Facing a deluge with a leaky roof

Imagine you’ve been thinking about replacing your roof. It’s not leaking at the moment, but you’ve been patching it for years and you know that the next big storm could mean serious water damage. A new roof is expensive, but you know that it will help keep your house – and the money you’ve invested in it – secure for years to come.

Unfortunately, your spouse is expecting your in-laws for a visit next month. The guest room is shabby and outdated, and the living room carpet, which your dog has done some digging on (as well as other actions I won’t mention), needs replacing. This is in addition to the steps leading up to the porch being in sad shape – so much so that you are concerned that the elderly in-laws might trip and fall on them.

In this scenario, it is easy to see why the roof repairs would be put off for a while. Spending money on the roof may mean that the stairs get a temporary fix, you have to buy a cheap carpet for the living room, and the guest room won’t get much more than a new bedspread. It’s either that or you may have to reach deep into your savings, which you really don’t want to do. Besides, convincing the spouse that the roof is a good investment would take more time and energy than you can muster, given all the other things on your plate. For your spouse, making family welcome is the most important thing. You know you need the roof, but you decide to go with your spouse’s top priorities instead.

Will your organization be ready for the coming storms?

For most hospitals, integration tools are rather like that roof. What you have was provided with your electronic health record vendor, and it does an ok job, as long as you don’t need anything more advanced than HL7-2. You know you are going to need a more robust integration platform soon, because the outcomes-based payment storms are coming. In the new world that will soon be upon healthcare providers, integration will be needed for a range of endeavors: accountable care organizations (ACOs), analytics, telehealth, and remote monitoring devices, plus other relationships and technologies that you can’t even imagine at this moment.

To go back to the home-repair analogy: There is a deluge coming, and the clouds are likely to start pouring rain sooner rather than later. It’s worth your time and effort to convince your spouse that the investment will pay off soon, because without the new roof, the new guest room (not to mention that new carpet) will likely be soggy.

Your C-suite colleagues are like your spouse – they have other priorities that seem much more urgent than an integration platform. But there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that outcomes-based reimbursement is on the horizon, and your hospital or health system won’t be granted some magic exemption. Plus, you have a need today, right this minute, for technologies like telehealth and remote monitoring to help reduce readmission rates and lower the cost of care.

While it may be tough to convince your colleagues and your board that integration is an investment that shouldn’t be put off any longer, it’s worth the effort to try to persuade them. Because when they hear the drip, drip, drip of revenue leaking away due to a lack of analytics and other key capabilities that depend on integration, they’ll want to know why you didn’t push harder to get them what they needed.

Do your homework and have a plan

Since your C-suite colleagues have priorities that will compete with the integration platform for dollars, make sure you are prepared when you present the possibilities. Do your homework: Know what technologies are available, what integration challenges your organization is facing, and what the costs are. In particular, look closely at the business and clinical projects that are dear to the hearts of your colleagues, and identify opportunities that will be enhanced by robust integration capabilities.

For example, if your interoperability capabilities are limited to traditional point-to-point integration, how will you extend your patients’ medical records to other organizations when you join an ACO? How will you partner with your state or local health department on population health issues? And how will you integrate data for reliable population health analytics to help you succeed in your ACO contracts?

How will you create a patient portal to allow your customers access to their own records? Stage 2 Meaningful Use measurers how many patients access their records electronically – so if you don’t have a robust patient portal now, you will likely be asked to stand one up very soon.

What will you do if the CEO asks you to spin up a telehealth program quickly to help contain the readmission rate? Telehealth and remote monitoring are proving to be effective strategies for reducing readmissions and repeat emergency department visits. With heavy financial penalties for high rates of readmission and an overcrowded emergency department, you can bet that your CEO is going to want to attack those issues with every useful tool possible, including telehealth. And that takes an integration tool capable of handling modern systems architecture.

How will you answer when your CEO asks if you can handle a merger with – or total acquisition by – another institution? This year alone, dozens of mergers and acquisitions have taken place in all areas of the healthcare space. As it stands, the “little guys” in the healthcare industry are not going to survive. It’s the larger operations that are thriving and expanding. If you are not in the midst of consolidation now, you will be in the near future. You need to be ready for change. How are you going to do everything that needs to be done without a comprehensive integration strategy that uses the latest technologies and architectural patterns? How will you make your enterprise future ready?

Prepare a strong business case for integration

Since capital dollars are harder to access than operating funds, take a look at platforms that don’t require you to purchase hardware or software. A subscription-based service will allow you to spread the costs out over the life of the tool, and also make it easier to switch tools if your choice doesn’t meet your needs or something better comes along.

Research the business case for integration, paying particular attention to how integration enhances the projects that your colleagues consider important and any savings that might result from having better capabilities. Put a dollar figure to those savings wherever possible. If you can show that a robust integration strategy will help your colleagues meet their goals, generate real costs savings, and can be done at a price your budget can live with – your job is largely done.

But be prepared for questions by having detailed use cases available with defendable cost and savings estimates to demonstrate how the organization will see a significant return on its investment.

It’s a lot of work, but it may prevent that moment when your colleagues ask why you didn’t prepare better for the inevitable integration challenges they are going to face.

And if your attention to this project flags, remember what happens when the rains come and your roof leaks. That image should be enough to keep your eye on the prize of a robust integration strategy to meet the coming storms.

KLAS publishes inaugural interoperability report

Healthcare providers strongly encourage better coordination among vendors, timely location of patient records, and greatly improved parsing capabilities as three of the most needed improvements for interoperability of electronic medical records. These findings and others are found in a special study, “Interoperability 2015: Are We Lifting Together?” published by KLAS.

The study highlights how provider organizations rate their EMR vendors in terms of how proactive and effective they are in sharing patient data outside their organization.

KLAS interviewed more than 200 healthcare professionals during a three-month period for this study. All participants identified barriers to interoperability. However, neither providers nor vendors mentioned technology as a missing ingredient, stating instead that a lack of agreement on the use of standards and willingness to share information are more likely causes.

In addition, the report identifies key areas and questions that, if addressed, could accelerate interoperability:

1. Is interoperability success tied to service?
2. Perception is not always reality.
3. Where does information sharing break down?
4. FHIR is hot – why are Carequality and CommonWell not?
5. Are there dollar differences in sharing?
6. Does interoperability impact EMR buying decisions?

To access this report, visit www.klasresearch.com.