eClinicalWorks is moving into the acute care EHR space, and will showcase early work on the new technology at HIMSS16, the company said. Expanding on some international efforts dipping its toe into the acute care market, eClinicalWorks has entered a joint development agreement with South Carolina’s Tidelands Health, a three-hospital health system with more than 40 outpatient locations, to bring an acute care EHR to market.
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Named eClinicalWorks 10i, the cloud-based EHR platform will enable provider organizations to connect care within inpatient, outpatient and allied health settings, and is slated to launch in early 2017.
“We’ve got a lot of ambulatory clients that use our product that believe the way we’ve worked with them with cloud computing health records is lacking on the inpatient side,” said Girish Navani, CEO and co-founder of eClinicalWorks. “They also say the current state of acute care technology is very different from ambulatory, and that it costs too much. Client/server is a very rigid system that does not cater to a model of care delivery that requires both agility and speed. And usability is a question, with many acute care products looking like they were developed 30 years ago.”
Navani said eClinicalWorks has met with success on the acute care front overseas, where it launched an inpatient EHR system at 80 hospitals.
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“For the U.S., we’re taking an approach that is very collaborative,” Navani said of the agreement with Tidelands Health. “We’re engaging with staff throughout the entire ecosystem, from every inpatient department, from OR to ER to rehab – everyone is participating in the design sessions with us. We’ll showcase the product that is in the works at HIMSS.”
For its part, Tidelands Health, an ambulatory EHR client of eClinicalWorks since 2009, is excited to be able to have such input into the creation of an acute care EHR.
“We’ve seen the prototypes and are very pleased,” Tidelands CIO Todd Rowland, MD, added. “We’ll be going live with the system, which will provide one continuous patient record for inpatient and outpatient, in 2017. For example, under OneCare, our internal name for the system, an emergency room physician calling up a patient record will see the most comprehensive and current medical record from that patient’s primary care and specialist physicians – in contrast to what an ER physician has today, which maybe is information on the last time the patient was in the ER, which is not very helpful.”
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On another front, Rowland added that 50 percent of Medicare payments by 2018 will be made using performance-based mechanisms, and that many other payers are following suit. “Our current IT systems are not capable of dealing with this,” Rowland said. “eClinicalWorks has shown a shared commitment to the OneCare approach, which will cost-effectively deliver a solution that enhances patient care.”
IDC Health Insights research director Judy Hanover said that eClinicalWorks innovation in the ambulatory fray signals potential to offer those technologies in the acute care space.
“It is quite clear from IDC’s research that there is opportunity for innovation in acute care EHR, particularly as existing products do not deliver on the need for flexible mobile workflows, do not offer significant improvements to provider productivity or operational efficiency, and fail to deliver value for cost,” Hanover said.
EHR vendors that are able to leverage the cloud to deliver resilient applications with superior flexibility, usability, mobility, performance and cost of ownership will certainly find opportunity in acute care, Hanover added.
