Rants & Musings

EHR Strategy: It’s all about thawing Chicken

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Success and failure are often separated by the slimmest of margins. Sometimes you have to be prepared to think on your feet to out think unfavorable circumstances. Sometimes success hinges on how you present your idea. It is possible to force the circumstances via rapid evolution to pass from problem, to possible solution, to believable, to heroic? I believe so.

Permit me to illustrate with frozen chicken. Several hours before dinner I threw the frozen chicken breasts into the sink, choosing to thaw them with water instead of the microwave. Some twenty minutes later while checking emails I wondered what we were having for dinner. Not to be outdone by own inadequacies, I remembered we were having chicken. I remembered that we were having chicken because I remembered turning on the hot water. The only thing I couldn’t remember was turning off the hot water.

I raced to the kitchen. My memory was correct. Grabbing every towel I could find, I soaked up the puddles from the hardwood flooring, thinking while mopping about how I might answer to my wife if she happened to return to a kitchen that looked like the Land of Lakes. My first reaction, admittedly poor, was to tell her that I thought the countertop wasn’t level and that the only way to know for sure was to see which direction the water ran. Telling her the truth never entered my mind.

Once the major puddles had been removed, I worked on version two of the story, quickly arriving at a version of the truth that was more palatable—tell her I decided to wash all the towels. Why not get bonus points instead of getting in trouble? Version three looked even better. Since I was wiping the floor with the towels, instead of telling her I washed the towels, why not double the bonus points? I decided to wash the floor, and wash the towels. Husband of the year can’t be far off.

A few hours have passed. The floor is dry—and clean, the towels are neatly folded and back in the linen closet, and the chicken is on the grill. All the bases covered. A difficult and embarrassing situation turned into a positive by quick thinking.

A few of you have asked, let’s say we buy into what you are saying, how do you propose we turn around our EHR approach? All kidding aside, it comes down to presentation. Clearly you can’t walk into a room with a bunch of slides showing that your EHR investment was wasted. The first step involves defining the quantitative returns that can be achieved by changing the focus of EHR away from ARRA money and Washington, and focusing on the business problems EHR will address.

So, how did the dinner turn out? I was feeling confident that I had sidestepped to worst of it. Overconfident, as it turned out. My son hollered from the basement, “Dad, why is all this water down here?”

Video Game Theory applied to Healthcare IT

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My twelve-year-old son overheard a conversation I was having about EHR, Meaningful Use, and ICD-10, and I watched his eyes glaze over.  So I tried to explain it to him in terms I thought he might understand.  Maybe this explanation is the one I should have used with my client.

John and Sally have a thousand dollars in the bank.  They pool some of their money and have a hundred dollars to spend on video games.  The game they really want, Project From Hell, costs sixty dollars.  About half the people who play Project From Hell never make it to the end, and never get the chance to claim their prize.  It takes two years to play, and one or both of them could be eliminated from the game for failing to play well.

The second game is a take-off on Faust, Sell Your Soul to the Devil.  To play this game, you must first beat Project From Hell.  Sell Your Soul costs thirty dollars.  However, the upside is that if you win, which is not very likely, you can earn two dollars.

The third game, Bet Your Savings, is the most intriguing.  All kids who have a computer must play Bet Your Savings, which costs thirty-five dollars.  The way Bet Your Savings works is that if you do not play, or if you play and lose, ten percent of the money in your bank account disappears.

I asked my son which games John and Sally should buy.  He said if they bought Project From Hell and Sell Your Soul, they would only have ten dollars left, and that the reward from Sell Your Soul, two dollars, was not worth much.  He also noted they do not have enough money to buy all three, and that since Bet Your Savings was mandatory, unless John and Sally wanted to automatically lose ten percent of their savings, they must choose Bet Your Savings.

He decided they should buy Project From Hell and Bet Your Savings.

By now you have figured out the Project from Hell is your EHR, Sell Your Soul is Meaningful Use, and Bet Your Savings is your ICD-10 initiative.

Resources are scarce.  Do you have enough money to do Meaningful Use and ICD-10 correctly?  Many hospitals do not, and yet they are charging full tilt at meeting Meaningful Use to possibly net a few dollars.  Many hospitals have not invested enough to meet ICD-10.

Where should you place your limited resources?  If you are still confused, feel free to ask my son.

 

EHR: Puppy Training Your Vendor

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To ensure we take an accurate look at the provider-vendor relationship, we must be willing to acknowledge that healthcare providers are from Mercury and the EHR vendors are from Pluto.  They exist in different orbits, and their business models are very far apart—they never intersect; not in space, and not on your project.

1. Have your own inside expert. Don’t rely on the vendor to tell you what you should be doing.  Never.  Ever.  Unless of course you think the vendor knows more about how you want to run your hospital than you do.  Remember, you select them—not the other way around.

Bringing a vendor into your hospital is a lot like bringing home a new puppy. Both need to know who runs the show. Don’t roll over.  They may not be looking to be led, but if you don’t lead them they will lead you.

You should have the expert on board at the outset, before you select the EHR vendor.  The expert should be your advocate.

2. Establish a specific executive liaison with your vendor.  This is not your new tennis partner.  This should be the person who has the authority to ensure your quantifiable wishes are being met, and whose responsibility it is to deliver the message to his troops, and marshal the resources necessary to get the job done.

3. Specify your contractual objectives. Ensure that the contract is aligned with the clinical and business objectives of the healthcare organization, not the vendor.  Before you can accomplish this, you have a lot of work to do with your team.  You must define your clinical and business objectives.  Often these two groups also have a Mercury and Pluto relationship.  Once you have these, your next task is to deliver these objectives to the vendor and have the vendor tell you in writing what they will meet, what they might meet, and what they can’t meet.  It would be nice to know these before you sign their contract.

4. Involve more people than just the IT staff. Need a rule of thumb, involve as many users as IT people—Mercury and Pluto.  You will need new processes, not just to squeeze an ROI from the EHR, but because many of your old ones have probably been around since the invention Band-Aid.

Each of these recommendations will actually help you and help your vendor be successful.  It will not be an adversarial relationship as long as you manage it.  If you don’t manage the relationship, you won’t have to worry about meeting Meaningful Use—you’ll be too busy selecting a replacement vendor.

One final thought, don’t let the vendor loose unsupervised on the oriental rugs.

 

What is the future of the EHR/N-HIN landscape?

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One may argue it is possible to build the real Brooklyn Bridge with nothing but toothpicks, and a lake filled with Elmer’s Glue.  Difficult yes; prudent, no.   Urban legend is when the United States first started sending astronauts into space, they quickly discovered that ballpoint pens would not work in zero gravity.  To combat the problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and $12 million to develop a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside down, underwater, on almost any surface including glass and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to 300C.

The Russians used a pencil.

The ability to do something is not justification for doing it.  Nor is that fact that someone has put it forth as an idea.  The willingness to do something merely because everyone is doing it or because someone instructed it be done probably has nothing to do with a business strategy, or if it does, it shouldn’t.

In the next five to seven years the business of healthcare at the provider level will have the opportunity to change markedly—the unanswered question is, will it have the ability?  To answer that at the provider level—primarily hospitals and clinics—I believe one must distinguish between the business of healthcare (how the business is run) and the healthcare business (how the care is delivered).

In many respects, the business of healthcare and the strategy surrounding it is pinned to a 0.2 business model.  Certainly there are exceptions to any aphorism, but taken as a whole, there is plenty of room for improvement.  As one hospital CEO told me, “What we really lack is adult supervision.”

So, how exactly does the toothpick bridge apply to healthcare?   Here’s my take on the situation.

  1. It may be possible to build and roll out a national network of EMRs through EHRs connected by HIEs to an N-HIN—I don’t think will happen in the next five to seven years, especially if to be effective the network requires a minimal participation of somewhere between 70 to 80 percent of healthcare providers.
  2. Even if I am wrong, why would anyone build a national EHR network out of toothpicks?  Could they possibly have devised a more complex and costly approach?
  3. The government arrived late for the party, has only limited authority, and chose to provide cash incentives instead of direction or leadership.  They passed the responsibility of the success of the national EHR roll out to hundreds of thousands of healthcare providers.
  4. The providers are burdened by having no experience in the sector, hundreds of EHR systems from which to select, no standards, hundreds of HIEs, no viable plan, no one with singular authority, a timeline that cannot be meet, and an unwritten set of Meaningful Use requirements.

