Medical Group in the Cloud

How should medical group CIOs think about issues around hosting, the cloud, and infrastructure?
It really does depend on the composition of the individual group. We’re out across about 14 counties in central Illinois. So being able to implement an infrastructure that gives us the access to data that we need, is very important. The cloud can do a lot of things for you; you don’t have to worry about whether you have enough bandwidth, enough storage, enough processing power. One of the inherent advantages of the cloud is what they call elasticity. I really wish we could get the EHR into the cloud; but those solutions need to have a certain infrastructure.

If the infrastructure isn’t there, you’re living in two worlds, then?
There are companies that will host your data center; but some of the functionalities of true cloud computing don’t necessarily exist yet in the EMR space. Some of that development will take place over time.
For the clinic, we’re just slowly dipping our collective toe into the cloud. We’ve done imaging, and our HR and financial IT operations, and the next will be our help desk; so we’ll continue to move services into the cloud over time.

Are your physicians are happy with the EHR?
Not everyone is happy; change is hard. But our EMR utilization is one of the top in the nation in terms of transactions through the EMR, among Allscripts. Allscripts has what they call a Delta process, looking at prescriptions prescribed, documents created, etc.

And you’re in their top five percentile in terms of EMR use among Allscripts customer organizations?
Easily. We have 340 providers, plus we have an MSO [medical services organization] group of another 70 providers, so nearly 400 providers are utilizing Allscripts across all specialties; it’s a very large implementation. And one of the fun checkpoints for me personally is that our medical malpractice insurance carrier came in, and you can get a malpractice discount if you’re using an EMR solution. And they came in and looked at individual physicians, and said, great that you have an EMR, but are you actually using it? They analyzed our use based on individual analyses of our physicians, and 100 percent passed.