How Are Ambulatory Practices Going to Compete with Health Systems?

We’ve all seen the stories about the explosion of data and the way healthcare is getting more personalized. However, David Chou recently pointed out how the data is one thing, but figuring out the role everyone plays in your healthcare organization is just as important as the data itself. It gets complex quickly as this graphic David shared shows:

This is a great graphic of the healthcare analytics roles and responsibilities that will be needed to make the personalized medicine future a reality. Plus, it will be key to getting a lot of the value out of our past EHR investments. Many hospitals and health systems already have these roles filled or are working to have them filled. We’ve seen this first hand when we see data jobs being posted to our healthcare IT job board.

While this work is extremely exciting and shows a lot of promise, I imagine a graphic like the one above is just completely overwhelming to consider for a small ambulatory practice. Even a large group practice would likely find the above graphic challenging to consider in their relatively small healthcare organization. How can they compete with a large health system with that kind of complexity? Do graphics like the one above just provide one other illustration of why small practices are going to soon be extinct?

I don’t think so and I hope not. However, graphics like the one above do illustrate the tremendous challenges that ambulatory practices face when they don’t have a massive health system behind them. What’s the path forward for smaller practices then?

The first thing to remember is that even though a health system is large, it doesn’t mean it’s going to do things well. In fact, it’s easy to argue how large organizations are much less efficient. It’s not hard to see how a large health system will focus all of their analytics work on the acute care environment and leaves out ambulatory practices. Smaller healthcare organizations are going to have to use this to their advantage.

While it’s unlikely that ambulatory practices will do all of the healthcare analytics work on their own, it is possible for ambulatory practices to tap into third party vendors that do the work for them and hundreds of other ambulatory practices. Smaller healthcare organizations partnering with corporate and entrepreneurial vendors is going to be the best way for these healthcare organizations to compete with the large health system. In fact, it’s a huge opportunity for them to show why patients should visit their practice instead of the large health system.

One thing that’s holding these efforts back is EHR vendors’ decision to close the doors to outside vendors. There are a few EHR vendor exceptions and areas where every EHR vendor is more open (ie. labs, pharmacy, etc), but it won’t be enough going forward. My friend Jeremy Coleman recently described why in this series of tweets:

I don’t see any healthcare future where centralization will survive. Sure, it will put up a good fight for a while, but the number and variety of applications that are coming out in healthcare are going to be so varied and dramatically important for doctors to incorporate into the care they provide that EHR vendors won’t have a choice but to create APIs that facilitate all of these applications.

An EHR vendor that embraces this approach is going to be essential for every ambulatory practice. Eventually, ambulatory practices will be stuck with the need to switch EHR systems or sell to the health system (which generally means switching EHR systems too). However, an ambulatory EHR that provides an open ecosystem for the latest and greatest in health IT will allow ambulatory practices to thrive even against the much larger health systems.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn

