‘Interoperability continues to be the big issue’

Paul Black took over the reins of electronic health record vendor Allscripts Healthcare Solutions in 2012

after 13 years with rival Cerner Corp., where he rose to chief operating officer. In between, he spent five years with a private equity firm, which served him well in the past year as Allscripts acquired firms with software offerings that go well beyond its mainstay physician office business. Editor Merrill Goozner recently spoke with Black, 59, about his strategy for Allscripts and the future direction of the EHR business. The following is an edited transcript.

Modern Healthcare: What was behind your recent moves into home care and behavioral health EHRs?

Paul Black: It’s very important to be relevant to our clients’ needs. By that I mean, you can be a really great electronic health record company, but if you’re not helping companies make the transition from fee-for-service to value-based care, you’re not going to be relevant.

We have four different platforms: EHRs, population health, consumer engagement and precision medicine. Those are important distinctions for where we are in 2017 from where we were in the past. We have made acquisitions, but for the most part, we’ve built those platforms through growth and in our own engineering divisions.

MH: Where are you still looking to beef up your offerings?

Black: On the inpatient side and hospital side, it’s important to have an integrated platform—from the ER to surgery to pharmacy. Both acute care and ambulatory care have to be on one platform. That’s the bulk of what’s been done over the past four years. We have a complete suite of offerings. On the ambulatory side, we have revenue-cycle capability, documentation and the rest.

MH: Do you see yourself competing with startups or are you open to collaboration?

Black: We’ve had an open approach to all outside parties. Very few have done that until recently. We embrace third parties; we embrace startups. We have over 140 companies that have signed on to the Allscripts developer program. They come in; learn how the API (application program interface) works; they get certified; and they have access to our EHR record to build solutions on top of that.

We have 40 people inside Allscripts to help those folks be successful. It’s one thing to publish an API. It’s another to help train them for the solutions they’re building. In 2013, we had an application development program contest. We gave up to $1 million to four companies. They competed and were chosen as the four best. We collaborate with (Chicago-based) Matter. We helped that incubator get started. At last count, there are more than 2,000 programmers writing code on top of Allscripts’ solutions. We think that’s a distinct competitive advantage.

MH: What’s your approach to interoperability? Are you building a closed system with your acquisitions?

Black: Our approach has been to build the foundation for a second layer based on population health management. It’s based on the availability of an interoperable platform. It has to have three or four distinct capabilities.

We have to pull data out of any EHR out there. We have 450 systems homegrown that we pull from today. We harmonize it for the different nomenclatures used to describe different medical conditions; different documentation capability; medication terminology. We harmonize that and put it into what we call a single source of truth. I store it, and then I give people the capability to perform analytics around that so they get a full understanding. We perform the analytics, or we help them do the analytics. We want to close the loop back

“If you’re not helping companies make the transition from fee-for-service to value-based care, you’re not going to be relevant.”