Healthcare Matters

We recently covered Premier’s announcement of its new platform, called PremierConnect, a reform-era information exchange that will connect an estimated 100,000 member providers, supply chain leaders and hospital executives. I referred to it as a “virtual machine for change management,” as PremierConnect is, in fact, a networked service that continuously distills tens of thousands of patient records into meaningful information that can be used by providers and SCM professionals to identify best practices, eliminate variance and drive new standards.

In a recent interview with Information Week Healthcare, Keith Figlioli, senior VP of healthcare informatics at Premier, confirmed that PremierConnect will go live June 25. During the interview, Keith emphasized how the new service will support the enhanced levels of clinical integration required of accountable care organizations (ACOs) and stressed the value of the expanded network that PremierConnect will enable.

IBM’s Sean Cassidy, director of healthcare information management, told InformationWeek Healthcare, “There is so much transformation happening in healthcare today. The notion that each individual provider can deal with that transformation by themselves is an impossible challenge; it can’t happen.” He added, “PremierConnect gets to the heart and soul of how providers will transform. It gives them the ability to collaborate and innovate. Healthcare transformation has to be done collectively, not individually.”

It got me to thinking about the value of networks in general. Of all the popular ideas of the Internet boom, one of the most dangerously influential was Metcalfe’s Law . Simply put, the law says that the value of a communications network is proportional to the square of the number of its users.

                                                                    Illustration: Serge Bloch

Modeling a clinical or hospital information system as a network of information consumers rolled up inside a larger network of hospitals and clinics (the Premier Healthcare Alliance) is what Premier is doing –it’s text book– and whether you trust Metcalfe’s value assumptions or more recent theories that dispute some of his conclusions, the bottom line is: If PremierConnect successfully harnesses these networking/community based changes in healthcare (i.e. Patient Centered Medical Homes, ACOs, etc.), GPOs who don’t hurry up and develop competitive and/or complementary networked service models are going to be left in the dust.

—Tom Finn