WATERTOWN, MA – Ryan Champlin, vice president of operations for the physician network at the Cook Children's Health Care System in Fort Worth, Texas, isn't prone to hyperbole. But when it comes to practical implications of the athenahealth-Microsoft partnership that was announced at HIMSS11 in February, he can't help it.
"People get mad at me for being so excited about this," said Champlin, "but, honestly, this is the holy grail of health data."
Cook Children’s, alongside the Steward Health Care System in Massachusetts, is one of the early adopters of the two firms' new connected solution, which sees the athenaClinicals EHR and athenaCollector practice management software working in concert with Microsoft Amalga, an enterprise health intelligence platform. Microsoft can then push data from Amalga to Microsoft HealthVault, an online platform for collecting, storing and sharing personal health information, better enabling provider-patient connectivity.
That ability to see inpatient and ambulatory information in a single view – whether it's clinical, operational or financial – is crucial, executives say, especially with accountable care organizations on the rise and providers angling for pay-for-performance funds.
The complementary technologies will help improve care coordination across outpatient and inpatient settings, enabling analytics across individual patient encounters and populations of patients.
“Athenahealth and Microsoft share a common view on the importance of improving information sharing across the health system to address the ‘data gaps’ faced by healthcare organizations striving to deliver optimal care,” said Peter Neupert, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Health Solutions Group. “By connecting athenahealth and Microsoft’s complementary health IT assets, we can open new doors for health systems looking to reduce costs and improve care through the efficient, secure exchange of health information.”
Champlin said Cook Children's had priced some other EHR options, but they turned out to be prohibitively expensive and would have required "an IT department that was far more sophisticated than the one we had."
Athenahealth's cloud-based technology "has been a godsend" for his physician network, he said. First, because it was a physician-motivated choice, "we got a lot of buy-in." Second, he said, "athena has the unique ability to be implemented and then evolve.”
“With athena, the product we implemented a year ago isn't the product we're using today. It continues to improve and has tremendous flexibility,” he said.
The ease with which it jibes with Amalga? Gravy.
“It struck me that we could use Amalga to glue together the hospital's data and the athena data and then that would give us a consolidated patient record for our doctors to use to treat the kids,” said Champlin.
Moreover, being able to then push that record out of Amalga and into HealthVault means that, as kids graduate from pediatric care to adult care, they can take with them their entire pediatric record.
"It has so much appeal, because it's so relatively inexpensive and yet, at the same time, it's incredibly flexible," said Champlin. "The really neat thing is that, once the data is in Amalga, any Amalga implementation can communicate with any other Amalga implementation – so then you resolve the whole HIE issue."
“Outside of unique, advantaged organizations like Kaiser and the Cleveland Clinic, there are few examples of health systems with the connectivity to share data across the full enterprise," said Jonathan Bush, chairman and CEO of athenahealth. "In most cases, the technology simply does not exist or is not cost efficient. With Microsoft we have created what we believe to be a low-cost, rapidly deployable and infinitely scalable solution that gives healthcare professionals a single view of a patient’s activity – something that healthcare reform advocates have been striving to do for years."
"When you've been at this for a while, you just get so frustrated that healthcare is so far behind everybody else" when it comes to efficacious use of IT, said Champlin. "We make all these excuses. I hate that we say it's too complex to have the data all flow together. I hate that we say you can't have your medical information because you wouldn't understand it. This fixes all of those things. It's incredible."
The two vendors' synergies have led some to wonder aloud whether this partnership might be the precursor to something more.
Microsoft does not have an EHR solution. As Austin Merritt, COO of Software Advice, wrote in a HealthcareITNews.com blog post this past March, this might "pave the way to a much bigger collaboration between the two industry giants. Rather than acquiring EHR vendors … Microsoft could be dipping its toe in the water by partnering instead, (which) requires much less risk and is often the first step towards a larger move."
"The two companies share a common vision for healthcare IT and look forward to executing on this exciting alliance," said a Microsoft spokesperson. "Past that, our policy is not to comment in any way on future partnerships, alliances or M&A activity."
It could make sense, Merritt argued: Athenahealth may have a smaller user base than some of its competitors, and its SaaS model may provide "zero synergy with SQL Server and Windows Server sales." But its "commitment to cloud computing could prove to be attractive as Microsoft has been criticized for being late to the cloud party. Time will tell what benefits this partnership brings to both firms."
In the meantime, Cook Children's is enjoying the fruits of this partnership. Later this spring, said Champlin, "we're going to roll out for our docs, for the first time, the consolidated patient view. They log in, and on one screen they have everything we know about a patient: their allergies, their medical history, their problem list, their immunizations, everything. And then they can click down to the subsystems that give them greater detail about some particular issue the child might be having.”
"And then when they document, that adds back in to the overall record for the child,” he said. “And when the child graduates from us, we push it back out to HealthVault. We've got it, the adult’s doctor got it … and off they go."