The plan sounds like something designed by Rube Goldberg.  Could it be done this way?  I do not think we will ever know.  Not necessarily because it will fail, but because I think the plan will be supplanted by a more realistic one from the private sector.

The government’s plan relies on a top-down approach—albeit with a missing top; from the government, to the providers, to the patients.

The private sector plan will come from firms like Apple, Google, and Microsoft.  It will work because it will be built from the bottom up; from the patients, to the providers, and back.  Personal Health Records (PHRs) will become EMRs.  This approach will allow them to flip their PHR users to EMR users, and will be adopted quickly by millions of customers (patients).  Their approach will have a small handful of decision makers calling the shots instead of hundreds.

This model’s other component will be driven from another direction, by large hospitals and clinics that connect to small hospitals, small practices, and ambulatory physicians via a SAAS model.  Something like this is underway today at the Cleveland Clinic using their offering, DrConnect.

I believe the approach will be refined even further as the distinction between PHRs and EMRs erodes.  Instead of requiring remote care providers to have their own mini-EHR integrated with their practice management system, they will be able to use the EHR of a large hospital.  I anticipate that they will be able to log on to the system to access their patients’ EMRs as though they were actually resident in the large hospital.  This will all but eliminate the role of Health Information Exchanges (HIEs).  It will also extend the reach of those large hospitals, and aid in the retention and recruiting of physicians.

Why is this important?  Because the federal plan, which won’t be viable for several years, is designed to use software solutions which address a current business issue.  By the time their networked solution is fully functional it will be well on its way to obsolescence.  The government is forcing the expenditure of more than a hundred billion dollars on a static offering to address a non-static issue.  Their approach will not be able to keep pace with the changes demanded by market forces.  It reminds me off building a plan to go to the moon based on where the moon was instead of where it will be.

 

EHR Strategy: The Wildebeest Postulate

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The Kalahari; vast, silent, deadly. The end of the rainy season, the mid-day heat surpasses a hundred and twenty. One of the varieties of waterfowl, most notably the flame red flamingo that nested in the great salt pans in Botswana, has begun its annual migration. In the muck of one of the fresh-water pools that had almost completely evaporated, writhes a squirming black mass of underdeveloped tadpoles. A lone Baobab tree pokes skyward from the middle of the barren savanna. In its shade, standing shoulder to shoulder and facing out, a herd of wildebeest surveys the landscape for predators.  Sir David Attenborough and PBS can’t be far away.

Some things never change. I make my way across the freshly laid macadam to meet the school bus. Fifty feet in front of me is a young silver maple tree, the buds of its green leaves yielding only the slightest hint of spring hidden deep within. The late afternoon sun casts a slender shadow across the sodded common area. One by one they come—soccer moms; big moms, little moms, moms who climb on rocks; fat moms, skinny moms, even moms with chicken pox—sorry, I couldn’t stop myself—as they will every day at this same time, seeking protection in its shade. My neighbors.  It’s only sixty-five today, yet they seek protection from the nonexistent heat, a habit born no doubt from bygone sweltering summer days. A ritual. An inability to change. In a few weeks the leaves will be in their full glory, and the moms will remain in the shadow of what once was, standing shoulder to shoulder facing outward, scanning the horizon for the bus. A herd. Just like wildebeest.

The children debus–I invented the word.  Mine hand me their backpacks, lunch boxes, and musical instruments.  I look like a Sherpa making my way home from K-2.

I shared this analogy with the neighborhood moms—the bruises will fade gradually. I can state with some degree of certainty they were not impressed with being compared to wildebeest. So here we go, buckle up. By now you’re thinking, “There must be a pony in here somewhere.”

Some things never change; it’s not for lack of interest, but for lack of a changer.  For real change to occur someone needs to be the changer, otherwise it’s just a bunch of people standing shoulder to shoulder looking busy. How are you addressing the change that must occur for EHR to be of any value?  EHR is not about the EHR.  It’s not about ARRA money, and it is not about IT.  It is about moving from a 0.2 business model to 2.0.  You need someone who sees the vision of what is is—sorry, too Clintonian—must lead.  Be change.

