By MATTHEW HOLT

I am dipping into two rumbling controversies that probably only data nerds and chronic care management nerds care about, but as ever they reveal quite a bit about who has power and how the truth can get obfuscated in American health care. 

This piece is about the data nerds but hopefully will help non-nerds understand why this matters. (You’ll have to wait for the one about diabetes & chronic care).

Think about data as a precious resource that drives economies, and then you’ll understand why there’s conflict.

A little history. Back in 1996 a law was passed that was supposed to make it easy to move your health insurance from employer to employer. It was called HIPAA (the first 3 letters stand for Health Insurance Portability–you didn’t know that, did you!). And no it didn’t help make insurance portable.

The “Accountability” (the 1st A, the second one stands for “Act”) part was basically a bunch of admin simplification standards for electronic forms insurers had been asking for. A bunch of privacy legislation got jammed in there too. One part of the “privacy” idea was that you, the patient, were supposed to be able to get a copy of your health data when you asked. As Regina Holliday pointed out in her art and story (73 cents), decades later you couldn’t.

Meanwhile, over the last 30 years America’s venerable community and parochial hospitals merged into large health systems, mostly to be able to stick it to insurers and employers on price. Blake Madden put out a chart of 91 health systems with more than $1bn in revenue this week and there are about 22 with over $10bn in revenue and a bunch more above $5bn. You don’t need me to remind you that many of those systems are guilty with extreme prejudice of monopolistic price gouging, screwing over their clinicians, suing poor people, managing huge hedge funds, and paying dozens of executives like they’re playing for the soon to be ex-Oakland A’s. A few got LA Dodgers’ style money. More than 15 years since Regina picked up her paintbrush to complain about her husband Fred’s treatment and the lack of access to his records, suffice it to say that many big health systems don’t engender much in the way of trust. 

Meanwhile almost all of those systems, which already get 55-65% of their revenue from the taxpayer, received additional huge public subsidies to install electronic medical records which both pissed off their physicians and made several EMR vendors rich. One vendor, Epic Systems, became so wealthy that it has an office complex modeled after a theme park, including an 11,000 seat underground theater that looks like something from a 70’s sci-fi movie. Epic has also been criticized for monopolistic practices and related behavior, in particular limiting what its ex-employees could do and what its users could publicly complain about. Fortune’s Seth Joseph has been hammering away at them, to little avail as its software now manages 45%+ of all encounters with that number still increasing. (Northwell, Intermountain & UPMC are three huge health systems that recently tossed previous vendors to get on Epic).

Meanwhile some regulations did get passed about what was required from those who got those huge public subsidies and they have actually had some effect. The money from the 2009 HITECH act was spent mostly in the 2011-14 period and by the mid teens most hospitals and doctors had EMRs. There was a lot of talk about data exchange between providers but not much action. However, there were three major national networks set up, one mostly working with Epic and its clients called Carequality. Epic meanwhile had pretty successfully set up a client to client exchange called Care Everywhere (remember that).

Then, mostly driven by Joe Biden when he was VP, in 2016 Congress passed the 21st Century Cures Act which among many other things basically said that providers had to make data available in a modern format (i.e. via API). ONC, the bit of HHS that manages this stuff, eventually came up with some regulations and by the early 2020’s data access became real across a series of national networks. However, the access was restricted to data needed for “treatment” even though the law promised several other reasons to get health data.

As you might guess, a bunch of things then happened. First a series of VC-backed tech companies got created that basically extract data from hospital APIs in part via those national networks. These are commonly called “on-ramp” companies. Second, a bunch of companies started trying to use that data for a number of purposes, most ostensibly to deliver services to patients and play with their data outside those 91 big hospital systems.

Which brings us to the last couple of weeks. It became publicly known among the health data nerd crowd that one of the onramp companies, Particle Health, had been cut off from the Carequality Network and thus couldn’t provide its clients with data.

The supposed reason was that they were getting data without a “treatment” reason.

