Founded just over 7 years ago, Shared Health(SH) currently operates the largest public/private Health Information Exchange (HIE) in the United States with a vision to transform healthcare by securely connecting medical information across a patients' network of clinicians. Shared Health has the distinction of being the only comprehensive statewide HIE in the country to combine beneficiaries from Medicaid and commercial insurers, as well as self-insured employers into a single exchange available at the point of care.
Being at the cutting edge of technology SH achieves operational effectiveness by reducing costs of incremental product development cycles. The initial product design undergoes multiple rounds of review and recommendations to include as much flexibility and granularity into independent modules as possible. SH follows SCRUM methodology in which every new development project is allocated a predefined sprint cycle. At the end of a project sprint any budget or time overrun is documented and shared between the various stakeholders. This creates an environment of greater transparency where management is on top of key issues and roadblocks. Another key aspect is the use of technology to achieve quick turnaround time. Most of the systems and processes at SH are designed to handle the commonly used industry formats for data interchange such as HL7, NCPDP, 837p, etc. This allows SH to bring on board a new partner or client in as little as 90 days time, as compared to its peers who take significant amount of time to redesign their processes to accommodate a new data source.
SH uniquely positions itself in a niche market carved out of EMRs (Electronic Medical Record), EHRs(Electronic Healthcare Record) and HIEs. SH has a wide range of products and services that include tools for medical professionals to access patient data across multiple care settings in the healthcare environment. SH engages in systematic integration with other EMR companies such as eClinical Works and Allscripts to create a delivery model with a complete longitudinal view of the patient. For example SH encourages clinicians to use the ePrescribe system of AllScripts and in return AllScripts feeds the medication information back to SH repository. The strategy is to create effective partnerships where a patient's claim history, medication history, immunization and allergy information, lab results and radiology reports as well as discharge summaries and other clinical data are warehoused into a central repository. At the sametime SH very strategically distinguishes itself from other traditional HIEs by offering advanced clinical decision support tools such as Problem List, Clinical Insight and Condition Tracker. SH's business model is to encourage clinicians to adopt their clinical exchange system by providing incentives such as Pay-for-Performance, chronic care management and care opportunities. SH also acts a broker for Practice Management Systems and EMRs to provide an onramp to National Health Information Network (NHIN). Strategically SH wants to be omnipresent by enhancing capabilities of existing systems and building new ones where required.
Being a part of an evolving market, Shared Health does not operate under any existing pricing guidelines. As a part of The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act(ARRA) $19bn is intended to be used to increase the adoption of EHR by physicians and hospitals and so SH's pricing is dictated by the amount of money that is being invested into healthcare reforms. The pricing model in many ways can be compared to the automobile industry. SH provides different kinds of EHR systems - basic, meaningful use and decision support system. Customers only pay for the features that they opt for. This level of flexibility and customization provided by SH is unmatched in the industry. SH is also engaging its focus on improving system usage by providing better training kits and creating innovative feedback forums. The goal is to provide better products that can be customized to client requirements without hampering key deadlines.
Although there are many players in the Healthcare IT space, most of the traditional EMRs and EHRs are limited in their capabilities to expand and be certified as a Meaningful Use platform. In many ways SH is much ahead of the race by being on target to be 100% meaningful use certified by mid this year. SH's moto to build partnerships (as against rivalries) to promote exchange of information in a community based model has served it well as is evident from the number of Hospital Systems, physician organizations and IPAs that are on its network. Overall SH has built a great reputation on a national level by successfully implementing clinical exchange systems handling claims for over four million patients spread across 8 different states and most of its success so far can be attributed to its long term planning and operational excellence.
