While at Dreamforce 2022, one of most thought-provoking things I heard was that, in order to really meet the needs of the healthcare consumer, we in healthcare need to once-and-for-all let go of the idea that there will be “one tech system to rule them all” and adopt an “and both” approach that integrates both the EHR and a CRM. The EHR is how we’ll “know the patient” and the CRM is how we’ll “know the customer.”

Dr. Geeta Nayyar, Salesforce’s SVP & Chief Medical Officer and Amit Khanna, SVP & GM of Salesforce’s Health & Life Sciences business join me to unpack this “and both” approach to infrastructure technology and talk all-things healthcare consumer. The paradigm shift that comes with this duality – we are at times “patients”, we are at times “customers” – is a big one. Especially in healthcare.

Dr. G speaks to the strategy that Salesforce is operating under to take its tech further into the healthcare and life sciences space, while Amit introduces us to some of the new Healthcare 360 product features launched at Dreamforce that fully show-off Salesforce’s expertise at integrating different technology solutions (Slack, MuleSoft, telehealth) and making perfect sense of massive amounts of real-time data (longitudinal record, health scoring).

As Salesforce advances further into the health market with more care-forward features in its CRM and a strategic focus on healthcare-important issues like improving equity and access to care, will our traditional view of the importance of the EHR change? What if the replacement tech comes with ‘self-service at-scale’ and more ‘seamless experiences?’ Could we head away from “and both” and choose CRM “instead of?” Tune in – the EHR IT infrastructure may have finally met its match!

At Dreamforce 2022, Salesforce’s big annual user conference, “real-time data” was THE topic of conversation as the tech company launched a brand-new platform across its lines of business to help make this type of data integration-plus-analytics “magically” easy. I caught up with Salesforce’s EVP & CRO of Global Health & Life Sciences, LaShonda Anderson-Williams, just after her division’s keynote to find out more about how the new platform (called Customer 360 for Health) is intended to impact what we can do with health data, particularly in the realm of improving health equity and access to care.

Never mind the actual new product features – telehealth integration, health scoring, longitudinal patient records, marketing integrations, etc. – the sum-total of their potential impact is intended to not only improve the way healthcare understands its patients as health consumers, but to also enable it to better meet their nuanced needs with more personalized “seamless” experiences.

LaShonda and I chat about how this type of work is already happening at CVS Health and Moderna – the two marquee customer stories shared during the keynote – as well as how other healthcare organizations can benefit from “putting data at the center” of their health equity initiatives. Her best advice for health and life sciences businesses as they work on improving health access for all? Tune in to find out!

By ADRIAN GROPPER, MD

US healthcare is exceptional among rich economies. Exceptional in cost. Exceptional in disparities. Exceptional in the political power hospitals and other incumbents have amassed over decades of runaway healthcare exceptionalism. 

The latest front in healthcare exceptionalism is over who profits from patient records. Parallel articles in the NYTimes and THCB frame the issue as “barbarians at the gate” when the real issue is an obsolete health IT infrastructure and how ill-suited it is for the coming age of BigData and machine learning. Just check out the breathless announcement of “frictionless exchange” by Microsoft, AWS, Google, IBM, Salesforce and Oracle. Facebook already offers frictionless exchange. Frictionless exchange has come to mean that one data broker, like Facebook, adds value by aggregating personal data from many sources and then uses machine learning to find a customer, like Cambridge Analytica, that will use the predictive model to manipulate your behavior. How will the six data brokers in the announcement be different from Facebook?

The NYTimes article and the THCB post imply that we will know the barbarians when we see them and then rush to talk about the solutions. Aside from calls for new laws in Washington (weaken behavioral health privacy protections, preempt state privacy laws, reduce surprise medical bills, allow a national patient ID, treat data brokers as HIPAA covered entities, and maybe more) our leaders have to work with regulations (OCR, information blocking, etc…), standards (FHIR, OAuth, UMA), and best practices (Argonaut, SMART, CARIN Alliance, Patient Privacy Rights, etc…). I’m not going to discuss new laws in this post and will focus on practices under existing law.

Patient-directed access to health data is the future. This was made clear at the recent ONC Interoperability Forum as opened by Don Rucker and closed with a panel about the future. CARIN Alliance and Patient Privacy Rights are working to define patient-directed access in what might or might not be different ways. CARIN and PPR have no obvious differences when it comes to the data models and semantics associated with a patient-directed interface (API). PPR appreciates HL7 and CARIN efforts on the data models and semantics for both clinics and payers.

Consider the ongoing news about the data broker called Surescripts and the data processor called Amazon PillPack. The FTC is looking into whether Surescripts used its dominant data broker position illegally in restraint of trade. Surescripts, in a somewhat separate action, is claiming that barbarian PillPack is using patient consent to break down the gate it erected for its business purposes. From my patient perspective, does Surescripts have a right to aggregate my prescription history and then refuse me the ability to share that data with PillPack without special effort? 

The possible differences between CARIN and PPR pertain to how the barbarian is labeled and who maintains the registry or registries of the barbarians. The open questions for CARIN, PPR, and other would-be arbiters of barbary fall into four related categories:

1 – Labels Only

• Labels like the CARIN Code of Conduct or the PPR Information Governance Label are self-asserted by the app or service provider and, like other consumer product labels, would be enforced by the FTC. Who designs the labels?

2 – Registries Only

• For deployment efficiency, the the apps and services may be listed in controlled registries. The app could be registered by the developer of the app or by the operator (including a physician) that wants to use the app. This option is relevant because apps might have options the operator can choose that would change the criteria for a particular registry. Will registries support submissions by developers, operators or both?

