Big Announcements at eClinicalWorks National Conference

If you’ve followed our coverage of health IT conferences for any amount of time, you know that we love to attend user conferences.  They usually include big announcements on stage from the company and you get to spend time with the real boots on the ground of healthcare IT.  This has been exactly my experience at the first day of the eClinicalWorks (eCW) national conference.

Girish Navani kicked off the conference as the opening keynote which included major product announcements and features in their soon to be release v12 update.  Check out our summary of some of the announcements and developments eCW shared on stage.

Navani opened the event saying he missed being at the user conference and was glad to be back after a 3 year in-person hiatus (Thanks COVID). The feeling seemed mutual giving the packed keynote opening to the event.

For those that don’t understand how big eCW really is, they have over 15,900 customers and their users conduct 350+ million visits each year. That’s really impressive scale given their focus on ambulatory. Navani commented on how they love to see their customers grow and it seems like eCW is really benefiting from the consolidation that’s happening in the industry. I’ve also been impressed by how many FQHCs I’ve bumped into at the event. That seems like a really strong area for eCW.

eCW was particularly proud of their cloud origins. This makes me feel old, but pretty amazing that they’ve been doing a cloud approach to EHR for 23 years. Although, it’s definitely been an evolution as cloud has matured.

The biggest example of the evolution in their cloud approach is highlighted in their embrace of the public cloud. Check out our previous interview about their $100+ million investment in Microsoft Azure to learn more about that embracing of the public cloud. Navani commented that 75% of eCW customers are on the cloud and he strongly encouraged the other 25% to follow suit so they can benefit from the reliability, security, and continuity of the public cloud.

Navani did demos of a number of new products and features they created for eCW users. First up was a new Healow Chatbot which eCW users can embed right on their website. The chatbot is designed to answer some of patients most common questions like “Can you change my password” and “Do you take this insurance?” It even included a “price transparency” option which was great for organizations that had public pricing for their services. He appropriately noted that many of these questions like changing a password weren’t asked 20 years ago, but now that is a common question practices get. Automating the response to these common questions can be a great help to practices.

Next up was Prisma and search insights. Looks like this feature has been around for a bit, but it has been enhanced and made faster. One of the challenges we often hear at Healthcare IT Today is the cognitive overload that many doctors face. Being able to quickly find data for a patient amidst the sea of information is a very useful tool. Plus, things like result linking for easy access to results was cool to see. Navani suggested that finding the right info for the patient should be as easy as searching Google. No doubt this tool mimics that approach.

The value based care component is hard to describe and even harder to tweet. I’m sure eCW would be happy to demo the integration between care manager and doctor for you. It’s pretty slick, but felt like an important effort to support the shift to value based care. In fact, just the simple fact that they’re building value based care features into the clinical workflow feels like an important step forward. Of course, I’m sure it’s going to take time for users to fully adopt these new options.

They also showed a number of interesting interoperability options they’d integrated into the eCW software. It certainly raises a lot of questions about the quality of the data and the sources, but it really is amazing to hear EHR vendors talking about interoperability and embedding it in their software. They also announced that as part of their Cures Act efforts, they’ll be launching an open API for developers to develop on top of eCW. I’m interested to talk to them more about what they have planned in this regard. Is this more about Cures Act compliance or about embracing a third party vendor ecosystem?

There were a series of other v12 product announcements that are hard to put into context if you’re not an eCW user. Some of them included new mobile options, eSignatures, integrated Healow surveys, a really impressive Healow referral integration (I’d like to see how this works in practice), new documentation automations and options, and jellybeans (like I said, you have to know eCW to appreciate this one).

Two of the product announcements really stood out to me. First was their efforts to improve the “I have to log in to eCW so many times” problem that every EHR vendor deals with. They improved the initial sign in time and they created a lock and unlock feature that even supports multiple users on the same computer. Sounds trivial, but this is going to be a huge improvement for users and is not trivial to code this properly. Navani also commented that all of eCW’s speed has improved and they’ve added keyboard shortcuts throughout the product. If you remember this piano analogy I made back in 2012, clicks isn’t the problem. It’s speed and consistency of response.  Hopefully, these speed enhancements will help with both of those.

The other big feature was the addition of a great new navigation bar that allows a user to work across multiple screens. In a moment of vulnerability, Navani admitted that the workflow for doing this in the previous version has been less than ideal. This new navigation seems like a great solution to solve those workflow problems where users need to access multiple screens.

When I think back to these announcements, it was amazing to see the cheering from the crowd as each of them was announced. In fact, I heard audible gasps and moments where people couldn’t help but yell “Yes!” with the exuberance of a religious revival. This is the perfect illustration of why user conferences are so valuable and exciting. Attendees at the event often spend the majority of their day using this software. This is particularly true with EHR software. Changes to the software make a massive difference in their work life, so they’re extremely excited to learn about the new features. It’s great to see this excitement and to see where companies like eCW are heading in the future.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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