As most regular readers know, we don’t try to get into the rat race of breaking news on things like EHR selection, the latest meaningful use, or whatever else might be time sensitive healthcare news. Sure, every once in a while we’ll report something we haven’t seen or heard other places, but we’re more interested in the macro trends and the broader insight of what various announcements mean. We don’t want to report on something happening, but instead want to tell you why something that happened is important.
A great example of this is Mayo Clinic’s decision to go with Epic and leave behind Cerner, GE, and other systems. There’s a good interview with Mayo Clinic CEO, Cris Ross, that talks about Mayo’s decision to go with Epic. As he says in the interview, GE Centricity wasn’t part of their future plans, and so they were really deciding between Epic and Cerner. Sad to see that Vista wasn’t even part of their consideration (at least it seems).
Based on Cris Ross’ comments, he commented that he liked Epic’s revenue cycle management and patient engagement options better than Cerner. Although, my guess is that they liked Epic’s ambulatory better than Cerner as well since they were going away from GE Centricity. Cris Ross’s double speak is interesting though:
As we looked at what met our needs, across all of our practices, around revenue cycle and our interests around patient engagement and so on, although it was a difficult choice, in the end it was a pretty clear choice that Epic was a better fit.
Either it was a difficult choice or it was a pretty clear choice. I think what Cris Ross is really saying is that they’d already decided to go with Epic and so it was a clear choice for them, but I better at least throw a dog bone to Cerner and say it was a hard choice. Reminds me of the judges on the voice that have to choose between two of their artists. You know the producers told them to make it sound like it’s a hard choice even if it’s an easy one.
Turns out in Mayo’s case they probably need to act like it was a really hard choice and be kind to Cerner. Mayo has been a Cerner customer for a long time and the last thing they want to do is to anger Cerner. Cerner still holds a lot of Mayo’s data that Mayo will want to get out of the Cerner system as part of the move to Epic.
I’ll be interested to watch this transition. Will Cerner be nice and let Mayo and their EHR data go easily? Same for GE Centricity. I’ve heard of hundreds of EHR switches and many of them have a really challenging time getting their data from their previous EHR vendor. Some choose to make it expensive. Others choose to not cooperate at all. Given Mayo’s stature and the switch from Pepsi to Coke (Cerner to Epic, but I’m not sure which is Pepsi and which is Coke), I’ll be interested to see if Cerner lets them go without any issues.
I can’t recall many moves between Epic and Cerner and vice versa. Although, we can be sure that this is a preview of coming attractions. It will be interesting to see how each company handles these types of switches. What they do now will likely lay the groundwork for future EHR switching.
I’d love to see the contract language used these days on the subject of ‘moving away’. My guess is that some firms were very careful about this, and some not so much.