Survey Names Top 4 Specialty HIE Vendors
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
A Black Book study provides insight into future HIE spending and expansion.
According to a Black Book Market Research survey, the number of multi-provider networks and hospital systems considering investing in a private HIE to standardize the sharing of patient data jumped from 33 percent in 2013 to 72 percent this year. The survey highlighted a shift from volume to value within the healthcare industry and showed how this shift has pushed physicians to start investing in HIEs differently.
The results were based on responses from more than 4,000 HIE clients and potential customers during the period between the second and final quarters of 2014, as well findings from another survey including 1,290 healthcare insurers, payers, and industry organizations.
“The HIE market will dramatically change during the next two years as providers seek electronic health records systems that support data exchange to qualify for meaningful use incentives,” said the report’s authors, according to Exscribe.com. “As HIEs consolidate, it is vital that they keep and cultivate the confidence of their original stakeholders by involving them in the operational progression. The key challenge for consolidating HIEs will be to maintain the stakeholder trust that has taken extraordinary efforts to develop.”
Yet despite the ONC's recent 10-year road map for interoperability and the emphasis on the centrality of HIEs for the future of data sharing, “persistent unpredictability” is the best way to describe the current technological environment, according to 86 percent of healthcare providers and 81 percent of vendors. Many providers are resistant to HIE investment because of that uncertainty, and 90 percent of hospitals and 94 percent of independent physicians say that they lack trust in the business model of public HIEs, or that they want to see how much of the cost payers will be absorbing before moving forward.
This reality is causing the contraction of the public HIE market, leading the majority of stakeholders, from providers to payers, to believe that most small, independent HIEs won't survive the next two years, creating a tough marketplace dominated by a handful of major players, according to the Black Book results.
“A short list of enterprise HIE vendors have effectively established operative exchanges across organizational siloes to benefit patients, providers, agencies and payers,” said Doug Brown, Managing Partner of the study. “Those vendors are justifiably earning the lion's share of 2015 initiatives and stymied HIE developers are reconsidering their positions.”
The poll examined 224 operational exchanges and 67 vendors (public and private) across 20 HIE-specific indicator and identified the top HIE vendors in specialized categories. The top performers were Cerner in Electronic Health Record-based HIE, Orion Health, in Government Payer and Commercial Insurer Centric HIEs, Aetna Medicity, in Core Private Enterprise HIE Solutions, and Intersystems, in Core Public HIEs Systems.
According to Insurancenewsnet.com, other vendors that scored well in specific HIE performance indicators were: Alere Wellogic, Availity, Caradigm, CTG, dbMotion Allscripts, Epic Systems, Greenway, GSI Healthcare, HealthUnity, ICA, Infor (Lawson), McKesson RelayHealth, Medecision, Optuminsight, QSI Mirth NextGen, Sandlot, and Siemens.