How the Constantly Changing Technology Landscape is Helping Improve Patient Care - Part 3

Welcome back to our series with John D’Amore. In Part 3 John discusses how an increase in health care mergers will impact the adoption of health information exchanges.

Stay tuned for Part 4 next week. Enjoy!

Podcast Transcript:

Integrated Healthcare Executive:  How will the increase in health care mergers and acquisitions impact the adoption of health information exchanges?

John D'Amore:  That's an interesting question, and it's a force that we're well aware of for this, which is health systems coming together. We've gone on the pendulum from providers being very independent-based over the past decade to being more and more consolidated as part of the health systems for that.

There's a mixed impact for that to health information exchanges. One, sometimes, when doctors come into a network or into an integrated delivery system, they will all adopt the same EHR. That's great, because that can promote data sharing within that health system.

However, almost every major metro market in the United States has multiple large health systems that are going to be delivering care for that. Even though you might go from having 50 different health systems in the region to maybe you get down to 3, 5, or 10, depending upon the size of the metro region, we still see a need for information sharing across those boundaries.

We don't think that there's going to be monopolies in any market, because, obviously, that's a danger to care for that. There's already going to be that need to share across. But, in addition to mergers and acquisitions causing the consolidation of EHRs, sometimes mergers and acquisitions are done at a corporate level but not at the technology level.

We've talked to health systems and did a lot of profiling on this in the past several years, where the average health system still needed to integrate with 10 to 20 different electronic health records -- not individual instances of the same EHR, but fundamentally different brands, different versions of EHRs.

Doing that level of integration is not going to be solved by creating corporate structures that just say, "Now we're all part and we all have the same branding." Clinical information that's collected is going to be very diverse regardless of if there's many health systems in the market or a few, because there's a lot of different providers of care, the way that they document that information.

Overall, the mergers and acquisitions that are happening in healthcare have a mixed impact in terms of what that will do for health information exchange. When you see consolidation of EHRs, I do think that that makes information flow more seamlessly, but, regardless, there's still going to be a lot of different technologies that are used, and the ability to share information between systems will still be critical.