Now if you really want to understand all this in detail, go read Brendan Keeler’s excellent piece “Epic v Particle”. Basically Particle cried foul and unusually both Michael Marchant, a UC Davis Health employee & the Chair of the big health systems on the ”Care Everywhere Committee” (remember that from earlier?) and then Epic itself responded. Particle’s founder Troy Bannister in a linkedin post and an official release from Particle said that they had not received notice or any evidence of what they’d done wrong. Michael said they had. I started quoting the Dire Straits line “two men say they’re Jesus, one of them must be wrong.” (FD. Troy was briefly an intern at Health 2.0 long, long ago).

Then Epic publicly released a letter to its clients explaining that, contrary to what Troy & Particle said, it had been discussing this with Particle for months and had had several meetings before and after it cut them off. So unless Particle’s legal counsel was parsing its words very very carefully, they knew Epic and its clients were unhappy, and it was unlikely Troy was Jesus. Michael might still be, of course. (Update: as of 4/15/23 Particle says only some feeds were cut off not all of them as Epic suggested)

In the letter Epic named 4 companies who were using Particle’s data in a way it didn’t like– Reveleer and MDPortals (who are one not two companies as they merged in 2023 before this issue started), Novellia and Integritort. 

So what do they do with the data. Reveleer says that “leveraging our AI-enabled platform with NLP and MDPortals’ sophisticated interoperability allows us to deliver providers a pre-encounter clinical summary of patients within their EHR workflow at the point of care.” Sounds like treatment to me. But Reveleer also does analysis for health plans. You can see why hospitals might not like them.

Novellia is a PHR company, presumably using “treatment” to enable consumers to access their data to manage their own care. This was EXACTLY what Joe Biden wanted the 21st  Century Cures Act to give patients the right to do and what Epic CEO Judy Faulkner told him he shouldn’t want (depending exactly who you believe about that conversation). But it’s probably not a particular “treatment” under HIPAA, because who believes patients can treat themselves or need to know about their own data anyway? (I’ll just lock you all in a room with Dave deBronkart, Susannah Fox and Regina Holliday if you want the real answer). This is apparently the line where ONC folded in its ruling to the vested interests that providers (and their EMR vendors) didn’t have to provide data to patient requests.

Finally, Integritort does sound like it’s looking for records so it (or its law firm customers) can sue someone for bad treatment (or as it turns out defend them for it). Is that “treatment” under the HIPAA definition?  Almost certainly not. On the other hand, do the providers cutting them off have a vested interest in making sure no outside expert can review what they’ve been up to? I think we all know the answer to that question. 

But anyway it looks like Particle switched off Integritort’s access to Carequality on March 22nd before Particle was entirely switched off by Carequality sometime around April 1.

What is not answered in the letter is why, if Carequality can identify who these records are going to, it needed to switch all Particle’s access off. Additionally, you would think that Particle’s path of least resistance would be to cut off the named clients Epic/Carequality was concerned about and try to sort through things while keeping its system running–which it seems it did with Integritort. Whatever happened, instead of this negotiation continuing behind the scenes, we all got to witness a major power play–with clearly Epic & its big customers winning for now.

I think most people who are interested in getting access to data for patients are all agreed on the need for new “paths” which were already defined in the regulations but not implemented, and also presumably for agreed standards (with associated liability) of “know your customer laws” for the onramps like Particle to make sure that the clients using them are doing the right things vis a vis confirming patient identity et al. 

Slight digression: I am confused about why identity proofing is such a big deal. In recent weeks I have had to prove my identity for the IRS, for a credit union, and for the TSA. Not to mention for lots of other websites. There are companies like IDme, Clear and many others that do exactly this. I don’t see anything so specific about health care that is different from credit cards, bank accounts, airport safety, etc. Why can those agencies/organizations access all that data online but for some reason it’s a bridge too far for health care?

