EHR News Round Up – November 2023

Cranfield, UK, 4th December 2023, Written by Arun Gill –

In this November round-up, I offer the latest news and developments impacting the EHR market, including my thoughts on their implications for the market.

Palantir Wins £330M FDP Deal

Palantir Technologies was finally confirmed as the winner of a £330M seven-year contract to build a national data aggregation platform for NHS England. The federated data platform (FDP), to which the US data analytics giant beat the likes of Oracle and IBM, is the largest-ever single tech contract awarded by the NHS.

Addressing concerns raised about Palantir’s alleged patchy record on data security, NHS England emphasized that all data from different EHRs and IT systems across ICSs, Acute Trusts and other providers in England would be used solely for direct care and planning, but not to access data for research purposes.

Significantly, GP data directly from primary care EHRs will not be included, but the FDP will most likely leverage the National Care Records Service summary view, giving at least some access to primary care data.

The plan is for all hospital Trusts and ICSs to have their own platform, but they will be able to connect and share information between them. The FDP will not be compulsory. NHS Trusts and ICSs will be encouraged to use it to support their own use cases, however, it is difficult to see how many will do this. ICSs are already spending nearly half a billion dollars on their ICS Shared Care Record rollout.

The FDP news is a blow to the likes of Orion Health, InterSystems, Oracle Health and Graphnet Health, who had performed well in the awarding of ICS contracts but are likely to see ICS-level funding dry up moving forward. So, what’s next for ICS Shared Care Records? Read our take in this Digital Health SPI Insight.

NextGen Unveils AI Partnership with Nabla

November was a busy month for one of the leading players in the US ambulatory EHR market, NextGen Healthcare. Leading software investment firm Thoma Bravo kicked off the month by announcing it had completed the acquisition of the vendor for USD 1.8bn.

Whilst the ambulatory EHR market is grappling with a shrinking customer base as smaller, independent practices are bought by health systems and IDNs (and replaced by the likes of Epic and Oracle Health), the new owners will have ambitions of capitalising on NextGen’s diverse portfolio and healthy customer base, and scaling the business.

Last week, it unveiled a strategic partnership with Nabla, an Ambient AI assistant for practitioners to ease administrative burdens on healthcare providers. Nabla Copilot, an Ambient AI for clinical note generation, is integrated with NextGen Ambient Assist, enabling automated capture of critical patient information during consultations. The partnership is just one of several examples of EHR vendors partnering with AI specialists in recent months to address provider challenges of managing EHRs and alleviating staff burnout.

NextGen company also revealed that it would lay off nearly 250 employees by early 2024. Click here for more insight on why NextGen represents a good catch for its acquirer, and the impact the deal will have on the US ambulatory EHR market.

First Install for Philips’ Innovative Clinical Decision Support Tool

Philips announced the first installation of its novel Visual Patient Avatar App earlier this month. Germany’s Bonn University Hospitalis the first clinic globally to utilize the Avatar commercially. Philips hopes its tool, which combines clinical decision support in an image-based format, will prove highly beneficial for overburdened clinicians within high-acuity hospital departments, such as the OR. Key patient metrics can be visualised on a ‘gingerbread man’ type illustration, based on changes in colours or shapes. With demand for clinical decision support rapidly increasing, expect other vendors to explore new ways of delivering these tools to clinicians.

Signify Research’s analysis of the Analytics/AI-based applications utilised in the High-Acuity Clinical Information Systems market, such as early-warning scoring and predictive analysis of sepsis, are discussed in more detail here.

Innovaccer and CareAbout Look to Help Primary Care Practices

Value-based care (VBC) enablement service provider, CareAbout Health, selected Innovaccer‘s data platform and analytics solutions to, in CareAbout’s words, ‘help its providers achieve their clinical and financial goals in a value-based care environment’.

This appears to be a positive move for both parties. Innovaccer has built a reputation among IDNs, ACOs, health systems, hospitals and payers for its comprehensive population health management suite of solutions. Its platform compiles data from multiple sources, including EHRs, and then offers tools that allow providers operating in VBC to perform risk stratification and develop a clear set of workflows for clinical decision support and care coordination. It also offers patient activation tools, as well as tools that measure how providers are performing against their VBC targets.

However, Innovaccer’s success has come from serving big IDNs, health systems and payers. Winning the contract with CareAbout, an MSO (managed service organization), is therefore something of a strategic departure for Innovaccer. But Signify Research believes this has plenty of merit, as discussed in this Digital Health SPI Insight.

New National HIE Platform in China

Significant developments regarding healthcare data exchange across China. Earlier in November, the country’s National Health Commission announced the first phase of its Health Information Exchange (HIE) platform connecting national provincial, city and country levels, had been completed. Hospitals within 25 provincial-level regions are now able to access patients’ digital health records (EHR) from other hospitals within their respective regions.

This three-year (2023-2025) national HIE initiative is related to China’s 14th Five-Year Plan (2021–2026), which emphasises establishing a unified health information system. In recent years provincial and local governments have increasingly piloted large interoperability projects to increase data sharing across China. By late 2022, all provincial-level regions had built regional platforms to consolidate information, such as patient demographics, residents’ online healthcare records (EHR) and electronic medical records (EMR). However, the development of national projects had, until recently, been lacking.

The next two years of the Chinese NHO’s national initiative will see developments such as data exchange of test results, infectious disease monitoring, early warning/emergency command information platforms, and data security improvements.

In case you missed it, here’s some feedback on HIE requirements from health system buyers that Signify Research has interviewed over the last 12 months.

One final piece of exciting EHR news! Join Signify Research’s FREE webinar with my colleague Rohinee Lal, Principal Analyst & Research Manager, who’ll be exploring healthcare data exchange potentials.

Register to join our free to attend insightful presentation to learn more about how EHR vendors in the US are currently “playing with FHIR”. The key topics include:

• Examining vendors’ views on interoperability and the role it plays in relation to their IT solutions.
• Understanding vendors’ product and technology needs and challenges as it relates to FHIR.
• Exploring how vendors are addressing evolving regulations on the path to interoperability.
• Providing insights into how vendors juggle compliance with the need for product innovation.

About the Author

Signify Research’s Digital Health team provides market intelligence and detailed insights on numerous digital health markets. Our areas of coverage include electronic medical records, telehealth & virtual care, remote patient monitoring, high-acuity clinical information systems, patient engagement IT, health information exchanges and integrated care & value-based care IT. Our reports provide a data-centric and global outlook of each market with granular country-level insights. Our research process blends primary data collected from in-depth interviews with healthcare professionals and technology vendors, to provide a balanced and objective view of the market.