10 Nov Geisinger making Epic, Cerner work together for population health
We want to get as much information from as many places as we can
Geisinger Health System, an Epic shop, has chosen to integrate Cerner’s HealtheIntent platform. In particular, the Pennsylvania vertically integrated care delivery system, often compared to Kaiser Permanante, uses the Data Syndication, HealtheEDW, HealtheRecord, and HealthRegistries products from the platform.
The platform is billed by Cerner as a cloud-based programmable population analytics toolset and is designed for scale to operate in semi-real time; it offers insight on the population level as well as insights and visualizations at a person and provider level.
Healthcare IT News spoke last week with Nicholas Marko, MD, Geisinger’s chief data officer and a practicing neurosurgeon, who was a key stakeholder in the decision to use this solution for population management, about the challenges Geisinger faces.
Geisinger selected Cerner over other candidates, sticking with its best-of-breed philosophy. Much is at stake when making decisions to opt for a heterogeneous technology environment: A company’s DNA, its partnering and vendor management capabilities, its fundamental technology architecture, and its willingness to spend the time and money integrating new sources of information on the front end – and new methods of doing analysis and preparing visualizations on the back end – must be weighed against the incremental advantages it gets from what Geisinger considered the more desirable product.