However you can see where the fault lines are being drawn. There are a lot of organizations, many backed by rich VCs or huge quasi-tech corporations, that think they can do a much better job of caring for Americans than the current incumbents do. (Whether they can or not is another matter, but remember we are spending 18% of GDP when everyone else spends 10-12%). Those organizations, which include huge health plans, tech cos, retail clinics, startup virtual care clinics, and a whole lot more, need data. Not everything they or the intermediaries they do will fit the “treatment” definition the current holders of that data want to use. On the other hand, the current incumbents and their vendors are extremely uninterested in any changes to their business model.

Data may be the new oil but, like oil, data needs refining to power economies and power health care services. We spent much of the last century fighting about access to oil, and we’re going to spend a lot of this one fighting about data. Health care will be no exception.

Matthew Holt is the publisher of The Health Care Blog

By ADRIAN GROPPER, MD

The HHS Office of National Coordinator (ONC) hosted a well-attended Annual Meeting this week. It’s a critical time for HHS because regulations authorized under the almost unanimous bi-partisan 21stC Cures Act, three and a half years in the making, are now facing intense political pressure for further delay or outright nullification. HHS pulled out all of the stops to promote their as yet unseen work product.

Myself and other patient advocates benefited from the all-out push by ONC. We were given prominent spots on the plenary panels, for which we are grateful to ONC. This post summarizes my impressions on three topics discussed both on-stage and off:

• Patient Matching and Unique Patient Identifiers (UPI)
• Reaction to Judy Faulkner’s Threats
• Consumer App Access and Safety

Each of these represents a different aspect of the strategic interests at work to sideline patient-centered practices that might threaten the current $Trillion of waste. 

The patient ID plenary panel opened the meeting. It was a well designed opportunity for experts to present their perspectives on a seemingly endless debate. Here’s a brief report. My comments were a privacy perspective on patient matching, UPI, and the potential role of self-sovereign identity (SSI) as a new UPI technology. The questions and Twitter about my comments after the panel showed specific interest in:

• The similarity of “enhanced” surveillance for patient matching to the Chinese social credit scoring system.
• The suggestion that we already have very useful UPIs in the form of email address and mobile phone numbers that could have been adopted in the marketplace, but are not, for what I euphemistically called “strategic interests”.
• The promise of SSI as better and more privacy preserving UPIs that might still be ignored by the same strategic interests.
• The observation that a consent-based health information exchange does not need either patient matching or UPIs.

It seems inconceivable to me that the TEFCA national health information network can be built on coercive surveillance instead of some combination of consent and UPIs. HHS controls TEFCA and they will have to deal with this in 2020.

Second, there was fierce reaction from patient advocates, activist patients, and academics to Judy Faulkner’s threat to sue HHS if the final regulations look like the most decent drafts. All three of these perspectives are very much worth reading. All three ask ONC to push for the strongest information blocking rules without delay and I agree.

However, the reaction from the academics, the proud architects of SMART on FHIR, doesn’t acknowledge the pact they made with Epic years ago. Neither the big academic hospitals that drove SMART nor the big hospital EHR vendors like Epic were interested in designing a patient-centered system. SMART on FHIR is conceived as apps that must run in the EHR and under the control of the hospital. SMART is a hospital-centered design, not a patient-centered design. This reflects the shared strategic interest of the EHR vendors and their big hospital customers. My pleas to the SMART and HL7 designers to enable patient-directed access were and still are quietly ignored.

The third topic of interest from a patient-centered perspective was evident in the plenary panel about consumer apps and the privacy risks from their lack of HIPAA protection. The strategic interests were in full display, all asking for convenient access to health records on behalf of patients. One panelist described their success in pulling up a patient record on their smartphone and handing it to a doctor that would otherwise have had no way to see them. The commercial interests were eager for the new regulations to create a market for their solutions.

