Dive Brief:

• Promising cost reductions, higher security and ease of integration—​with a dash of interoperability—​Deloitte has launched its new EHR platform, called Evergreen, according to a company press release.
• The release claims that Evergreen can reduce hospital IT costs by as much as 30%, improve analytics and reporting, as well as ease the IT transition from fee-for-service to the value-based model that will eventually be the basis for at least half of Medicare reimbursement by 2018. The company drew its inspiration for Evergreen from the approach it developed for Catholic Health Initiatives' deployment of their Epic EHR.
• "Evergreen draws upon Deloitte's world-class capabilities in strategy, consulting and application management services," Tim Smith, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP, and leader of Deloitte's healthcare technology practice, stated in the release. "It brings the enterprise-wide view that organizations may need in retooling their cultures around a greater use of data."

Dive Insight:

Deloitte made certain that the press release used just about every single health IT buzzword in the glossary: Meaningful Use, value-based model, workflow optimization, population health, standardized design, clinical optimization, etc. If you take it all at face value, it almost sounds too good to be true.

That being said, when you strip away the PR language, it appears that something interesting may actually be going on. It appears that Deloitte is offering to take hospitals and health systems through their entire EHR life cycle, tailoring not only implementation and support but the design and build of the EHR itself to the taste of their leaders.

Traditional hospital EHR vendors do customize their product for customers, but they're still working with a single broad design that doesn't always fit as hoped. If Deloitte can effectively create a new, targeted EHR for each customer successfully, it would be a home run for the consulting giant. Let's see if they can pull it off.