One of the great traits of wildebeest is that they are great followers.

 

HIT: The Change Keeps Changing

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Hello to those whom I’ve yet to meet.  This is rather long, so you may wish to grab a sandwich.

I write to share a few thoughts.  I reside in the small place where those who refuse to drink the Kool Aid reside. For those who haven’t been there, it’s where those who place principle over fees dare to tread.

Where to begin? How to build your provider executive team? (Those who wish to throw cabbages should move closer to their laptops so as not to be denied a decent launching point.)

I comment on behalf of those in the majority who have either not started or hopefully have not reached the EHR points of no return—those are points at which you realize that without a major infusion of dollars and additional time your project will not succeed. Those who have completed their implementation, I dare say for many no amount of team building will help. Without being intentionally Clintonian—well, maybe a little—I guess it depends on what your definition of completed is.

If I were staffing a healthcare organization, to be of the most value to the hospital, I’d staff to overcome whatever is lying in wait on the horizon, external influences—the implications of reform and Stages 2 and 3 of Meaningful Use, and a national roll out of EHR with no viable plan to get there.  Staffing only to execute today’s perceived demands will get people shot and will fail to meet the needs of hospital. To succeed we need to exercise an understanding of what is about to happen to healthcare and to build a staff to meet those implications.

Several CEOs have shared that they are at a total loss when it comes to understanding the healthcare implications of reform and IT.  They’ve also indicated—don’t yell at me for this—they don’t think their IT executives understand the business issues surrounding EHR and reform.  I somewhat disagree with that perspective.

Here’s a simplified version of the targets I think most of today’s hospital CIOs are trying to hit.

1. Certification
2. Meaningful use
3. Interoperability—perhaps
4. Budget
5. Timing
6. Vendor management
7. Training
8. User acceptance
9. Change management
10. Work flow improvement
11. Managing upwards

There are plenty of facts that could allow one to conclude that these targets have a Gossamer quality to them.  Here’s what I think. You don’t have to accept this, and you can argue this from a technology viewpoint—and you will win the argument. I recently started to raise the following ideas, and they seem to be finding purchase—I like that word, and since this is my piece, I used it.

Before we go there, may I share my reasoning? From a business perspective, many would say the business of healthcare must move from a 0.2 to a 2.0 business model. (This is not the same as the healthcare business—the clinical side.)  The carrot?  The ARRA incentives—an amount that for many providers will prove to be more of a rounding error than a substantive rebate.

Large healthcare providers are being asked to hit complex, undefined, and moving targets, and they are planning on adapting to reform and reforming their own business model while they implement systems which will change how everyone works.  Hospitals are making eight and nine figure purchase decisions based in part on solving business problems they have not articulated. If success is measured as being on-time, in-budget, and fully functional and accepted, for any project in excess of $10,000,000, the chances of failure are far greater than the chances of success.

Their overriding business driver seems to be that the government told them to do this. Providers are making purchasing decisions without defining their requirements. Some will spend more on an EHR system than they would to build a new hospital wing.  Many don’t know what the EHR should cost, yet they have a budget. Many don’t know if they need a blue one or a green one, if it comes in a box, or if they need to water it.

So, where would I staff to help ensure my success—this is sort of like Dr. Seuss’, “If I ran the Circus”—the one with Sneelock in the old vacant lot.  I’d staff with a heavy emphasis on the following subject matter experts:

• PMO
• Planning & Innovation
• Flexibility
• Change Management
• PR & Marketing

Contrary to popular belief, not all of these high-level people need to have great understanding of healthcare or IT. You probably already have enough medical and IT expertise to last a lifetime.

Here’s why I think this is important. Here’s what I believe will happen. Three to five years for now the government would like us to believe there will be a network of articulated EHRs with different standards, comprised of hundreds of vendor products, connected to hundred of RHIOs, and mapped to a N-HIN.  Under the proposed model, standardization will not occur if only for the fact that there is no monetary value to those vendors whose standards are not standard.

Interoperability, cost, and the lack of standardization will force a different solution—one which is portable.  I think the solution will have to be something along the lines of a single, national, open, browser-based EHR.  It will be driven by consumers.  Consumers will purchase the next generation of super-smart portable devices that offer a combination of iPad/iPhone functionality.

