Premium Reports

In January 2021, Optum announced their intentions to acquire Change Healthcare. The merger remains unfinalized, however, as the US Department of Justice blocked the deal in February 2022 due to anticompetition concerns—such a merger would give UnitedHealth Group, Optum’s parent company and the nation’s largest insurer, access to rivals’ sensitive data. The legal proceeding is ongoing and scheduled to go to trial August 1, 2022. This report shares Optum and Change Healthcare customers’ reactions to the merger and their perceptions of its impact. Between March 2021 and April 2022, KLAS interviewed 48 individuals from 46 unique organizations; of these respondents, 9% are Optum customers, 56% are Change Healthcare customers, and 35% are customers of both vendors.

• A definition of enterprise imaging
• Keys to success outside of technology, including strategies for (1) safely managing sensitive images within an enterprise imaging infrastructure and (2) navigating enterprise imaging in a post-pandemic world

Since 2017, KLAS has hosted four separate summits on enterprise imaging (EI), each time bringing together healthcare executive thought leaders to discuss EI issues and define guidelines. The insights gleaned from these summits represent the combined wisdom of some of the industry’s top EI experts.

This white paper summarizes the discussions from the most recent summit—held in May 2022—and also pulls in findings from previous summits to form a succinct EI guide intended to help provider organizations on their enterprise imaging journey. The following sections are included:

• A definition of enterprise imaging and an outline of the functionalities required for a strong enterprise imaging strategy
• Advice for the RFP process
• Best practices for workflow, governance, and vendor delivery
• Keys to success outside of technology, including strategies for (1) safely managing sensitive images within an enterprise imaging infrastructure and (2) navigating enterprise imaging in a post-pandemic world

Note: The data in this report comes from two different surveys. Not all respondents answered both surveys, so sample sizes vary throughout the report. See About This Report for more information.

Almost all HIT solutions today need to be able to share data in some capacity. To a large extent, efforts by provider and vendor organizations to enable interoperability have focused on EMR-to-EMR data sharing or sharing between other solutions whose primary function is not interoperability (e.g., BI systems, population health management platforms). Such sharing has also been the focus of KLAS’ historical interoperability research. However, there are a large number of standalone solutions—both old and new—whose primary function is to facilitate interoperability for specific use cases. These interoperability facilitators are garnering increased market interest as organizations face an expanding array of data-sharing needs.

To help provider organizations better understand their options for tackling interoperability, this report uses vendor-provided information (not yet validated by KLAS) to examine the various solutions’ primary use cases, customer types, and deployed functionality. Future research will utilize customer feedback to validate vendor capabilities and measure customer satisfaction. For complete details on vendors’ self-reported capabilities, see the full report.

Shared smart devices are becoming increasingly popular in healthcare as a means of improving communication, streamlining clinical workflows, and potentially consolidating the nurse tool belt. In this report, KLAS spoke to healthcare organizations that are using Zebra Technologies’ TC52-HC, a mobile computer, to get their perspective on how well these devices perform, increase operational efficiency, enhance patient care, and meet the unique needs of clinical workflows.

_{Note: This report is a reprint of research originally published in November 2021. Small data errors that appeared in that report have been corrected in this current version.}

In the United States, just 10% of the average healthcare organization’s revenue comes from downside risk contracts. However, several health systems are ahead of the curve, and their valuable insights on adopting downside risk can help peers figure out how to move the needle on value-based reimbursement (VBR). KLAS worked with population health management (PHM) vendors to identify which of their customers are most advanced in adoption of downside risk contracts and then conducted interviews with top executives at 15 of these organizations. We spoke with large, midsize, and small health systems as well as a handful of ACOs, highlighting the fact that with the right technology and organizational structure and buy-in, organizations of all types can make significant progress toward VBR.

The Executive Insights portion of this report explores what outcomes the organizations have achieved as well as their aggregated insights regarding keys to success, lessons learned, and potential pitfalls. Case studies for each of the participating organizations provide additional detail and can be found in the Expanded Insights section of the report.