The problem with these consumer apps is that very few doctors can or will access them in the normal course of events. The apps all present different and unfamiliar interfaces, are not accessible unless the patient is in the room, and cannot easily transfer information into whatever EHR the clinician is using. One of the leading proponents of this patient access ghetto strategy is the CARIN Alliance lobby. It goes as far as to declare that their best practices will not support patient-to-provider communications.

What was entirely missing from the consumer access panel and, as far as I can tell, from the entire ONC Annual Meeting agenda, is any discussion of a longitudinal health record, a patient-centered health record that hospitals, physicians, as well as family caregivers could all access and update to ensure that everyone was on the same page. A cynic might ask: where’s the money or strategic interest for that?

Adrian Gropper, MD, is the CTO of Patient Privacy Rights, a national organization representing 10.3 million patients and among the foremost open data advocates in the country. This post originally appeared on Bill of Health here.

By GRACE CORDOVANO PhD, BCPA

Being a patient or a carepartner can be a lonely, powerless place.

There’s no high powered legal or lobbying team to help support you in your or your loved one’s health care journey. There’s no PR team at your beck and call. There’s no advisory board, no executive committee, no assistants, no chatbots or AI-powered technology coming to the rescue. There’s no funding or a company sponsoring your efforts.

There’s no course in how to be a professional patient or carepartner.

There’s no one there in the stillness and dark of the night, when you are in the quiet of your thoughts, the privacy of your personal space, where there are fleeting moments that you don’t have to be strong and courageous. There is no one there to console you, support you as you lay there willing to make a deal with the devil for the slightest glimmer of hope, the slightest bit of clarity, or slightest bit of peace.

As a the carepartner to a loved one who is sick or disabled, many wouldn’t second guess charging head first through a thousand wielded swords if it meant a hope or a cure.

As an advocate, the majority of the work you do is self-created, self-supported, and unpaid. A calling. An undeniable, magnetic force that pulls you in because you cannot turn a blind eye no matter how hard you try. Because you cannot bear witness to human suffering and not do anything. Because you’ve been there and you can relate to another’s pain, grief, and sense of hopelessness and it is unacceptable to not help ease the heaviness of another’s burden.

As an advocate, I know I am not alone when I wonder if my advocacy work is worth it. Does it all make a difference? What did over 20 years of advocacy work improve? Are all these hours of work into the depths of the night worth it? Is the constant mental, emotional, and physical effort of being perpetually on high alert going to bring change? Do the words spoken from the podium, the panels, keynotes, workshops, fireside chats, and the discussions that ensue after handing in my lavaliere or hand held microphone cause actionable change? Does anyone listen to the podcasts and interviews and change their business strategies? Do the business cards and LinkedIn connections exchanged matter? Do the thousands of hours I’ve spent carefully and thoughtfully placing words on paper in articles and blog posts to capture the patient and carepartner voice and perspective make a difference? Does the time spent dedicated to continuing conversations across 3 social media platforms matter? Was all the time I’ve spent away from my family, my children, on the road, traveling to conferences (often at my own expense) to amplify the patient and carepartner voice worth it? Are missing family occasions, children’s games, school events, outings with friends, as well as putting one’s marriage, self-care, one’s physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual being at risk worth it?

After over 20 years of advocacy work, when I close my eyes and reflect, I cannot unsee and unhear what I have seen:

• The people who have died horrible deaths because of cancer, with not a spot of dignity left.
• The parents who fought tirelessly to find hope of a cure or the gift of more time with their dying child.
• The people who have watched as their parents or grandparents died, sometimes slowly, unfathomable deaths, from their heart failure, dementia, cancer, diabetes, and other comorbidities.
• The people who struggle with their own cancer diagnosis while caring for their aging, sick parents, and their also disabled and medically complex children.
• The people who are disabled, who have been denied the critical care they need, the medical equipment and devices, and the standard of care treatments prescribed by their doctors, because insurance companies deemed them not medically necessary. Or worse, being denied their actual Medicaid.
• The people living with chronic illnesses who are denied their life-saving treatments by insurance companies daily, forced to see regressions, relapses, painful, sometimes irreversible progressions of their diseases.

The tears stream down my face as I recall the hundreds, thousands, of pleas I have been faced with over the last 20 years. Pleas, stories, cries for help that break one’s soul and leave you gutted.

There is a common denominator here. These people could not get access to the information they needed for the next step in their, or their loved one’s, care. Information they needed to:

· schedule a second or third opinion appointment

· to organize a tumor board

· to consider clinical trials

· to ask the right questions

· to pick the right doctor or hospital

· to fight an insurance denial

· to do a peer to peer and expedite care needed themselves

· to make an informed decision about an upcoming surgery or procedure

· to prevent a medical error from happening

· to fight an exorbitant medical bill

· to understand their diagnosis and treatment enough to know it wasn’t too early for palliative care

· to know that it was time for hospice

This is what information blocking looks like boots on the ground.

These are the realities people face when they are living with life-altering, life-limiting, absolutely earth-shattering diagnoses.

While patients and their loved ones can’t get the information they need to make educated, empowered decisions about their care, even while actively dying, hospitals, EHR vendors like Epic, as well as MANY other entities, have ludicrously shared and sold the same patient information for commercial purposes, to “improve hospital operations”, for “re$earch”, leveraging the legal loopholes of HIPAA, stating all is legal, this is business as usual. Without needing informed, explicit patient consent. Without any effort dedicated to patient education, public awareness, and transparency under the guise of “Nothing to see here”.

As patients and carepartners, WE WILL NOT STAND FOR THIS A MOMENT LONGER.

Thank you Ms. Judy Faulkner, CEO of EPIC, for your recent letter urging some of the biggest hospital CEO’s and presidents to oppose the proposed rules to improve interoperability and grant patients access to their information. You have made it crystal clear that you are not aligned with the real-world unmet needs and the barriers patient and carepartners face daily. Thank you for illustrating what paternalism looks like in 2020.

Thank you, Mr. Tommy Thompson, former governor of Wisconsin, for your guest column on why the proposed health IT rules would be a detriment to EPIC and Wisconsin’s economy. You have made it crystal clear that the business priorities of Wisconsin are of a greater importance than legal rights and the sanctity and dignity of the lives of all the patients of this great country of the United States of America.

Thank you for helping me refocus. Thank you for helping me answer the questions and address the self-imposed imposter syndrome that can momentarily cloud one’s perception. The answer is: IT IS ALL WORTH IT.

I am more laser-focused than ever before, more confident than ever that patients, carepartners, advocates, those in authentic support of first doing NO HARM, and those in support of partnering with patients and carepartners MUST to come together.

I want all patients and carepartners to know these truths: No one is coming to save us. Together, we can save ourselves and OUR healthcare as we know it.

The time is now to #UnblockHealth. I’m ready to blow the doors off this or at least die trying.

Respectfully Yours in Unblocking Health,

Grace Cordovano, PhD, BCPA

Grace Cordovano, PhD, BCPA is a board-certified patient advocate specializing in the oncology space, a patient experience enhancer, and information unblocker.

Today THCB is delighted to feature an excerpt from Robert Wachter’s much-talked about new book “The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age“ (McGraw Hill, 2015). If you enjoy this piece, be sure have a look at the director’s cut interviews Wachter did for the book with Atul Gawande: “Computers Replacing Doctors“,  and John Halamka: “Black Turtlenecks, Data Fiends & Code.” — John Irvine

That Epic would find itself labeled a monopoly is in itself an extraordinary turn of events. In 2000, after 21 years in business, the company had only 400 employees and 73 clients, and did not appear on a list of the top 20 hospital  EHR vendors. Its big break came in 2003, when the 8 million–member Kaiser Permanente system selected Epic over two far better known competitors, IBM and Cerner. The cost to build Kaiser’s electronic health record: $4 billion.

