A Handful Of Doctors Are Top Users Of Electronic Health Records, And Most Are Athenahealth Clients
“Saying cloud over and over again doesn’t make it rain,” said hedge fund manager David Einhorn last month when he announced he was short athenahealth. He dismissed the cloud-based electronic health record vendor as an overvalued outsourcing company. Athenahealth’s stock dipped nearly 16% to $106.8, but has clawed its way back to pre-Einhorn announcement levels.
Maybe it helps to say cloud. In the halting multibillion dollar race to implement electronic health records, only 485 eligible doctors met government requirements showing “meaningful use” of EHRs as of May for Stage 2. The overwhelming majority–nearly 60%, are athenahealth clients. Leading vendor Epic Systems is a distant second, followed by cloud-based start-up Practice Fusion, which claims to have the most doctors on its platform. Whether that trend continues for athenahealth remains to be seen. (The number is even more dismal for hospitals, with barely 10 completing requirements).
The government has laid out objectives for providers in three stages, gradually increasing tasks, such as handing out a summary to patients after each visit, and exchanging patient information with a different electronic health record. But deadlines have come and gone. The deadline for meeting Stage 2 rules, which went into effect in late 2012, has been pushed back from 2014 to 2016. “The pace is too damn high,” John Glaser told Forbes last year. Glaser is chief executive of Health Services at Siemens Healthcare, a major electronic health record vendor. “Increasingly, providers will blow you off.”
Athenahealth which has spoken out against delays finds itself in a sweet spot. Because of its cloud platform, it can provide once a month system-wide updates for its clients—mainly smaller practices, and can monitor in real time whether they are meeting objectives. It is the reason Ascension Health, the largest Catholic health care system in the country dumped its server-based electronic health record for athenahealth last year. It expects to complete rollout to 4,000 doctors in 2016, in time for the last deadline–unless there’s a delay, again.
