HealtheIntent is new but it will be big portion of the Cerner solution
April 30, 2018
HealtheIntent is new but it will be big portion of the Cerner solution
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Cerner HealtheIntent
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Our organization had run Cerner EMR already so we only had a selection of adding HealtheIntent or not. There was no competitor. There are two aspects behind our decision: one is cost and the other is performance. We could save 50 full-time employee's expense to run our legacy analytics framework. I have no idea of details of the contract to buy and maintain HealtheIntent but generally speaking, it is saving money. Second, performances in terms of populating, processing data in HealtheIntent is way better than that of the legacy system.