This weekend I was excited to head back to the eClinicalWorks National Conference in Orlando, FL.  Thousands of eClinicalWorks users attend the national conference to hear the latest product announcements, connect with peers, and be able to talk directly with the eClinicalWorks staff.

One of the unique things that eClinicalWorks staff do at the conference is in the hallway leading to breakfast and the opening keynote is the eCW staff all line up and cheer as their customers walk past.  It’s kind of like a football player running out of the tunnel feeling as the crowd cheers.  It’s a pretty fun way for eCW to honor their customers.  Plus, this year before the opening keynote, they were streaming some entertainment from the hallway where they had a band and even broke out in a custom song about the user conference and the various eClinicalWorks products.

A really creative and entertaining way to start a user conference.

As I’ve said before, each EHR user conference seems to reflect the culture and personality of the organization and their leaders.  Girish Navani, CEO and Co-Founder of eClinicalWorks is an amazing showman and the opening keynote is a great show full of cheering along as he announces new features, demos the new features, and makes new product announcements.  Below you’ll find my social media summary of the key announcements during the keynote along with a little extra commentary.

Kudos to the eClinicalWorks team for an amazing stage set up.  Multiple screens and a colorful stage was a great setup for their announcements.  The glasses were part of their big announcements as you’ll see.

One of the most interesting things I share from user conferences is the stats they share with the audience.  2000 new locations for eCW in the last 12 months is a big deal at any time, but especially in the current market.  Not to mention passing $1 billion as a private company.

I think the idea of making the EHR invisible was a big theme at this year’s conference.  You’ll see it in a number of the solutions they showed.  Logging into the EHR over and over again can be a real hassle.  It’s great to see them embracing facial recognition and liveness to make the login process more seamless and invisible.  Not to mention more secure.

I thought this was a really fascinating comparison to Google Search’s move from providing links to providing summaries.  That definitely sounds like what eClinicalWorks is doing with PRISMA.  It used to search all the data and now it’s summarizing it.  I’m still chewing on Navani’s comment that “healthcare has an infinite flow of data.”  When you think about what could be measured in our body, that statement is really poignant.

A lot of people in the interoperability world are looking at how the EHR vendors are going to approach TEFCA and QHINs.  eClinicalWorks strategy is all in as a QHIN with what they’re calling PRISMA Net.  My guess is that may spell the evenutally sunsetting of CommonWell and CareQuality for eCW, but we’ll see how that plays out.  Lots to still be determined there.

Major credit to Sunoh.ai, the AI Medical Scribe/Ambient Clinical Voice solution that’s integrated with eClinicalWorks was given on stage.  What’s interesting is that it probably didn’t need much attention on stage because it was being adopted so quickly.  The quote from the doctor is amazing to see.  What other IT feature has gotten more quotes like this?  I’m interested to see if they’re making progress with other EHR vendors implementing it, but not something they’d announce at their user conference.

The key announcements for Sunoh.ai basically revolved around deeper integration with eClinicalWorks.  There was a lot of happy cheers for Sunoh to be able to automatically do the various coding and orders.  These deep integrations is what every AI medical scribe is working on and is going to make a huge difference.

I’d seen quite a bit of healow Genie before, so this wasn’t that new for me.  You can see how valuable this can be for an organization and the deep integration with the EHR and PM really does set it apart.

It’s fun for me to think back on this progress as well.  I think at my first eClinicalWorks user conference many years ago they announced copy and paste (there were some security and privacy reasons why they didn’t allow it for a long time) to celebration from the crowd.  This year felt like multiple leaps forward when it comes to the impact their announcements will have on the end user, the interface, and patients.

The move to connect with payers is happening with a number of EHRs.  It can solve a lot of the challenges healthcare organizations face.  I was surprised with how many health plans eCW has connected with.  If you look at our past interviews, you can learn how impactful it is for an organization when the payer is connected to healow Insights.

This was kind of the data dump of new features.  I probably missed a few, but it gives you an idea of what they’ve accomplished.  A lot of focus on making things more efficient.  The AI curated content on eCW University is fascinating and pretty unique.  I loved that the patient visit summaries are available in 8 languages.

The expansion into more specialties continues.  It’s always interesting to see what unique needs each specialty has and these 3 have really unique ones.

I think we saw a similar slide to this last year, but it’s amazing to see how many value based care efforts are going on and how eCW supports them.

These announcements of eClinicalWorks expansion were almost an after thought on stage.  That kind of makes sense since if you’re a user, do you really want to hear that your vendor is spending time on areas that won’t help you specifically?  The big announcement in there though was Navani saying that they’re planning to release a Critical Access Hospital product sometime next year.  That will be interesting to watch.

RCM is a big focus in healthcare right now because there’s a lot of opportunity and revenue management has become so important.  Lots of improvements to eCW’s RCM efforts were shared on stage.

I think I share these numbers every year, and every year they leave me struck.  1 million daily healow app users is pretty amazing to consider.

We’ve talked a lot about doctor reviews at our Swaay.Health LIVE conference over the years.  It’s a big important space for medical practices.  Done right, it can make a big difference in driving patients to your practice.  Was fascinating to see a preview of what eClinicalWorks has created to be able to better manage a clinic and their doctors on the various patient review sites.

We finally saw the details of one way the smart glasses could be used.  Clinicians and others like practice managers can use their smart glasses to get a “podcast” which basically summarizes their messages, appointments, reports, etc.  Plus, what makes it unique is you can actually interact with it and reply to messages for example.  It was a cool demo, but I’m really interested to see what users think of it when they get it in their hands.

They of course saved what I think was the coolest demo for near the end of the keynote.  You can read about it in the above description.  However, the basic idea of only having smart glasses and possibly a screen in the exam room and everything done with voice including the screen pulling up info from the EHR based on the ambient signals was pretty mind bending.

I’m confident there’s a lot of refinement that’s going to be needed.  Plus, it’s a huge paradigm shift for doctors, but it definitely enlivens the mind to what could be possible in this new world of AI.  Could a doctor really see a patient with no clicks?  The demo definitely illustrated the opportunity.

That’s my summary of the eClinicalWorks National Conference keynote.  What did you think of their announcements?  Are there any that stood out to you?  What do you think of the computerless exam room and ambient computing?  Share your thoughts with us on social media.

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