Unhappy software vendors are leery of new effort
Many worry about wasted development
"A lot of vendors dropped out of the pool of those willing to develop ORYX Plus products even before they knew the initiative was going to end," says Judy Finlan, director of clinical consulting services at the New Jersey Hospital Association in Princeton. "Their numbers were in the low 20s to begin with, and out of that number, seven or eight remain. The vendors saw the demise of ORYX Plus coming a year ago if they were paying attention."
Jean Chenoweth, senior vice president at HCIA in Baltimore, says her company will not suffer as a result of ORYX Plus being pulled, but "companies that developed systems specifically for ORYX Plus reporting spent a lot of money doing so. It’s most unfortunate that the Joint Commission would discontinue such an extensive reporting system at the expense of those vendors." She says such a move "will discourage vendors from developing new products for them in the future."
It seems that some hospitals using ORYX Plus measures will continue to use them even after the initiative has been discontinued. Leonard Rogers, CEO of Health Care Data in Encinitas, CA, says while not many actually signed on for the entire ORYX Plus program, his company has among its customers many facilities that use ORYX Plus measures anyway, even though they are not participants.
"They like the outcome measures," explains Rogers, "but don’t want to participate fully in the initiative. They would select just two or three, where the agreement with the Joint Commission was to select 10 and report on those." He says some of his customer hospitals said they didn’t want to do 10 measures because "that’s too much data to collect right now. They said they wanted to get their organizations’ cultures into the mode of collecting data before signing up. But they liked some of the Plus outcome measures, so they would select some with the idea of maybe signing up as a participant the following year."
Rogers says his company is suggesting that hospitals not stop when ORYX Plus terminates — that they continue to collect Plus measures. "It’s a step in the right direction for core measures, but, in my opinion, a little premature." He says his company told hospitals that Health Care Data would risk-adjust the measures they send in. The Joint Commission gives vendors risk-adjustment factors, but will stop doing that at the end of this year.
"But we will have enough data by then that we will be able to continue to risk-adjust the measures," says Rogers. "So, our customers won’t miss a beat. And when core measures are finalized, we will offer them."
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