Today, Epic has 8,100 employees, 315 clients, and yearly revenues of approximately $2 billion. The system is now deployed in 9 of the US News & World Report’s “Top 10” hospitals. In 2014, the company estimated that 173 million people (54 percent of the U.S. population) had at least some medical information in an Epic electronic record.

Epic Founder and CEO Judy Faulkner’s vision, built on several central tenets, has been vindicated many times over. The first principle was that the winning EHR vendor would be the one that solved the most problems for its customers.

While Apple’s App Store has made a modular environment seem feasible and even desirable, most healthcare decision makers want a single product that does everything they need right out of the box (physician notes, nursing notes, drug ordering and dispensing, billing, compliance, and population health) and does those things everywhere, from the newborn nursery to the urology clinic to the ICU.

Said David Bates, chief quality officer at Boston’s Brigham & Women’s Hospital and a national expert in health IT, “If you make a big matrix of all the various things that you want as an organization, Epic covers many more of the boxes than others.” When it was choosing which EHR system to purchase, Partners HealthCare (which includes Brigham, Massachusetts General, and several other Boston-area hospitals and clinics) created just such a matrix, and Epic’s system covered more than 90 percent of the boxes.  The nearest competitor covered just 55 percent. Choosing Epic, said Bates, “was not a close decision.”

Partners’ investment in its new EHR system will total about $1 billion. As Epic often makes clear, only about 15 percent of an organization’s electronic health record investment ends up in Verona. The rest is for training the organization’s own workers, for paying its own IT staff and for outside consultants to help with the implementation.

Second, while Epic’s software has been criticized for its lack of interoperability, most healthcare leaders don’t stay up at night worrying about that. Don’t get me wrong: they care deeply about moving information around; it’s a core rationale for EHRs in the first place. But their definition of “around” is not everywhere. Rather, they want a seamless flow of information around all the buildings they own (within the hospital, between the hospital and their clinics, that sort of thing). They also want interoperability between their system and an outside laboratory they use, their system and Aetna’s claims department, and their system and the local Walgreens.

And they do care—up to a point—about connecting to the patient. But this is where things get nuanced, because the information the hospital CIO wants to make available to the patient is finely calibrated: enough to make the patient happy (scheduling appointments, refilling medications, e-mailing her doctor), but not so much as to risk the franchise. If you come to UCSF for a kidney transplant, it’s good for business if you also get your  shots and primary care from us. If you go to see that famous Sloan Kettering oncologist for a second opinion, the cancer hospital would also like to administer your chemotherapy, even though there is absolutely nothing special about its version of the medication, and you could probably get it cheaper at a clinic down the road.

Just think about it: if a patient can go online and shop around for the cheapest CT scan or colonoscopy (“Hey, Groupon’s offering a $75 MRI at the mall today!”), this creates a problem for the nation’s healthcare Meccas, which count on the profits from these activities to pay the bills.

One way to prevent such shopping around is to be sure the hospital’s IT system doesn’t connect to outsiders that the hospital views as competition. In fact, one technique that hospitals use with their Epic system is to buy it and offer nearby clinics free or subsidized access to it, but only if they admit their patients to that hospital or are otherwise part of its network. Epic implicitly encourages this by not selling its system directly to small practices. A clinic that chooses to stay outside the major medical center’s orbit may find its staff standing at the fax machine when it needs to exchange information with that hospital.”

Third, Faulkner was patient. While other companies were busy merging with one another in order to grow, or futzing around with new product lines, Epic remained confident that, someday, the market for electronic health records would take off. Faulker’s employees focused on building a solid system that would solve more problems, and solve them better, than their competitors’ systems. It worked. Fueled by superior customer ratings and word of mouth, Epic’s client base grew slowly and steadily.

“We were making a healthy profit before HITECH,” said Epic’s president Carl Dvorak, showing me a curve of customer growth from 2000 to 2014. While the graph depicted an unmistakable uptick after 2010, it also illustrated steady year-over-year increases before the federal incentives kicked in.

