eClinicalWorks, perennially a top-three vendor of ambulatory electronic health records, is taking a bold step into the market for acute care.
Tuesday, the Westborough, Massachusetts-based vendor announced the launch of eClinicalWorks 10i, a cloud EHR platform for inpatient care. Vice President and Co-founder Sam Bhat said that he sees the new product as a replacement EHR for small and mid-size hospitals that need to revamp their inpatient records to meet the demands of healthcare reform, including value-based payment.
eClinicalWorks already provides cloud-based ambulatory EHRs for about 80 U.S. hospitals. The advent of eClinicalWorks 10i, will allow these customers — mostly with 300 or fewer beds — to integrate hospital, physician, community health and population health records onto the same platform, Bhat said. “We will be offering ancillaries as well,” including laboratory and pharmacy information systems, Bhat added.
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While this move represents eClinicalWorks’ entry to the U.S. acute care market, the company already has hospital implementations overseas, particularly in the Middle East and Asia, Bhat said. “We have been working at a few hospitals in the U.S.” for a couple of years as well, he said.
Notably, eClinicalWorks has signed a joint development deal with Tidelands Health, a three-hospital system along the South Carolina coast.
“We require a unified record across the continuum of care, regardless of where the patient is seen,” Tidelands senior vice president and CIO Dr. Todd Rowland said in a statement provided by eClinicalWorks. “eClinicalWorks has shown a shared commitment to this … approach, which will cost-effectively deliver a solution that enhances patient care,” he said.
The plan, according to Bhat, is to complete implementations at Tidelands — and other early U.S. hospital partners that eClinicalWorks is not naming — by early 2017 to assure the new 10i product is ready for broader use, including at hospitals with more than 300 beds. Since inpatient EHRs have long sales cycles — sometimes 18 months or more — marketing starts now, Bhat said.
