of a Care Connectivity Consortium to pioneer the effective connectivity of electronic patient information across their systems. Those five are Intermountain Healthcare (based in Utah), Geisinger Health System (Pennsylvania), Group Health Cooperative (Washington), Kaiser Permanente (California), and Mayo Clinic (Minnesota). But even that ground-breaking effort, in which I’m heavily involved, will result in a multi-provider network, not a national one.