Three questions for Allscripts

Allscripts is demonstrating the "Power of All" at its HIMSS15 booth and how it drives smarter healthcare by powering precision care, building healthy populations and inspiring innovation.

Senior Vice President and General Manager of TouchWorks Business Unit, Greg White, fielded our questions.

Q: How is Allscripts working to help its customers achieve interoperability? 

GW: With the variety of EHRs and other healthcare IT systems available today, interoperability is critical for good patient care. Allscripts has a long history of being open, both technically and as a corporate philosophy. Our OPEN program, which has been in place for several years, enables our customers and partners to get creative and build complementary systems on top of ours. 

Furthermore, our clients need to proactively and predictably manage populations no matter where they are: home, office, rehab or post-acute. Allscripts dbMotion can connect any EHR to an Allscripts EHR--enabling seamless flow of clinical information bi-directionally. Attendees can stop by our HIMSS booth #3521 and see how Allscripts has the ability to pull information about a patient cared for in other environments directly into an Allscripts EHR—or any other vendor’s EHR. 

As part of our development process, we listen to our clients. Allscripts has several client advisory boards and frequent meetings with clients to ensure we understand their needs so that we can help them achieve success.

Q: How do you think federal activity such as the interoperability roadmap and move to value-based care will impact your business and your customers?

GW: Federal initiatives such as Meaningful Use are driving increased sharing of information. Allscripts, along with our clients, have always had an open, connected philosophy, so we’ve been building for this strategy for years. These initiatives have helped our clients by prompting other vendors who have historically been closed to rethink their strategy. We think that’s best for everyone.  Interoperability is a requisite to drive value-based care. Interoperability across a community provides transparency, visibility and, as analytics continue to evolve to big data, better analysis and insight into the populations you manage. Healthcare organizations will struggle to succeed in value-based care without it. 

Q: What other issues are top concerns for your customers and how are you helping them manage?

GW: Value-based care requires more than interoperability. Patients must be engaged. We are actively helping our clients develop patient engagement strategies--they’ve not had this type of relationship in the past. And for them to leverage the benefits of incentives, they need to get their own house in order--from basic operations and tools to support modern billing practices to promoting and embracing the most efficient, appropriate and quality care protocols to drive success for the patient and the physician. We’ve helped our clients improve outcomes for years and will continue to do so. One other obstacle facing care providers is how to better collaborate across the entire community. All the technology in the world won’t make the behavioral and cultural changes required for true interoperability.