H.I.S.-tory by Vince Ciotti

Episode #75:

QuadraMed Part 5:

QCPR© 2012 by H.I.S. Professionals, LLC, all rights

reserved.

Odd Connections

• This week we finally complete the story of Compucare & QuadraMed, by tracing the origins of the “QCPR” EMR. Amazing how convoluted the origin of these four letters can be….

• We pick up the story of UltiCare as it was being sold well by Dr. Ralph Korpman’s Health Data Sciences (HDS).

• Back in the late 80s & early 90s, it was a leader in the red hot “bedside” market.

Beside Hype• It’s interesting to read all of the hype spouted forth back in those

days about the advantages of putting devices at the bed side – it reads like the miracle cures that EMRs are going to be today…

• Of course, no one spoke about the downsides like: CPOE alert-fatigue, lost productivity of RNs and MDs clicking their lives away, security, etc. It’s all positive, efficient, integrated, immediate…

Prestigious Client List• While MedTake and CliniCom sold to

“normal” community hospitals, HDS’

UltiCare was installed in big names:– William Beaumont Hospital System in

Royal Oak, Michigan, bought UltiCare in 1985 for about $10M. Included in that cost were 7 “MV 10000” minicomputers made by DG. Beaumont was being managed by

– Humana – the giant hospital chain – at the time, so the potential for additional sales was enormous…

– Princeton Medical Center in NJ implemented HDS in 1991, with DG terminals in every patient’s room.

Biggest Sale of Them All!• As seems to be the case with so many of the vendors

we’ve traced, HDS’ biggest sale of all was themselves:

• In May, 1996, the Medaphis Corporation acquired HDS in a stock deal worth about $255M! HDS was privately held at the time.- Ralph and his team must have made out pretty darn well…

• The name Medaphis may not ring a bell, but they were major players in Healthcare at the time. In another familiar theme in HIS acquisitions (think McKesson after acquiring HBOC), right after the acquisition, Medaphis ran into some financial challenges/litigation, had to re-state HDS’ revenue for several years, and to shake the cloud over it’s name, Medaphis then renamed itself Per Se Technologies .

• Again, true to form in the HIS world, the first major change Per Se made to UltiCare was to change its name, calling it “Patient 1”

Another HUGE Sale…• One thing that motivated Per Se to pay so much for Patient 1 was

an imminent 1996 sale HDS had been working on, to one of the largest healthcare organizations in the country: – New York City Health & Hospitals Corp.

• This place was so big in terms of volumes, it ishard to appreciate: a dozen of the largest hospitals in the US, spread out over 4 boroughs of NYC (in all but Staten Island).

• I distinctly remember the stunning victory of SMS over McAuto back in the mid-70s when NYCHHC was shopping for a financial system. SMS’ stock soared when their $s hit our bottom line…

• HHC runs UltiCare (aka Patient 1) right up to this day; speaking of which, any day now they will announce the successor EMR. Now just guess who might win this epic decision at such a large multi-hospital system???

And Two More Times…• After a few years of further sales successes,

Per Se sold Patient One to Misys Healthcare Systems from Raleigh, NC, in July, 2003.

• And what was the first thing Misys did to “improve” Patient One? You guessed it they played one more round of Shirley’s big hit, re-naming it the “Computerized Patient Record”

• The last (final?) sale of UltiCare/Patient 1/CPR came in September, 2007, when our main story-line vendor, QuadraMed, acquired CPR from Misys and (did you guess it?) changed the name a 4th time, albeit a minor change, to “QCPR” (QuadraMed’s Computerized Patient Record).

• QCPR turned out to be the perfect front-end to Affinity’s solid revenue cycle core applications.

QCPR/Affinity Status Today• QuadraMed competed well in a number of system selections our

firm led over the past few years, thanks to its large client base of:– 184 users on Affinity for a core HIS: Access, Rev Cycle, etc.– 68 clients on QCPR, most of which are 300 beds & larger.

• Client names included such “biggees” (literally!) as:– St. Francis in Tulsa OK, with 946 beds– St. Raphael’s in New Haven, CT, with 474 beds– St. Barnabas, West Orange, NJ, with 597 beds– Bellevue Hospital in NYC with 809 beds – Forest General, Hattiesburg, MS with 512 beds

• So there you have it, the complete HIS-tory of: – Compucare’s Affinity and QuadraMed’s QCPR, evolved from

HDS’ UltiCare, Medaphis/Per Se’s Patient 1 and Misys’ CPR.