EHR vendor giant Cerner Corporation is leveraging health IT partnerships to help providers bring their tools into the age of healthcare consumerism.
At Cerner Corporation, the evolution of healthcare technology has looked like a baseball game. And as health systems face calls for more consumerism in healthcare, the EHR vendor giant is integrating solutions that will help it score in the second inning.
“The first inning was about meaningful use of patient portals,” David Bradshaw, senior vice president of Consumer & Employer Solutions at Cerner, told PatientEngagementHIT.com in an interview. “CMS really drove all of us to deploy patient portals and focused on health IT adoption.”
And that first inning worked. Patient portal adoption has reached just around 90 percent, and healthcare organizations are treating increasingly engaged patients the likes of which most providers hadn’t before seen. By and large, organizations are facing a patient panel that is taking ownership of its healthcare and is demanding a consumer-centric experience.
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“Our clients are dealing with an industry that is in a transformation,” Bradshaw stated. “Uber, Lyft, the airline apps, the banking apps, eCommerce apps have made us conscious and aware of an industry that is transformed digitally.”
As the demand for consumer-centered healthcare has increased, organizations have tapped the expertise of chief experience officers, chief marketing officers, and chief strategy officers, all of whom were looking for tools to help deliver on the positive healthcare experience consumers so avidly demanded.
“They had business problems,” Bradshaw added. “They were trying to get people to pay online. They were trying to get people to schedule online. They were trying to register patients online before they got to the hospital. They were trying to touch patients daily in their lives in preparation for their episodic treatment at their facility.”
And with that, healthcare entered its second inning, Bradshaw said.
“Cerner was late in developing some of these niche apps in this consumer-centered wave,” Bradshaw admitted. “It was a known disconnect. It’s not like they were asleep, but all the big EHR companies have limited resources and you got to invest them in the places that fit.”
Instead, those patient-centered goals gave rise to an entire ecosystem of third-party, niche engagement apps.
These technology developers, largely backed by venture capitalists, emerged to fill health system needs by offering online appointment scheduling systems and provider search tools and other tools organizations needed in order to survive the rising tide of healthcare consumerism.
Providers bought these products, developed them to their population needs, and built crucial relationships with smaller, third-party vendors.
But as successful as those apps have been, organizations have still faced some technology fragmentation. While well-developed tools can work around interoperability questions, having a disparate suite of engagement tools create multiple entry points for patients which can be both cumbersome and confusing.
Now Cerner is getting in on the game, working to connect disparate apps underneath its own umbrella through its Cerner Consumer Framework. To make this work, Cerner has established relationships with leading third-party patient engagement vendors across the country.
Even though Cerner won’t be developing any of these niche patient engagement technologies – at least outside of the HealtheLife patient portal – it will be playing host to a number of key technologies already broadly adopted across the industry.
“Think of it as like a digital tabletop, and on this digital tabletop, all of our HealtheLife applications allow themselves to be represented,” Bradshaw explained.
Health system clients can arrange their preferred third-party apps and the HealtheLife patient portal in a way that makes sense for the specific patient population at hand.
The EHR vendor giant has begun the project with partnerships between some of the leading patient engagement firms in the country. In September, Cerner announced its partnership with price transparency and payment tool Simplee.
Also in September, Cerner and GetWellNetwork unveiled a partnership that put GetWellNetwork’s patient engagement and connectivity tools on the Cerner Consumer Framework as well.
Bradshaw noted that Cerner has also formed partnerships with Kyruus, a provider directory and matching tool, and AmericanWell, a major provider of telehealth services.
“Now a health system client can orchestrate their experience using GetWellNetwork and SimpleePay and the HealtheLife patient portal, creating an integrated experience that is visually cohesive because of this software development kit that we’ve developed as part of the Cerner Consumer Framework,” Bradshaw explained.
The decision to partner with these companies – not acquire them or develop their own versions of the tools – required extensive thought from Cerner, Bradshaw explained. While there were some incentives to hosting niche consumer healthcare tools of their own, Bradshaw and leadership from Cerner felt there simply were other things the vendor should be doing while their partner firms were doing consumer-centricity well.
“We see our customers have moved in pretty strong movement towards some of these third-party vendors,” Bradshaw stated.
Cerner is going to let those vendors do what they do best, and meanwhile it can concentrate on its own focus areas.
“Take bill pay as an example. Our revenue cycle team is very focused on our Revenue Cycle project,” he said. “We are investing enormous amounts of resources into that. To take that team away and to focus on a consumer interface for paying your bill online when there is a robust offering like Simplee in the marketplace that’s been well-adopted by our largest clients doesn’t make sense.”
Now that healthcare has entered its second inning, Bradshaw and Cerner leadership sees a market prime for partnership and collaborative development. And the Cerner Consumer Framework is just one example of where it’s headed.
Going forward, Bradshaw is looking to the next inning and the importance of health data interoperability. As federal regulations demand seamless exchange of health data between multiple providers and the patient, Bradshaw is leaning on these collaborative efforts like the Cerner Open Developer Experience (code) program to solve interoperability challenges.
Source: Patient Engagement Hit