Allsys? Eclipscript??

Did you read my last blog post? Well, if you did, the Allscripts/Eclipsys deal should be no surprise. How else does one compete with Judy's incredibly successful physician-oriented sales approach: first sell the docs on your ambulatory EMR, then have them sell their local hospital's C-suite on her acute care product?

To save you from a few clicks, my last blog post was about the NextGen/ Opus deal. For those of you who just follow the big players, Opus is a super little company with a great EMR developed for UHS in PA. They have been targeting smaller hospitals because the big ones have all bought EMRs already. NextGen is a major player in the ambulatory system market, with a great practice management systems (sched, reg, BL & AR) and a hot ambulatory EMR that physicians seem to love. Theirs was a marriage made in heaven, and they've already sold several hospitals on the new "integrated" product combo. But it's not truly integrated, you say, not really written in the same programming language, data base and operating system? Well, let's look at Meditech as an example, probably everyone's model of "true" integration. They bought up LSS (Lake Superior Systems) a few years back, and "integrated" their ambulatory systems with their Magic, Client/Server, and Release 6 products. Now, of course, the programmers in Boston never heard of these guys out in Wisconsin, so they just wrote an interface "under the covers," and voila: instant "integration." Check out a demo and you'll see radically different screens and field names, but, boy, are the brochures, proposals and PowerPoints ever integrated! Let's face it, most vendors today have cobbled together disparate systems they sell as integrated, to whit: - How many old "Novius" apps does it take to complete a Soarian system? - How many companies & products did McKesson buy to build Horizon? - How many (excellent) products did Eclipsys buy to create Sunrise? - Just how integrated is QuadraMed's Affinty, PC products and QCPR? - Etc, etc., etc. So, we now have another "totally integrated" HIS vendor in the market built together from pieces. Only this one is truly some very good pieces: Allscripts moves in the ambulatory market as well as Eclipsys' Sunrise shines in hospitals (punny?). The great advantage of Allscripts and NextGen is they truly understand the physician market, and maybe will learn how to leverage that into hospital sales. If they're only half as successful as Judy, they'll be an epic success.