Point taken. But it is equally true that the EHR business represented a sluggish corner of the healthcare economy before 2010, so nobody but insiders really noticed Epic, or cared very much about it. The signing of the HITECH Act instantly changed that, and Epic was ready—if not for the politics and the attention, then at least for the business. “The reason that Epic got so much of the market is that its product is simply better,” said David Bates. I agree. To frame Epic as somehow having orchestrated HITECH—for its dominance in the past few years to be portrayed, as it sometimes is, as a massive conspiracy launched from the Wisconsin farmlands—is just plain silly. Given its 30-year history of quiet competence, it would also represent a sleeper cell story of, well, epic proportions.

From The Digital Doctor by Robert Wachter, reprinted with permission from McGraw-Hill. Copyright 2015.

Robert Wachter is a professor of medicine at the University of San Francisco, California. 

Arguably, the biggest news story coming out of HIMSS last month was the announcement of the CommonWell Health Alliance – a vendor-led initiative to enable query-based, clinical data sharing. So much has been written about CommonWell that there is little need to rehash what has been said before.

What has not been said, or at least has been sensationalized nearly to the point of irrelevance is the whole controversy surrounding Epic and how they were not invited to join the CommonWell Alliance until after the announcement. None other than Epic’s own founder and CEO, Judy Faulkner, has gone on record stating the Epic was unaware of CommonWell prior to the announcement. Faulkner has gone on to question the motives of CommonWell, in an effort to subvert it, in her highly influential role on the Dept of Health & Human Services HIT workgroup committee.

That was the last straw.

It is one thing to moan and groan at the HIT love fest that is HIMSS, where vendors commonly discount the announcements of competitors. But it is quite another thing to be a part of a highly influential body that is defining nationwide HIT policy and make the same claims over again, especially when they are frankly not true.

Is there some truth to Faulkner’s claims that the vendors who have created CommonWell may have had an additional motive, stopping the steamroller that is Epic? More than likely.

But it is also true that founding members of the CommonWell Alliance do wish to lay down the swords of hoarding data to allow higher order services to be developed on top of the CommonWell platform. They all see the market changing rapidly. They know that they, on their own, cannot move fast enough to meet all the needs of the market. They understand that the next iteration in HIT is to move to a platform-based services model – that is where the value will be. As to whether or not CommonWell will ultimately be successful, that is far from certain as there are many rivers to cross before we see the query-based health information sharing that these alliance members envision take hold, if at all, in this industry.

From our vantage point, Epic, with its monolithic strategy that is more akin to Wang Laboratories than it is to Apple’s iOS, is operating on a model that while providing a seamless environment from ambulatory to acute (something other EHR vendors have totally messed up on), will ultimately hinder healthcare organizations’ ability to rapidly innovate and respond to market changes. Epic simply will not be able to move fast enough and their customers will struggle as a result.

As to whether or not Epic was invited to the CommonWell party; we have received confirmation from several sources that indeed Epic was invited to join a couple of weeks prior to the announcement. What likely occurred is that Epic saw that CommonWell’s goals, objectives, and operating structure were already formalized when the invite arrived. Thus, Epic would not have an ability to make substantive contributions to this initiative and rejected the invitation.

It is disingenuous for Epic to state otherwise and if they were a public company, they may have been subjected to an SEC inquiry. But alas, Epic is not a public company and Faulkner can say what she wishes with few, if any, repercussions. Her quite vocal denouncements of CommonWell though do show that she clearly does feel threatened by this alliance.

But a core mission of Chilmark is to cut through the BS to ensure that this industry is informed. In keeping with that mission, we felt it important to let you know what is really happening behind the scenes at CommonWell. Hopefully, we have set the story straight on the CommonWell Health Alliance and Epic saga.

John Moore is an IT Analyst at Chilmark Research, where this post was first published.