One-on-One With Janet Dillione, CEO, Health Services Business Unit, Siemens Healthcare, Part 1

You also have a situation right now where there’s no doubt that with the limited capital available and the squeezing margins on customers they’re going to make their IT investments where they expect an opportunity to get those meaningful use dollars. If you really think about the CIO and the decisions that providers face, one of their most precious resources is their own staff. They’ve got a very fixed resource pool across which they can deploy technologies and get things done. And right now, with the incentives that the administration has put out there, those fixed resources, in a large majority of cases, are getting diverted to take care of the clinical business.

The other thing I would offer you is that the financial implementation is a more of a big bang. There’s no subtle, quiet migration across one nurse station at a time or one clinic at a time. It’s a kaboom.

GUERRA: Would customers that have upgraded on the clinical side but not the financial side – leaving them with a Soarian-Invision hybrid environment – be missing out on some functionality?

DILLIONE: Organizations that go up with Soarian HIS-wide get some integration that you can’t get in a mixed environment of Soarian and Invision. A lot of getting the benefit starts upfront with the way patient management and scheduling are automated in the full HIS environment. We expected this hybrid environment for awhile. We invested heavily in building the necessary bridges between the clinical front end and the financial backend to make sure it was a secure configuration for the customers. But yes, there are things that if they will go full (Soraian) HIS they will reap the benefits of, but we’re just going to have to be patient and wait for the market to make some of those moves.

GUERRA: We did a story recently looking at the pharmacy component of a clinical system. Many say that pharmacy is not something you want to get from a third party and integrate because it’s such a core part of what you’re doing. We know that in your products suite you have Siemens Pharmacy which over the years has been soundly integrated with Invision. Now, however, you are going to tie that in with Soarian rather than creating Soarian Pharmacy from scratch. Is it going to take some time to get all the bugs out of your Siemens Pharmacy/Soarian Clinicals integration or have you accomplished that?

DILLIONE: Anthony, have you been talking to my competitors? (laughing) Whenever I talk to new business prospects, this is usually the first or second question I get. Your suppositions are accurate in terms of the paramount significance of pharmacy to the medication-ordering process. There’s no doubt about it – I think pharmacy in this era has supplanted where lab was in the ’70s and ’80s as the key supporting system. Potentially, someday pharmacy will be so subsumed by orders, there’ll no longer be a distinction, similar to what you see happening a little bit in the recent PACS areas. This is when I get philosophical about software.

In terms of what we are doing, you are correct. Several years ago, when we were building out Soarian Clinicals, we faced a very critical decision point which was around pharmacy. On the original roadmap, there was a Soarian pharmacy idea that we would build it out on the Soarian architecture. As we were getting to that point in the roadmap, we started to talk to some customers, we started to bring folks in, and bells and whistles started to go off and they’d say, “What are you crazy? You can’t disrupt my environment. Come on, don’t make me tear out everything…” and so we took a step back. We had 400+ live Pharmacy customers at the time, and many of them had just upgraded to the recent versions of it. We took a step back and said, “Okay, what alternatives are there,” and we decided to pick the more evolutionary path, which was to continue on the Pharmacy module but invest over the next several years in extending it and integrating it into not only Invision, but also Soarian and MS4 (MedSeries).

That’s the path we’ve taken, and we’ve been making those investments for over three years now. I am happy to tell you that with the recent releases of Soarian Clinicals C6 and with the recent releases of Pharmacy, Soarian is now superior to Invision in terms of the integration point.

It took us quite a while to get there. I just reviewed some of these details with Gartner a few weeks ago, and I’m going to walk KLAS through the same thing, but we literally just attacked it from angles of not only data and data integration but also profit integration. So, if I am managing a hospital, how do I update the formulary, how seamless and integrated is that formulary update. We just literally went point by point and attacked the requirements to present an integrated view to the customers. This news is very fresh, hot off the presses. We’re actually just now cleaning up some of the sales tools to get our sales force comfortable with the message.