A month and a half ago, he was playing basketball in Chicago with Barack Obama. Tuesday, he took to an Orlando stage to describe to top staff and select customers his vision of how technology can rescue the U.S. healthcare system. HCAR caught up with Allscripts CEO Glen Tullman this week at the company's Executive Summit.

Thanks to its October merger with Misys Healthcare, Allscripts and its CEO would have been catapulted to new prominence even without Tullman's longtime friendship with the man who just happened to have won a race to the White House last month. The company can now say it provides software to one-third of the nations physicians. Add hundreds of home care clients and other post-acute venues and hospital Emergency Departments and one begins to understand Tullman claiming a leadership role within the healthcare IT industry.

The vision under discussion is one where physicians are connected to all of the service areas their patients might visit. Medical histories are readily available. Medical errors are reduced. Costs are reduced. Tullman believes this to be a possible future. Considering the frequency at which his words about healthcare reform match those coming from the television screen from the President-elect, he might be right.

Ask him whether those words originated with him and gradually made their way through Obama to the American people watching those television screens, and Tullman will only shrug. Ask him whether technology is important in healthcare, however, and he will talk with an evangelist's zeal. He begins, appropriately enough, with a moral call to action from MIT's Michael Hammer, "In a world where so many are deprived, inefficiency is a sin."

"What do we get for our $2.2 trillion for a healthcare system that is not built on electronic communication and readily available medical records?" he begins his speech with a rhetorical question. "$700 billion is wasted right off the top. 45 million people are uninsured and that number is rising. Out of one and a half million preventable medical errors every year, at least 98 thousand result in death."

With the right use of technology, Tullman concludes, we can do better. "Information is the solution and technology is the enabler of information. Did you know that Americans consult Internet sources 100 million times every month to find health information?"

It is not just technology as an amorphous concept Tullman promotes. He cites the promise of the paper-free office as his example. "When the PC was introduced, paper usage increased, driven by the demand for computer paper," he explained to his audience. "Usage did not begin to decrease until we started connecting computers to each other. Communication and shared information is the goal, not just more and more technology."

Citing the Emergency Room physician who told him having patient medical history available would change his life, Tullman calls for government and healthcare to set connectivity and interoperability as primary goals.

Lastly, he called for government to limit itself to what it does best and leave the rest to the private sector:

1. Leadership: people like David Brailer, Newt Gingrich and Tom Dashle need to call for change, innovation and collaboration. But don't create and Office for Health Information Technology and then make them fight for funding. Imagine what Brailer might have accomplished or how much longer he might have stayed on if his office had had a budget.
2. Standards: government programs and quasi-government bodies such as CCHIT, AHRQ and others need to make communication and shared medical records stated targets.
3. Incentives: the way CMS spends money influences behavior. Since there is not going to be any new money made available in health care, change the way existing money is spent to encourage the adoption of electronic prescriptions, EMRs and telemedicine/telehealth systems.
4. Private Sector Engagement: the healthcare consumer is not well-served if government does everything. Nor does the consumer benefit if 250 companies compete to become the single EMR standard. Make it tough, raise the standards, get it down to 20 or fewer EMR companies so the weak ones will go away and get out of the way of progress.

Will government hear Tullman's message? Chances might be good. Until the Secret Service confiscated Barack Obama's Blackberry after he became the President elect, Tullman was able to call him directly. Now he has to go through one extra person to get him on the phone.


Tullman is CEO of a Allscripts, a software vendor with products for physicians, hospital Emergency Departments and discharge planners. As of last October, it is also in the home care software business, having completed a merger with Misys Healthcare.

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