GE Healthcare confirmed at HIMSS 2015 that it is getting out of the hospital electronic medical records business.
The company acknowledged on Tuesday that three years ago it decided to phase out its Centricity Enterprise product. It’s now helping customers with a “graceful transition over a number of years,” said Jon Zimmerman, general manager of clinical business solutions at GE Healthcare.
“We are working closely with Centricity Enterprise customers to help them transition to a solid and effective acute care EMR,” Zimmerman said standing amid the GE Healthcare booth at McCormick Place in Chicago, this year’s home for HIMSS.
Zimmerman said the company had not decided whether to sell the Centricity Enterprise business to a competitor or simply help move customers to vendors of their choice.
“The market is dominated by a few large vendors,” Zimmerman said in explaining the decision to get out of the inpatient EHR business. “Is it in the best interest of our customers, shareholders and employees to (be) in a market where competitors are clearly ahead, or should we recognize the situation and go to where the market is growing?”
Zimmerman said that GE Healthcare is instead “doubling down” on its ambulatory EMR products, Centricity EMR for large medical groups and its integrated Centricity Practice Solution EMR and practice management system, which is meant for smaller practices.
The hospital-focused Centricity Enterprise product generated about 5 percent of total electronic medical records revenue, Zimmerman said.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
In 2013, Centricity products were thought to generate close to $300 million, making GE Healthcare a distant sixth in EMR vendors. That was more than $100 million behind fifth-place athenahealth that year, according to Medical Economics.
But the gap doubtlessly grew since then.
Industry insiders gossiped endlessly about GE Healthcare’s struggles with Utah’s Intermountain Healthcare. In June 2010, before Meaningful Use officially began, Intermountain CMO Dr. Brent Wallace told the New York Times that the health system would miss 36 of 48 Stage 1 measures if the EHR incentive program had begun then.
Intermountain left GE for Cerner in 2013, prematurely ending a planned 10-year, $100 million collaboration that began in 2008. Intermountain first installed Centricity in 2006, the rebranded name of what used to be called IDX Carecast, shortly after GE acquired IDX Systems.
But the poormouthing went beyond Intermountain. Anonymous posts, allegedly from GE Healthcare employees, declared Centricity Enterprise on its deathbed a year ago.
GE Healthcare built its healthcare IT division through a series of acquisitions last decade, but had issues integrating all its purchases. If GE does discontinue Centricity Enterprise, it would spell the end of one of the oldest EHRs on the market. IDX predecessor PHAMIS, which stood for Public Health Automated Medical Information Systems, grew out of the U.S. Public Health Service in the 1970s.
IDX bought Seattle-based PHAMIS in 1997.
Chris Seper contributed to this report.
[Photo from Flickr user CP Storm]