The Personal Health (PRH) will have evolved to become the EMR.  How is this possible?  What do smart devices do?  They do one thing, billions of times each day, and they do it perfectly—they send and receive ones and zeros.  That is what today’s EMR are—ones and zeroes.  Those next-gen devices will be EMR-capable.  Why?  Because there are more than a hundred million customers who will keep buying these devices.

The so-called N-HIN will be the new Super Internet—not some cobbled together network of RHIOs.

Firms like Apple, Google, and Microsoft will drive this change.  We already buy everything they offer, in fact, we line up at midnight to do so.  By then, those firms will care less about selling the devices than they will about transporting the ones and zeroes that comprise the data.  Their current PHRs are their way of introducing themselves to consumers as players in healthcare.

The point I am trying to drive home is that from being able to adapt to change and reform, lean towards staffing the unknown.  Staff with leaders, innovators, and people who can turn on a dime. Build your organization like turning on a dime is your number one requirement. Don’t waste time and money worrying about Certification or Meaningful Use. If anyone asks you why, you can blame me.

If you want a real reason, I have two. First, they won’t mean a thing five years from now. Second, if I am the person writing an incentive check, I want to know one and only one thing—will your system connect with the other system for which I am also writing a check?  That is the government’s home run.

 

What if hospital business models weren’t so tribal?

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I tend to look at it from the perspective of the business model of many hospitals.  How does one transform a 0.2 business model to function in today’s let alone tomorrow’s changing healthcare model?

The clinical side of healthcare, the healthcare business, in juxtaposition to the business of healthcare, would never quarter to the idea of buying millions of dollars of technology without first knowing how they were going to use it.

Plenty can be gained by applying what other industries have done to become more effective.  In some respects the inherent structure, cost duplication, and rigid departmental silos remind me a lot of how the various agencies under Homeland Security function, operating in isolation, performing much of the same work, and not sharing information.

Other industries operate with a much less tribal model than healthcare.  Hospitals have created tribes and tribal chiefs.  In some hospitals the tribes have names like radiology, general surgery, psychiatry, and OBG/YN.  Other hospitals have redundant tribes named admissions, human resources, IT, and payroll.  Each tribe is run by the tribe’s chief.  The chief’s dominant weapon is his or her budget which is lorded over its individual tribe, and a dispute vehicle of the other tribes.

The tribal organization is more a reflection of how the hospital evolved over the years, not a result of an inept business strategy.  Nobody set out to build an ineffective and internally competitive model, or one that duplicated support functions.  Acquisitions have reinforced and exacerbated the problem, duplicating and increasing costs without yielding a resultant increase in value.

Before the business of healthcare is prepared to cope with the unknowns of the myriad of external influences it will face in the next few years, it must first change how it functions under its current structure.  It might begin by revisiting its present structure and making sure that its performance and quality precede the application of technology.

I frown on using the term efficient.  To me, efficiency implies speed, and doing bad things faster is no solution.  Let us work at improving effectiveness and good things will happen.

 

HIEs: Too Many Cooks Spoil the Broth

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Is the number of people working on developing Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) is greater than the total number of people who attended HIMSS in Orlando; more than 30,000?  Why are five hundred HIEs are being built?

Let us assume for a moment that there is a set of standards somewhere, a blueprint perhaps, for what a good HIE should be able to do.  Granted, if we are going to be honest, an HIE does not have to do very much; does it?  It does not change the data in a health record.  It does not add data.  And, it neither creates nor destroys health records.

In its simplest form, a health record comes in from some place, and that same record goes out to some other place.  And what is in that health record?  If we are trying to keep it simple in order to show the problem is in fact solvable, what is in the health record is a formatted collection of ones and zeroes.  And how does the HIE “move” the ones and zeroes?  The movement is caused by writing computer applications; code—ones and zeroes.

The blueprint for an HIE is nothing more than a pipe to move formatted zeroes from point A to point B.  Now in reality, we have about five hundred HIE teams working hard to build disparate HIEs.  To what end?  To move ones and zeroes from point A to point B.  So, the 500 HIE teams are writing 500 different HIE applications using ones and zeroes to move ones and zeroes.

