athenahealth Population Health vs. Cerner HealtheIntent

My honest opinion is if an organization is fully running a Cerner EMR, it is almost not avoidable choice to use HealtheIntent. From performance and consistency views, it performs very well simply because HealtheIntent and Cerner EMR are from the same place. From the cost perspective, it's up to the contract. But in a general sense, it is more cost effective rather than running a separate analytics framework. If an organization is running a mix of Cerner and other clinical IT system, the answer is all but case by case.

Incentivized

• Reliability means Cerner HealtheIntent hardly ever goes down
• Cerner HealtheIntent can be customized for our business needs
• We have our own Cerner HealtheIntent server instead of using the cloud

Incentivized

• Metadata management in HealtheIntent should be improved. For example, we could find similar looking data sources (for example, diagnosis tables with similar names) but it was hard to distinguish and know which one is the one in production. It was because several data stewards loaded the same table with a different purpose (with similar tables names). And HealtheIntent doesn't have a metadata "for a test" or "for development", which makes hard to manage versions of one data source.
• To run a SQL in HealtheIntent, there is a time limit of only 10 minutes. Also, there is no delicate configuration of query execution. It may not need a lot of functions like Toad or SQL developer, but what HealtheIntent provides is very limited.
• Similar to the one above, HealtheIntent may need better metadata management for users. It is hard to find a table that I need, even to find out the existence of the table. Basic statistics like the size of a table, # of rows may be helpful for users.

Incentivized

We have had Cerner HealtheIntent for over 10 years and it has been a strong EMR. Other EMRs have been OK. They have just done the job, but haven't lived up to their promise. When a patch is put out for Cerner HealtheIntent, it actually works without bugs. Reaching support for Cerner HealtheIntent is easier and our issues are taken care of in a timely manner.

Incentivized

• ROI may be depending on the contract. But even if an organization is spending the same money for either homegrown analytics or HealtheIntent, HealtheIntent provides more agility of project or cost spending. If you don't like it you can discontinue anytime.
• The negative one is, HealtheIntent is a new product in Cerner and at this point, it may not be capable of everything like homegrown analytics. The question would be the future of HealtheIntent and will be able to cover what you need soon.
• If an organization is pursuing a standard, generic analytics and reporting (such as the combination of Oracle and Tableau), HealtheIntent is great. If not (for example, running R and d3.js for specific cases), the cost of migration to HealtheIntent will skyrocket.

Incentivized