• Aside from labels, patients tend to infer reputation on the basis of metrics like the number of users and the number of reviews for an app. Do the registries list software operators along with the software vendors in order to promote transparency and competition?

• Do the registries allow for public comment with or without moderation?

3 – Labels and Registries Combined

• What should be the number of registries and would they require one or more of the available labels?

• A typical app store policy is a low bar to enable maximum competition and reduce disputes over exclusion. Consumer rating bureaus, on the other hand, tend to issue stars or checkmarks in a handful of categories in order to reward excellence. Is our label and registry design aimed at establishing a low bar (“You must be this high to be a barbarian”) or promoting a “race to the top” (such as 0-5 stars in a few defined categories)?

• To improve fairness and transparency, should the orgs that define labels be separate from the orgs that operate registries?

4 – “Without special effort”

• Opening the gate to their own records is an established right for both the patient subject or the barbarian designated by the patient. Making this work “without special effort” requires implementation of standard dynamic client registration features that current gatekeepers have chosen to ignore. Should regulators mandate support for dynamic client registration, for any and all barbarians, as long as the app is only able to access the records of the individual patient exercising their right of access?

It seems that the definition of a barbarian is anyone who aims to get patient records under the current laws and the explicit direction of the patient. The opposite of barbarians, whoever they may be within the gates of HIPAA, are able to get patient records without consent or accounting for disclosures by asserting “Treatment, Payment, or Operations” as well as the pretense of de-identification. Meanwhile, these HIPAA non-barbarians are able to sell off the machine learning and other medical science teachings as “trade secret intellectual property” in the form of computer decision support and other for-profit algorithms. This hospital-led privatization of open medicine will contribute to the next round of US healthcare exceptionalism. 

And as for the patients, no worries; we’ll just tell them it’s about patient safety.

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.

By JACOB REIDER

… all rumored to be in the mix to acquire athenahealth.

Nope.

Why not?

a) Apple doesn’t do “verticals.” It’s that easy. Apple sells products that anyone could buy. A teacher, a doctor, my mom. Sure – they have sold high-end workstations that video editors can use, but so could a hobbyist filmmaker. Likelihood of Apple buying athenahealth? ~ .01%

b) Cerner? Nah. While (yes) they have an aging client-server ambulatory EHR that needs to be replaced by a multi-tenant SaaS product (like the one athenahealth cas built), they have too much on their plate right now with DoD and VA and the (incomplete) integration of Siemens customers. Likelihood of Cerner buying athenahealth?  ~ 1%

c) Microsoft. Like Apple, it’s uncommon for MSFT to go “vertical.” They have tried it. (Who remembers the Health Solutions Group?) But the tension between a strong product-focused company that meets the needs of many market segments, and a company that deeply understands the business problems of health (and health care) is too great. The driving force of MSFT, like Apple, is to sell infrastructure to care delivery organizations. Owning a product that competes with their key channel partners would alienate the partners – driving them to AMZN, GOOG and APPL. Likelihood of Microsoft buying athenahealth?  ~ 2%

d) Salesforce. I’d love to see this. But it’s still unlikely. athenahealth has built a product, and they (now) have defined a path to pivot the product into a platform. This is the right thing to do. Salesforce “gets” platform better than everyone (aside from, perhaps, Amazon). But Salesforce has struggled with health care. They’ve declared n times in recent years that they are “in” to really disrupt health care, and with the evolution of Health Cloud, and their acquisition of MuleSoft, they have clearly made some investments here, but the EHR is not the “ERP of healthcare” as they think it is. (Salesforce’s success in other markets has been that they dovetail with – rather than replace – the ERP systems to create value and improve efficiencies.) The way that Salesforce interacts with the market is unfamiliar (and uncomfortable) to most care delivery organizations. So if Salesforce “gets” platform, and athenahealth wants to be a platform when it matures, could these two combine? It’s the most likely of the three, but I still see the cultures of the two companies (I know them both well) as very different, and not quite compatible. Likelihood of Salesforce buying athenahealth?  ~ 10%

e) IBM. yup. I forgot that one. Many recent acquisitions. This would fit. I don’t think it would work very well, but it could happen. ~6%

Others?

a) Philips.  They have enough $$, are getting into population health, have IoT “last mile” business alignment, and understand the need to migrate from FFS to value on a global scale.

b) Roper / Strata. Yeh – you didn’t think of this one! Roper owns Strata Decision.  Cost accounting fits well into the revenue cycle roots of athenahealth. Strata is getting deeper into the role that clinical activity (and deviations from best practice) plays in cost. Dan Michelson (Strata CEO) understands the EHR market incredibly well.

c) Amazon. Platform. ABC. 1492. I’ll say no more. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, LMGTFY.

d) Value Act. Elliott’s not the only big player that may have interest in owning this real estate.

I’m sure there are more. This will be interesting. athenahealth has a vibrant culture, fantastic people, a strong, devoted customer base, and an active developer community.  Remember:  this is a revenue cycle company, not an EHR company. The EHR is a new game they’re playing. It’s an important one, but Todd and Jonathan got into this business with the goal of solving business problems for their customers. That vision remains.  it turns out that a healthier population is (or should be) good for business, and an EHR is (for now) part of that picture. But as the needs of the market evolve, athenahealth will evolve. They’ve demonstrated this well, and this agility is what will cause them to be successful in the long-term.

Jacob Reider is CEO at Alliance for Better Health and former deputy director of ONC. This post was originally published at Docnotes, which is the oldest health care blog. Really!