Doing the math—500 HIE teams * 1 HIE application per team = 500 different HIE applications.  If done correctly—which is an entirely different conversation—we will have 500 HIEs, each of which are capable of doing the exact same thing; which is—moving ones and zeroes.

Let us dissect the ones and zeroes concept for a moment.  When Al Gore created ones and zeroes he did so with the premise that all ones were created equal, all zeroes are created equal, and that ones and zeroes are equal.

Now, what makes the one and zero concept particularly great with regard to HIEs and all of healthcare IT is there is never a need for a “two”.  No CIO worth his or her salt will ever sit at a steering committee meeting and state, “If I only had a 2, this whole problem would go away.”

If one looks correctly at the issue of HIEs by breaking it down to its simplest elements, it is a unique problem to solve.  Unique—as in singular.  Two HIEs do not solve the problem better than one HIE.  Once you have two, you no longer have a unique solution, and when you have 500 HIEs, you have a mess.

Here is the kicker to this argument.  What else do you have when you have a single HIE capable of reading the data from all of the various EHR platforms?  Exactly.  You have the N-HIN—the Nationwide Health Information Network.  Why?  Because when push comes to shove, the N-HIN is nothing more than a glorified HIE.

However, once you have more than one HIE, you then need an HIE for the HIEs, which is the only reason there is any discussion about building an N-HIN.

So, in addition to the fact that 500 HIEs are 499 too many, do they create any other problems?  Of course they do.  They add a very high and unnecessary degree of additional complexity to the healthcare IT systems of every healthcare provider.  Some providers offer services within many different HIE footprints.  Every provider will need to adapt their systems so that the provider’s healthcare records can be accepted by their corresponding HIE pipe.

Instead of building 500 HIEs, and forcing them to some semblance of a standard, why not just build one HIE and have that be the standard?

 

EHR: The 40-chicken crocodile

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Got a couple hundred million burning a hole in your pocket?  Why not buy an EHR?  Indeed.

Riddle me this Batman, “What is a 40 chicken crocodile?”

It is the number of chickens you have to feed it each day to keep it from eating you. What is the crocodile at your hospital?  Is it your EHR?

Let me recount to you a true story about the details of one of the EHR “success” stories.  A major hospital who selected their EHR from among one of what I like to call the oligopoly EHR Flavor of the Month Club.  You know the suspects.

Permit me to throw a wrench to those clairvoyants who think they know where this is going before I’ve even written it.  Admittedly, I have a tendency to throw metaphorical tomatoes in one direction—that of the vendors.  That’s because, they are often easy targets.  Slow down Pepito.

This hospital, and from what I was told, the vendor, did it right.  I am not sure I would have differed from the approach of either.  The hospital spent a few years in its vendor selection process, and they were very thorough.  They spent two years building their process maps, ensuring the vendor implemented the EHR to meet their needs, not the other way around.  Operations led the nine-figure project.

They implemented many of the support functions and a few of the specialty functions.  Here come the chickens.  After implementation, cash flow dropped by 80 percent for several months due to significant issues they encountered cleaning up the revenue side.  Doctors were instructed to cut their hours by fifty percent to allow them to learn to use the system.  Hours are still down by twenty percent, well more than a year later.  Users use about one-third of the functionality, even after a rigorous training program.

The hospital held off doing most of the clinical implementations for two years.

I asked for some recommendations.  What would you have done differently?  Here’s what I learned.  If you have a research organization you need to spend extra special attention to their workflows.  Managing post-go-live was a big issue to begin to offset productivity losses. Without a continuous process improvement program the EHR would not have been accepted. Do not pick a go-live date at the outset of the project as it causes the organization to be paralyzed simply to hit the date.  Testing was compromised to meet the go-live date. The post go-live issues are still being fought.  Do not let the design or build teams skimp on either reporting or testing, they are still playing catch-up.

So, after doing a pretty bang up job, at least from where I sit, there are still a lot of chickens being fed to the crocodile.  Wonder how many chickens it would have taken had the users not been as involved as they were.  How many had the users not spent two years pre-build defining processes?  A lot.  Now comes the rest of the clinical effort.  See you at the poultry counter.

