Cerner HealtheIntent is being used by AdventHealth for an EMR for the past 10 years but over time has had very few updates done on the front-end user interface to make it more user friendly. Being more user friendly would make Cerner HealtheIntent easier to use for our end users. Cerner HealtheIntent has its plusses and minuses, but was far more reliable than the other EMR that was supposed to replace it.
Pros
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
Cons
Cerner HealtheIntent needs to be more end-user friendly
Cerner HealtheIntent needs to have a cloud-based option
Likelihood to Recommend
Cerner HealtheIntent has been very reliable, as it hardly ever goes down. So it can be counted on. The end-user interface takes some time to get used to and could be better. Modules aren't always easy to find, making doing a certain task a bit cumbersome or taking more time to perform a task.
My employer is a non-profit organization of healthcare system running many hospitals and clinics. We have implemented Cerner recently and HealtheIntent as part of the components we adopted. Before then, we had run our own analytics platform that consists of Oracle-based transactional database and Enterprise Data Warehouse, Tableau and Cognos based reporting environment. In the transition of implementing Cerner EMR we have used our own analytics to populate clinical data for secondary use, it had a lot of issues of data consistency and cost. HealtheIntent is a new option by Cerner that enables an integrated data analytics and reporting environment, with a reasonable cost of ownership and management.
Pros
First of all and not arguably, it is well integrated with Cerner EMR. All the data elements in the Millennium database that are the core of Cerner EMR database are straightforwardly imported into HealtheIntent. In addition, if you have already been running Table based reports but need to migrate to HealtheIntent, it is very straightforward.
HealtheIntent runs upon a web-based toolkit. It is easy to access the data, reports, and configuration. There are not very much details in the web tools but it has a minimum of functions sets that are needed for managing clinical data for the purpose of analysis and reporting.
Support from Cerner is good to understand this new platform and utilize it in a practical manner. There is an online community (uCern) that has active discussions around HealtheIntent, the user can find answers quite fast and easily from there.
Cons
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
VU
Verified User
Project Manager in Research & Development (10,001+ employees)
