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Can EHRs Expand to Become Health Systems’ “Platform of Platforms” (UDHPs)?

By VINCE KURAITIS & NEIL JENNINGS

In a previous post in this series, we discussed healthcare’s migration toward Unified Digital Health Platforms (UDHPs) — a “platform of platforms.” Think of a UDHP as healthcare’s version of a Swiss Army knife: flexible, multi-functional, and (ideally) much better integrated than the drawer full of barely-used apps most health systems currently rely on. We included a list of 20+ companies jockeying for UDHP dominance, including two familiar EHR (electronic health record) giants — Epic and Oracle. This raises the obvious question for today’s post:

Can EHRs level up into becoming UDHPs — becoming healthcare’s platform of platforms? Or are they trying to wear a superhero cape while tripping over their own cables?

We see good arguments pro and con, and like most things in healthcare “it’s complicated.” Some say EHRs are uniquely positioned to make the leap. Others believe the idea is like trying to teach your fax machine to run population health analytics.

Thus, we’ll lay out the arguments for differing points of view, and you can decide for yourself.

EHR as UDHP
This entry is part 4 of 4 in the series Platforming Healthcare — The Long View

by Vince Kuraitis and Neil P. Jennings of Untangle Health

Here’s an outline of today’s blog post:

  • A Brief Recap: What are UDHPs?
  • Thesis: EHRs Can Expand to Become UDHPs
    1. EHRs Currently Own the Customer Relationship
    2. Many Customers Have an “EHR-First” Preference for New Applications
    3. Epic and Oracle Health are Making Strong Movements Toward Becoming UDHPs
  • Antithesis: EHRs Can NOT Become Effective EHRs
    1. EHRs Carry a Lot of Baggage
    2. Customers are Skeptical
    3. EHR Analytics Are NOT Optimized To Achieve Critical Health System Objectives
    4. EHR Switching Costs are Diminishing
    5. Cloud Native Platforms Accelerate Innovation and Performance
    6. It’s Not in EHR DNA to Become A Broad-Based Platform
  • Synthesis and Conclusion

This is a long post…over 4,000 words…so we’ve clearly got a lot to say on the matter. Hope you brought snacks!

A Brief Recap: What are UDHPs? (Unified Digital Health Platforms)

In our previous extensive post on UDHPs, we described them as a new category of enterprise software. A December 2022 Gartner Market Guide report characterized the long-term potential:

The [U]DHP shift will emerge as the most cost-effective and technically efficient way to scale new digital capabilities within and across health ecosystems and will, over time, replace the dominant era of the monolithic electronic health record (EHR).

The DHP Reference Architecture is illustrated in a blog post by Better. Note that UDHPs are visually depicted as “sitting on top” of EHRs and other siloed sources of health data:

We noted that almost any type of large healthcare organization — health systems, health plans, pharma companies, medical device companies, etc. — had a need for UDHPs. However, today’s focus is more narrow — we limit the discussion to UDHPs in hospitals and health systems, primarily in the U.S. We use the term “health system” to encompass hospitals and regional health delivery systems.

In this post, we focus on the two largest EHR vendors in the U.S. — Epic and Oracle Health; they have a combined market share of 65% of hospitals and 77% of hospital beds.

In the remaining sections, we will lay out arguments on both sides of the issue of whether EHRs can (or cannot) expand to become UDHPs. The graphic below is our crack at a visual summary. The balloons represent the thesis – that EHRs can expand to become UDHPs; the anchors represent the antithesis – that EHRs can not expand to become UDHPs.

Thesis: EHRs Can Expand To Becoming UDHPs

Let’s look at the case for EHRs expanding to become effective UDHPs.

Continue reading…

Barbarians at the Gate

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By ADRIAN GROPPER, MD

US healthcare is exceptional among rich economies. Exceptional in cost. Exceptional in disparities. Exceptional in the political power hospitals and other incumbents have amassed over decades of runaway healthcare exceptionalism. 

The latest front in healthcare exceptionalism is over who profits from patient records. Parallel articles in the NYTimes and THCB frame the issue as “barbarians at the gate” when the real issue is an obsolete health IT infrastructure and how ill-suited it is for the coming age of BigData and machine learning. Just check out the breathless announcement of “frictionless exchange” by Microsoft, AWS, Google, IBM, Salesforce and Oracle. Facebook already offers frictionless exchange. Frictionless exchange has come to mean that one data broker, like Facebook, adds value by aggregating personal data from many sources and then uses machine learning to find a customer, like Cambridge Analytica, that will use the predictive model to manipulate your behavior. How will the six data brokers in the announcement be different from Facebook?

The NYTimes article and the THCB post imply that we will know the barbarians when we see them and then rush to talk about the solutions. Aside from calls for new laws in Washington (weaken behavioral health privacy protections, preempt state privacy laws, reduce surprise medical bills, allow a national patient ID, treat data brokers as HIPAA covered entities, and maybe more) our leaders have to work with regulations (OCR, information blocking, etc…), standards (FHIR, OAuth, UMA), and best practices (Argonaut, SMART, CARIN Alliance, Patient Privacy Rights, etc…). I’m not going to discuss new laws in this post and will focus on practices under existing law.

Patient-directed access to health data is the future. This was made clear at the recent ONC Interoperability Forum as opened by Don Rucker and closed with a panel about the future. CARIN Alliance and Patient Privacy Rights are working to define patient-directed access in what might or might not be different ways. CARIN and PPR have no obvious differences when it comes to the data models and semantics associated with a patient-directed interface (API). PPR appreciates HL7 and CARIN efforts on the data models and semantics for both clinics and payers.

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Digital Health: Almost a Real, Live Business

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By David Shaywitz, MD

While the evolution of the digital health ecosystem has seemed at times almost painfully contrived, it now appears to have reached the point where it requires but a few sprinkles of magic fairy dust to be truly alive.

The basic idea behind digital health is pretty clear: we can (and must) do health better, and technology should be able to help,

There’s also an ever-increasing amount of support for early-stage innovators in this space. A remarkably large number of digital health incubators have sprung up around the country, as Lisa Suennen captured with characteristic verve in a recent Venture Valkyrie post.

On top of this, a slew of corporate VCs have now emerged – many from payors, but some from communication companies, and even a few from big pharmas such as Merck – all keen to invest strategically in the digital health space.

Deliberately, many of these large corporations also represent likely buyers for the products or services that will be produced, so it really does seem like an example of the savvy external sourcing of innovation.

So we’re good, then – right?

Well, not so fast.

It turns out that many high profile VCs continue to eschew this space, other than perhaps an occasional investment or two. The reason? As one extremely well-regarded VC – with extensive healthcare experience – told me yesterday, “I haven’t seen a viable business model yet.”

Translation: how do you make (serious) money here? Where’s the revenue?

Continue reading…