 

HIE: Are two HIEs one too many?

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The is my most recent post at healthsystemcio.com

According to Wikipedia, Health information exchange (HIE) is defined as the mobilization of healthcare information electronically across organizations within a region, community or hospital system. HIE provides the capability to electronically move clinical information among disparate health care information systems while maintaining the meaning of the information being exchanged.

That seems really straight forward, at least to me. I find it helpful to whittle complex ideas down to a point that enables me to explain them to my parents, without either of us having to reach for the Tylenol.

In its simplest form, an HIE is a pipe, a pipe that transports ones and zeroes. Back in the days when I still had hair, one of my clients was the CEO of a large cable television company. He explained his business this way; “We are just like the water department. We put a pipe in the ground, send something through it, and every month people mail me money.”

He also sent ones and zeroes.

Now, there are those around us, apparently thousands of them, who have made it their mission to convince those in the minority that HIEs are far more complex than they really are. Maybe I just do not understand the concept of ones and zeroes.

You probably know that several hundred HIEs are in the process of being built—and they are all being built by people who have little to no experience building HIEs. Now, here is where everything gets a little hairy. Let us look back on the definition of an HIE and let us focus our conversation on building just one HIE. The tricky part about getting the HIE to work is that pesky little word “disparate,” as in disparate health information systems, and the last time I counted EHRs, I hit 300 before giving up.

That is where all that disparate clinical information comes from. However, when push comes to shove, the information from all of those different EHRs is pretty much the same, but the various EHR vendors just line up their ones and zeroes differently, thus enabling them to prevent others from playing in their sandbox.

There is another disparity surrounding HIEs, one that is unspoken. Suppose you and I decide to build an HIE, a good one. After some period of time, we get rid of all the little disparities among the various EHR vendors and are able to zip those little ones and zeroes from one end of the HIE pipe to the other. Let us also suppose we used a very long pipe, so we could use this HIE anywhere. It would work for a hospital, or at an Integrated Delivery Network (IDN), or across a region.

Our HIE is able to move our individual healthcare information from one end of the pipe to the other wherever the other end may be.

I forgot to mention the disparity. The unaddressed HIE disparity is the one created from having hundreds of HIEs, each designed in its own vacuum by people who have little experience filling vacuums. And when those HIEs have been built, what will they do? Exactly. They will move clinical information among disparate healthcare information systems. In laymen’s terms—ones and zeroes from EHR vendors who do not play well together.

The new ones are identical in functionality to the one we just built, only now there are 500 of them.

Now to the meat of the issue. If we build an HIE correctly, and build it to be able to handle any disparity, is there any more need for HIE 2, since in theory HIE 2 will be able to do the same things as HIE 1?  Let us extend this same thinking from HIE 1 through HIE 500. At some point—irrespective of certain technical issues—can it be concluded that the total number of HIEs needed to move ones and zeroes is one?

Other than the redundancy and expense of building a few hundred things that each perform the same function, the real problem of having multiple HIEs is that each new HIE greatly increases the complexity of moving a personal health record from point A to point B. If HIE 2 is the same as HIE 1, we do not need HIE 2. If the two HIEs are not alike, when we try to transport a personal health record from a patient in HIE one and move it to a doctor in HIE 2, the disparity created between the two almost requires a new HIE to resolve the problem. We will have infinitely compound the complexity of moving ones and zeroes by deploying 500 HIEs and hundreds of thousands of healthcare providers and a few hundred million patients, and we have designed quite a mess.

And why does the mess exist? It exists to move those same ones and zeroes we were moving quite nicely by the HIE we built. One can argue that scale may create its own design issues, but those issues do not make this idea dead in the water. Issues of scale are solvable; those of compounded complexity are self-imposed due to an overzealous design.

The proposed way to solve the upcoming problem of compounded complexity is to build the National Health Information Network, the NHIN. We need the NHIN to act as a super HIE, to remove the disparities that result from having multiple disparate HIEs.

Adding further unwarranted complexity to the multi-HIE model is the fact that each HIE has resulted in several hundred providers designing and retooling their healthcare IT systems to adapt to these anomalous HIEs.

Sometimes the most difficult solution to envision is the least difficult one to implement.