One of the surprising reactions for me in the announcement of Athenahealth’s acquisition of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center’s (BIDMC) in house webOMR platform was by John Halamka. As I mention in the linked article, it really isn’t a pure software acquisition as much as it is Athenahealth going to school to learn about the inpatient EHR space. However, John Halamka’s reaction to this announcement is really interesting.
As I read through all of the coverage of the announcement, John Halamka seems to have shifted gears from their current in house EHR approach to now considering a switch to some other external EHR vendor. This is very interesting given this blog post by John Halamka back in 2013. Here’s an excerpt from it:
Beth Israel Deaconess builds and buys systems. I continue to believe that clinicians building core components of EHRs for clinicians using a cloud-hosted, thin client, mobile friendly, highly interoperable approach offers lower cost, faster innovation, and strategic advantage to BIDMC. We may be the last shop in healthcare building our own software and it’s one of those unique aspects of our culture that makes BIDMC so appealing.
The next few years will be interesting to watch. Will a competitor to Epic emerge with agile, cloud hosted, thin client features such as Athenahealth? Will Epic’s total cost of ownership become an issue for struggling hospitals? Will the fact that Epic uses Visual Basic and has been slow to adopt mobile and web-based approaches provide to be a liability?
Or alternatively, will BIDMC and Children’s hospital be the last academic medical centers in Eastern Massachusetts that have not replaced their entire application suite with Epic?
Based on John Halamka’s comments it seems that his belief might have changed or at least he’s considering the option that an in house system is not the right approach moving forward. No doubt Athenahealth is hoping that they’ll delay the decision a few years so they have a chance to compete for BIDMC’s business.
If you look at the rest of the blog post linked above, Halamka was making the case for Epic back in 2013. I think that clearly makes Epic the front runner for the BIDMC business at least from Halamka’s perspective. We’ll see how that plays out over time.
It seems like we’re nearing the end of the in house EHR hospital. Are there any others that still remain?
