Evaluated on a revenue basis, they don’t get any bigger in the healthcare IT space than McKesson Provider Technologies. So when the President of that division speaks, it’s a good idea to listen. As such, healthsystemCIO.com editor Anthony Guerra recently talked with Sunny Sanyal to learn how the market was looking from his unique perch. It’s a story of much activity, good advice and lessons learned. What follows is an interview that any healthcare IT insider should take the time to absorb.
BOLD STATEMENTS
They look at the products they have and look at where they are in KLAS, and they do call us on it. And they ask us what’s going on and how we’re doing,
They have done a good job of staying on top of it, and even though none of us like the fact that it’s dragging out and taking a lot longer than any vendor would have liked to have the requirements finalized, we have to give them some slack because this is so difficult.
Just get going on CPOE, put your plans in place today and take the vendor’s prescriptive approach to rolling that out.
GUERRA: Let’s talk a little bit about KLAS scores. First off, what is your view of KLAS?
SANYAL: We think very highly of them. I think they do a very good job of staying consistent. Over the years, they’ve created a mechanism that everyone can relate to and understand. So we actually are highly supportive. We listen to them very carefully. We take note of them, and we spend a lot of time with them.
Having said that, I think it’s an area that all our product managers, all our services folks pay attention to. And frankly, we have a very good relationship with KLAS. And they give us a lot of really good feedback. It’s very rare that we hear something from KLAS that we wouldn’t hear from our customers. It’s good to have a third party talking to our customers because customers sometimes will elaborate more to KLAS. So we’ve viewed KLAS as a healthy complement to what we do internally in our surveying of customers. I’ll tell, you across the board, when we talk to our customers, we find that increasingly they are looking at KLAS. They’re paying attention to KLAS. Whether or not they make their actual buying decision just based on KLAS, I don’t know. But they do look at KLAS, and they do pay attention to the top three in KLAS (categories). They look at the products they have and look at where they are in KLAS, and they do call us on it. And they ask us what’s going on and how we’re doing, and I think that’s a healthy thing.
GUERRA: Let’s go into the numbers a little bit. For the “Best in KLAS 2009” Report released in December, in the acute care EMR category, you were #4 at 73.64, very close in score with a number of others. Way ahead of the pack, as I’m sure you know, was Epic at 87.75. Any thoughts on why Epic is so far out in front?
SANYAL: First of all, KLAS measures a vendor’s performance against the same vendor’s performance the prior years. So what we do is look at our trends. For each dimension, we look at how we performed against those major business criteria in prior years. And that gives us a more practical way of looking at year-over-year ratings or quarter-over-quarter ratings. So to me, that’s more meaningful. KLAS doesn’t, if you think about how the surveys are done, ask people to compare one vendor to another. So we use KLAS to answer the question: Are we improving? Are we headed in the direction that we should be?
Because the responses to KLAS surveys are not broken out by type of respondent (for example, we don’t know if most of the responses are from 200 bed community hospitals or multi-hospital academic medical centers) it has not been practical for us to compare ourselves against other vendors. Having said that, I look at the KLAS chart and I do look at who is number one and I want to know why they’re number one. So we do dig into that and try to understand why the scores are what they are.
So we do aspire to get to number one in every single one of our product areas. I’m happy to say that this year we have actually quite a few that are number one in KLAS but, on an operational basis, we pay much closer attention to our trends and try to push the ones where we believe we need to take action.
GUERRA: I noticed a gap in your offerings — specifically that you didn’t have a product ranked in the KLAS category of EMRs for physician practices with over 100 doctors. Epic does, and they do quite well in that space. You don’t rank for ambulatory EMR until we get into the smaller-sized practices with under 25 physicians, and then you rank eighth in the 6 to 25 category and sixth in the 2 to 5 doctor category. Is that something you’re looking to address?
SANYAL: We do have an ambulatory EMR for the large practices. It’s Horizon Ambulatory Care and the 10.X version level. Horizon Ambulatory Care is integrated with the inpatient Horizon Solutions and that scales. It’s actually installed at over 50 customers at very large settings. Duke University has it deployed with quite a large number of physicians. Wheaton Franciscan is another of our customers where it’s deployed in very large numbers across multiple states, multiple sites; Methodist in Peoria, Ill., house wide, hundreds of doctors, Medical Associates of Dubuque… so we have quite a few customers that are on it. It is an area of priority and it is an area of focus. With version 10, it’s integrated with our inpatient settings as well.
GUERRA: So you’re not on the report in those sections because you don’t have the number of implementations to qualify yet, does that make sense?
SANYAL: Yes, I need to look into why it didn’t factor in the KLAS reports. I didn’t realize it wasn’t on the report itself. I do believe we are at a point where we have critical mass to be able to qualify for what KLAS would call statistical significance.
GUERRA: Do you think the government has done a good job with HITECH?
SANYAL: I think they’ve done a good job for several reasons. This is extraordinarily complex. They have done a good job of staying on top of it, and even though none of us like the fact that it’s dragging out and taking a lot longer than any vendor would have liked to have the requirements finalized, we have to give them some slack because this is so difficult. It’s so complex, there are so many stakeholders and so many constituencies to balance. I do believe that they’re doing a good job. I do believe that the industry is moving in the right direction. On balance, I’d give them a positive score.
GUERRA: Finally, what do you want to tell your customers about the degree of support you’ll be able to provide?
SANYAL: I have three messages to our CIOs. First, we will absolutely be prepared for them with products that will be certified. They should not have any questions or doubts in their minds about our products and whether we’ll get certified in time for them.
Secondly, and corollary to that, is we have staffed up and we’ve ramped up ahead of time. We’re continuing to do that in anticipation that our customers will need us to provide services, resources, and implementation support. So we’re not waiting for the volume of projects to hit; we’ve already begun that process, we started that last quarter, and we’re adding very large numbers, let me put it that way, of services, resources. We’ve already communicated that to our customers, that we will be ready from a product perspective and resource perspective to help them.
The third message that I’d like to give to the CIOs is get started. Really get started on the things that you know will be on your critical path to Meaningful Use. So if you haven’t yet begun and mobilized your CPOE deployment plans, you need to do that. I’d say stop worrying about certification — that will happen. McKesson will get certified. Get going on the things that are more difficult that will take you longer, and that actually have a positive impact on the organization. Just get going on CPOE, put your plans in place today and take the vendor’s prescriptive approach to rolling that out.
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