Issue link: https://beckershealthcare.uberflip.com/i/1161749
50 CIO / HEALTH IT Q: How is Allscripts making its EMR interoperable with organizations that use other systems? PB: We've been advocates of having an open platform since 2007. We have a large group of people in the company whose only role is to help people understand how our APIs work and to help them write and understand how to make calls into our databases at a relatively low-level basis so they can get real information out and put real information back in. is is what we call our Allscripts Developer Program, which today has more than 4,000 different developers who are licensed and certified to log into our platform. e other thing we've been working on for a long time is our dbMo- tion platform, which is an interoperability platform we built in Pitts- burgh at UPMC to allow Cerner and Epic to talk together so that those two systems can have a single patient view of an individual's health record. We've been mastering and improving upon that platform for the last seven years we've owned it, and now, in 2019, there's more than 51 different EMR systems that are plugged into the dbMotion in the greater Pittsburgh area. Q: If you could change one perception of EMRs overnight, what would it be? PB: e perception that the EMRs have not reached their full potential is a bit misleading. We could go back to the report that came out in 1999 called "To err is human," which talked about the broader landscape of healthcare information technology and the way that hospitals operate. At the time, hospitals were predominantly paper-based, and anytime an industry that big operates on paper the efficiencies that you have with supply chain and efficiencies you have with duplication of ordering drugs, duplication of ordering tests, etc., were in place not on purpose but due to the fact that there wasn't a check and balance system or even a way to figure out whether or not that feature or medication had already been ordered. ere's a whole efficiency component that the EMRs are not getting credit for, circa 2019. Additionally, I think the EMRs are a lot more interoperable than peo- ple are giving them credit for. You can get data out of other organiza- tions and move the data around. It's not easy work, but it can be done. Q: What is your strategy and vision behind the ZappRx acquisition? PB: e specialty pharmacy marketplace is very large, and it's been growing quite rapidly over the course of the past 10 or 15 years. I think the statistics around that are that medications account for about 2 percent to 3 percent of all prescriptions, yet they represent nearly half of the total prescription costs in the United States. ZappRx, which is a digital health company that offers a prescription and prior autho- rization platform, leans on increasing efficiency and medication ful- fillment. If you're a physician and it's hard to order a medication, you might not order that exact drug just because of the difficulty of getting the prior authorization for it. ZappRx helps reduce the amount of time it takes and also helps with the efficacy of being able to adhere to that specialty protocol that was prescribed by a specialist for this better and more targeted treatment of that particular patient's condition. Q: What is your top priority for Allscripts for the rest of the year? PB: We have a lot of U.S.-based clients that are working on and doing upgrades for their certification process purposes, so we are performing a lot of upgrades throughout the end of the year and through the beginning of next year. We're also continuing to innovate around several different platforms we have to try and take out some of the physician fatigue, as well as other usage issues of these EMRs. n $32M Cerner EHR install at Washington state facilities delayed for years By Jackie Drees N egotiations between state and vendor caused delays to the Cerner EHR implementation at Washington's Department of Social and Health Services, The News Tribune reported July 8. DSHS hired Cerner in 2015 to install and provide support for a new EHR system at state-run facilities including Lake- wood-based Western State Hospital. DSHS claimed that since hiring Cerner, no progress has been made on the project, but the department has spent $21.8 million on costs including professional services contracts and salaries and benefits of DSHS employees assigned to the EHR im- plementation, according to the report. Cerner did not respond to the publication's requests for comment. DSHS cited a contract dispute with the EHR vendor and issues installing the new system in older facilities as con- tributing factors to the delay. "With any contract that you have with a vendor, there comes times when there may be differences in how we see the contract and how they see the contract," DSHS Assistant Secretary Sean Murphy told The News Tribune. "We continue to work with them to work through those elements to get where we need to at the end of the day." The project's timeline was previously altered to accom- modate an implementation deadline for October 2015. The deadline was then broken up into phases, with prior- ity items slated for completion by October 2015 and all other items finished by September 2017. The deadlines were not met, according to the report. n "I think EMRs are a lot more interoperable than people are giving them credit for." — Paul Black, CEO, Allscripts