Erlanger Health System Takes A Chance On $100M Epic Plunge

Erlanger Health System was in financial trouble as recently as 24 months ago. Yet, despite this Erlanger has shifted it's budgetary priority to implementing a digital health system from Epic.  Their other consideration was Cerner's EHR.

The Erlanger Health System include several other facilities in the community:

 

Erlanger, a four-facility public hospital system with about 800 total beds, is an academic medical system and serves as a campus of the University of Tennessee College of Medicine. The system also partners with UT to operate the UT Erlanger Physicians Group, a 170-member multispecialty practice

.The health system, which fell in financial trouble in 2012, only recently saved itself and positioned itself for the massive Epic investment. It closed out FY 2014 with $618M in total operating revenue and $18M in operating income.

Another Health System’s Finances Weighed Down By Epic Investment

While Memphis-based Baptist Memorial Health Care Corp. may intend to be “the high-quality and low-cost provider” in its region, spending $200 million on an EMR purchase has got to make that a bit more, shall we say, challenging.

While health systems nationwide are struggling with issues not of their own making, such as some states’ decision not to expand Medicaid, it appears that Baptist Memorial’s financial troubles have at least some relationship to the size of its 2012 investment in an Epic EMR platform.

But the health system’s financial health has deteriorated significantly over the past few years. After all, back in 2009,S&P gave Baptist Memorial a long-term ‘AA’ rating, based on its strong liquidity and low debt levels; history of positive excess income and good cash flow; and solid and stable market share in his total surface area, with favorable growth in metropolitan Memphis.

However, at this point Baptist is clearly struggling, so much so that is taking the extraordinary step of cutting the salaries of top executives in the system by 22% to 23%. That includes cutting the salary of health system CEO Jason Little. But this is clearly a symbolic gesture, as executive pay cuts can’t dent multimillion dollar operating revenue shortfalls.

So what will help Baptist improve its financial health?

Baptist is also going to have to live with its IT spending decisions, and it seems obvious that they’ve had long-term repercussions. I don’t think any outsider can say whether Baptist should have bought the Epic system, or how much it should have spent, but the investment has clearly been a strain.

It seems apparent that these expenditures are based upon the fear of being left out of the tremendous forces of change fueled by Congress's desire to reform American Health Care Financing and increasing the accessibility to it by previously uninsured patients.

There appears to have been several mortivations for HIT and EHR.

Providers see (saw) it as a means of improving legibility, decreasing errors, and a more efficient means of accessing medical histories as well as reducing repetitive testing.

CMS and HHS saw it as a chance to extract health data for purposes of improving outcomes, as well as warehousing enormous amounts of big data.

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BIG DATA The Idiot's Guide Slideshare Presentations

This is the first in a series on Digital Health Space Addressing Health Analytics.



During t h is past week, these topics are trending on many social media sites using several #tags:
 #big data, #analytics, #healthcarebigdata, #hcsm

Health Care 2.0  The Age of Analytics

4 Best Practices for Analyzing Health Care Data

The Big Data Revolution in Health Care

Big Data in the Health Care Sector

The Ultimate Guide to Using Big Data

Healthcare Big Data, CMS

Big Data in Healthcare: Measuring and Acting on Data to Improve Outcomes

Big Data in Healthcare: Real-time Health Monitoring and Intervention

Health Care Analytics #tags from #symplur

Further trending search tags can be found on Symplur

Health Analytics Hashtags

These hashtags will point you to a number of sites with links to thousands of interesting articles on health data.

Health Analytics Influencers  links to prominent #hcsm and #hitsm social medial sites on twitter.

mHealth and your Privacy

Patients, Doctors See Mobile Health App Benefits, but Privacy Concerns Remain

Mobile health applications can help patients better manage their health, boost the patient-physician relationship and improve health care research. However, some argue that the apps' collection of sensitive health data raises new privacy concerns.

In an iHealthBeat audio report by Ali Budner, experts discussed the benefits and privacy concerns related to the growing use of mobile health apps.

The report includes comments from:

• Deborah Estrin, a professor of computer science at Cornell Tech and cofounder of Open mHealth;
• Evan Muse, a cardiologist and fellow with the Scripps Translational Science Institute;
• Deborah Peel, a psychiatrist and the founder of Patient Privacy Rights; and
• Whitney Zatzkin, a public administrator and mobile health app user (Budner, iHealthBeat, 4/22).

Audio

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HHS: Another Petty Cash Mistake, Is it Working?

HHS’ $30B Interoperability Mistake May 08, 2015 03:04 am Anne Zieger in EMR and EHR Intelligence "Sometimes things are so ill-advised, in hindsight, that you wonder what people were thinking. That includes HHS’ willingness to give out $30 billion to date in Meaningful Use incentives without demanding that vendors offer some kind of interoperability. A staggering amount of money has been paid out under HITECH to incentivize providers to make EMR progress, but we still have countless situations where one EMR can’t talk to another one right across town. When you ponder the wasted opportunity, it’s truly painful. While the Meaningful Use program may have been a good idea, it failed to bring the interoperability hammer down on vendors, and now that ship has sailed. While HHS might have been able to force the issue back in the day, demanding that vendors step up or be ineligible for certification, I doubt vendors could backward-engineer the necessary communications formats into their current systems, even if there was a straightforward standard to implement — at least not at a price anyone’s willing to pay. Now, don’t get me wrong, I realize that “interoperability” is an elastic concept, and that the feds couldn’t just demand that vendors bolt on some kind of module and be done with it. Without a doubt, making EMRs universally interoperable is a grand challenge, perhaps on the order of getting the first plane to fly." The installed base of 'legacy software' required significant upgrading and even replacement. In addition to interoperability many health data exchanges had to be formed and a new sustainable business model had to be developed. Initially HITECH funding and other grants expired leaving the embryonic exchanges insolvent. It was and still is a complex problem. A critical component for providers was the totally unrealistic timetable and time pressure coupled with financial incentives to change.  Many are still resisting the MU process and would rather face a penalty for not adopting MU.  Instead of completing the process in three to four years it will most likely take ten or more years to mature.