Changing the EHR Landscape Through the Cloud

With the HITECH Act’s financial incentives to move from paper-based health records to electronic health records (EHR) to achieve Meaningful Use, hospital systems have been on a recent EHR implementation spree.

I sat down with Jim Riley, co-founder and CEO of iCare, an enterprise cloud EHR provider, to discuss how his organization is leveraging Verizon’s Enterprise Cloud.

How is iCare enabling its customers to meet Meaningful Use?

If you look at the overall strategy and purpose of the HITECH Act, you’ll notice that it’s changing the healthcare industry, particularly hospital systems that look to streamline their internal procedures in an effort to improve patient safety and deliver better, more coordinated patient care. However, the unintended consequence is that hospitals are installing very complex EHR systems so they can meet Meaningful Use requirements. However, this is leaving hospitals with the burden of running, maintaining, securing, and supporting these systems for years to come. The question becomes what happens when the subsidies run out and hospitals are faced with the continued astronomical costs of running and maintaining these systems? We’re predicting what we call an EHR crisis of 2015. This is how/where iCare differentiates itself.

iCare provides hospital systems with an enterprise EHR in-the-cloud. By providing an enterprise cloud EHR, hospitals can seamlessly achieve Meaningful Use without having to devote internal resources (time and money) to running and maintaining a data center. This allows our customers to focus on patient care, not software.

How are you helping your customers innovate by moving them to the cloud?

As Meaningful Use Stage 2 rolls out, hospitals must take into account how their EHR systems will evolve with the changing requirements. Hospitals are good at delivering care to their patients, but typically their competencies don’t lie in running expensive and complex IT departments or managing complex EHR systems that need to stay compliant with Meaningful Use requirements.

This is where iCare can step in and provide a simple solution.

iCare’s cloud-based EHR architecture allows hospitals to focus on what’s important to a hospital – delivering better, more innovative care to their patients.

By having the EHR system reside in a cloud environment, hospitals can free up resources that would typically go toward managing complex EHR systems. With a cloud-based solution, features, functions and upgrades are done at the backend without the need for the hospital to upgrade to a new system or to purchase new equipment or to disrupt service delivery. This gives hospitals the reliability they need to be able to deliver better, more coordinated care to its patients.

What differentiates iCare from other EHRs?

iCare’s EHR solution is cloud-based and leverages Verizon’s robust, high-performance infrastructure. This is a new paradigm for hospitals. Previously, hospitals did not have the option to move to a modern enterprise cloud solution that does not require new equipment or capital expenditures.

Many hospitals believe that they must install EHR software in their own data centers and maintain costly staffs of programmers, analysts, database administrators, and all of the other complexities of running software in-house. By using an online EHR solution and leveraging the cloud, hospitals can benefit from eliminating the internal complexity while gaining access to expanded capacity, flexibility, and scalability. This leads to upgrades in productivity by hospital staff. Clinicians are able to see more patients and view more accurate charts. In addition, with the cloud-based model, patient records can follow the patient seamlessly and can even be accessed by the patient directly online.

iCare is changing the game in enterprise Health IT, by delivering an EHR solution in the cloud. iCare offers a fresh alternative to traditional solutions.