EHR News Round-Up - April 2023

April proved to be a busy month for healthcare IT vendors with the annual gathering of HIMSS 2023 taking place in Chicago last week, followed by Europe’s leading Digital Health conference DMEA 2023 this week in Berlin.

Here’s my monthly round-up of the latest EHR news and developments, including my thoughts on the implications for the market.

Generative AI Buzz

As anticipated, AI-driven encounter automation and “Chat-GPT ” featured heavily in discussions on the HIMSS conference floor. Demos centred around use cases such as transcription and structured coding.

As the doors opened, Epic announced a partnership with 微软 to integrate AI tools through Azure’s OpenAI Service into its EHR workflows for operational (non-clinical) tasks. The strategic collaboration builds on the existing relationship between the vendors; Epic already has a tight integration with clinical documentation leader 纽昂司 (Microsoft-owned). The tool, which can automatically draft message responses to patients, is already being used by several US healthcare providers.

Six months after investing $100m in Microsoft Azure cloud services, eClinicalWorks also announced it would be integrating EHR and Practice Management solutions with ChatGPT, cognitive services, and machine learning models from Azure’s OpenAI Service.

The tremendous opportunity associated with generative AI in healthcare has the potential to be a long-term game changer. However, the consensus view from discussions I held with vendors at HIMSS was for the industry to proceed with a great deal of caution, particularly in relation to clinical support, where legal risks and ethical factors come into play. During a keynote session, panellists suggested an accountability framework to address the risks of new technology such as ChatGPT technology was fundamental. Further, almost 28,000 leaders have signed an open letter calling for a pause on training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.

Epic Expected to Break into German EHR Market, as the Clock Ticks for Oracle Cerner on i.s.h.med

Software multinational SAP ’s late 2022 announcement that it would cease supporting Oracle Cerner’s i.s.h.med EHR solution by 2030 required a swift and decisive response from Oracle Cerner, as indicated in this Premium Insight .

The DMEA 2023 conference would have been an ideal location to reassure Oracle Cerner’s German customers, although no major announcement was made. Epic , keen to break into the German EHR market, and CompuGroup Medical SE & Co. KGaA (CGM), eager to secure a greater slice of the German hospital EHR pie, are two of several vendors waiting to swoop at the expense of Oracle Cerner.

Specific to the Epic point, German Health Minister Karl Lauterbach has helped stoke the flames on this discussion with his comments relating to the inferiority of German HIS systems compared with solutions offered in the US from Epic. A very unfair comparison given the vastly different IT budgets of German hospitals to US hospitals.

Peter Gocke, CDO at one of the leading hospitals in terms of digitisation in Germany, Charité - Universit?tsmedizin Berlin, has added further to the debate with many expecting Charité to be the first German hospital to contract with Epic, at the expense of Oracle Cerner. However, is this the start of a broader play for Epic in Germany, or a one-off? We discuss this in detail in this Premium Insight .?

CGM Acquires m.Doc

CGM, the leading DACH EHR vendor in revenue terms, continued its acquisitive foray by obtaining a majority stake in patient portal provider m.Doc GmbH . The move is partly driven by CGM’s strategy to benefit from Germany’s Hospital Futures Act (KHZG), which is supporting digital healthcare projects via €4.3 billion of funding. Patient Portals are one of the 11 “pillars” detailing how the funding is to be used in Germany (highlighted below). m.Doc (along with Samidi and Doctolib ) has emerged as one of the leading vendors addressing this pillar and the CMG deal is likely to cement its position further. Two years after coming into force, it’s taken time for the government funding to trickle down to EHR/IT vendors. 2023 and 2024 will be the years where it really starts to drive vendor revenue growth.

At the DMEA conference, held this week, the likes of CGM and Dedalus were expected to position themselves as best equipped to support a multitude of pillars, as indicated in the Top Five Predictions for DMEA 2023 here . For CGM, the m.Doc deal puts it in a much stronger position for Pillar 2. ?

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VA Reset for Oracle Cerner

In my previous EHR News Round-Up , I commented on Oracle Cerner’s problematic $18bn Millennium EHR implementation for the US Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) being delayed until potentially 2024. Last week the VA announced a reset of the project, with no further rollouts until it is “highly functioning,” which could mean several years. There was one exception to this freeze; the go-live of Federal Health Care Center in Chicago remains scheduled for March 2024.

Health Catalyst Extends Contexture Partnership

Earlier this month, healthcare data and analytics provider Health Catalyst agreed a multi-year strategic partnership with Contexture , the largest health information exchange (HIE) in western US. It plans to transition to a single, unified HIE platform for the 28m patients it serves across healthcare organizations in Colorado (where Health Catalyst is Contexture’s existing HIE platform partner), and Arizona. Once completed in 2025, the transition will enable greater EHR interoperability, faster data exchange and care coordination between providers, improved security, and simplified patient and clinical search user experience.

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