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Cranfield, UK, 2nd September 2024, Written by Arun Gill –
Hi everyone! I’m delighted to share the latest edition of my EHR news round-up. Featuring news from Epic, MEDITECH, athenahealth, Health Gorilla, CommonWell Health Alliance, TEFCA, Carequality, Nervecentre Software, and NHS England.
US HIE Announcements
Multiple developments promoting US Health Information Exchange were unveiled across August, including TEFCA (Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement) and QHIN (Qualified Health Information Network) announcements from Epic , MEDITECH and athenahealth .
- Epic to Transition Customers to TEFCA by 2025 – Epic plans to move its customers to TEFCA by the end of this year, with the full transition anticipated by end-2025. Currently, 66 health systems (372 hospitals / 5,539 clinics) have already transitioned to TEFCA via Epic Nexus (Epic’s subsidiary). Additionally, 101 health systems (905 hospitals / 19,966 clinics) have pledged to join TEFCA. Epic’s optimistic that nearly all of its 2,000 US hospital customers will participate. US interoperability network Carequality is supporting the transition. Rob Klootwyk, director of interoperability at Epic, claimed that TEFCA has created an opportunity for the vendor to help push beyond the 70% interoperability plateau the industry has been stuck at for years and reach 100% of US providers.
- MEDITECH Partners with Health Gorilla to Promote US Interoperability – MEDITECH unveiled plans to launch Traverse Exchange, a HIE interoperability network promoting data exchange amongst its US customers. Scheduled for launch in Q3 2024, this new private network will leverage the foundation of MEDITECH’s Traverse Exchange solution in Canada. The Traverse Exchange is not a QHIN. However, its newly-formed partnership with Health Gorilla will allow users to access TEFCA as a participant of Health Gorilla’s QHIN along with California’s Data Exchange Framework (via Health Gorilla’s QHIO), Carequality, CommonWell Health Alliance l, and eHealth Exchange.
- CommonWell Health Alliance, one of the original US national Health Information Networks (HINs), announced the first of its members to go-live on CommonWell’s TEFCA QHIN. This includes tier-1 EHR vendor athenahealth, smaller EHR vendor ModuleMD, and early-stage start-up Solace Health (platform for patient advocates).
As organisations continue to come on board, TEFCA has the potential to truly mark a new era of interoperability and health data exchange, supporting the national interoperability framework’s aim of enhancing clinical decision-making, improving patient outcomes and lowering healthcare provider costs.
Epic UGM 2024
Epic held its 2024 Users Group Meeting earlier this month. It unveiled the development of several features for its EHR, with AI being a major focus. Noteworthy use cases included a speculative AI demo integrating Epic data with generative AI, the launch of its Payer Platform, advancements in AI and Cosmos data, and improvements in patient and clinician tools.
Epic also welcomed 19 new US health system client installations, as it continues to strengthen its inpatient-EHR share at every other vendor’s expense, including nearest competitor Oracle Health. Epic was the only inpatient EHR vendor to grow its net market share in the 2023 financial year, by the end of which it held a 40% share of hospitals (with Oracle Health a distant second with around a quarter share) and around half the share of beds (with Oracle Health again second with around a quarter share).
UK-Based EHR Underdog Continues to Disrupt the March of Epic and Oracle Health
Nervecentre Software was selected as the preferred joint EPR system supplier for two Yorkshire trusts last week.
Nervecentre, once known primarily for its Best-of-Breed (BoB) Clinical Information Systems (CIS), has emerged as a formidable player in the UK EHR market, securing multiple contracts and turning heads in an industry dominated by international EHR giants.
In just 12 to 18 months, the company has secured around seven EHR contracts, a remarkable achievement that has surprised many in the industry.
This success is especially impressive considering Nervecentre’s recent entry into the market and the intense competition from well-established international and local vendors. These recent Nervecentre contract wins highlight that it’s still possible for smaller BoB vendors to compete with larger EHR vendors at the contract award stage.
With a portfolio of over 40 NHS Trusts, Nervecentre is leveraging its existing relationships to convert BoB customers into EHR clients, providing a valuable pool of additional EHR customers to target.
Click here to read my colleague Jon Hill‘s complimentary insight analysing Nervecentre’s impact on the UK EHR market.
NHS England Puts Pressure on Trusts to Adopt FDP
Earlier this month, NHS England asked Trusts and Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) to confirm when in the next two years they would be adopting four analytics products that are already available as part of the Federated Data Platform (FDP) being built by US analytics giant Palantir Technologies. The four products are: referral to treatment validation; an inpatient care coordination solution; an outpatient care coordination solution; and discharge planning.
When Palantir won the £330M ($436M), five-year contract late last year to build and implement a national data aggregation platform, there was no mention of adoption being compulsory for Trusts and ICBs. NHS England took a gentler approach, reasoning that the FDP would be for Trusts that ‘found it useful’ and encouraging them to use the platform to support their own use cases.
The NHS England request represents a dramatic change in approach and appears to increase the pressure on care organisations to adopt the FDP.
For some, this is a realistic and welcome prospect. Kettering and Northampton Trust, which form the University Hospitals of Northamptonshire NHS Group (UHN), is one example of an English Trust that is ahead of the curve on this. In May, it announced the first of 44 pilot sites transitioning to a local instance of the FDP.
For others, it will be a challenge. The condensed timescales also potentially put pressure on resources: for example, integration teams at the health systems. Vendors may find their resources stretched too.
Click here for Mark Lazell‘s SPI Digital Health insight discussing the reasons for this move by NHS England, and how it might be received by the organisations in question.
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