“Many leading electronic health record vendors claim their ambulatory-care and hospital systems are integrated, but most are actually interfaced “under the covers,” health IT consultant Vince Ciotti (pictured), a principal of H.I.S. Professionals, LLC, based in Santa Fe, N.M., tells FierceHealthIT in an interview. This applies to almost every vendor that developed either a hospital EHR or an ambulatory-care EHR and then acquired an EHR in the other sphere.
For example, Ciotti says, Allscripts’ ambulatory-care products are leaders in that field, just as Eclipsys’ are in the hospital market. Likening Allscripts’ purchase of Eclipsys last year to a “shark swallowing a whale,” Ciotti says, “If you’re a hospital that uses Eclipsys, you’re probably not going to start forcing your physicians to convert to Allscripts, and vice-versa. They’re unrelated products, written by different programming teams, for different markets. They have no true integration like Epic and Cerner do, which alone run on the same hardware platforms and data bases.”
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Ken Terry, FierceHealthIT
