The Healthcare Technology Market

This continues a series of vertically focused posts.

A couple of projects with health care industry clients in the last year have opened my eyes on how much technology is changing the information databases and process flows, and yet how much more needs to be done in a very paper and labor intense industry.

One of the biggest investments is going in to Electronic Health Records.  As this Consulting Magazine article describes an implementation "at a large metropolitan hospital can last from three to eight years and require a $100 million or more investment. And the technology is only part of the project, which also includes business process reengineering, sweeping change management requirements, and ongoing training ... (because), healthcare remains acutely resistant to change due to a unique business model (which can be generally described as a highly regulated and highly competitive not-for-profit environment) and unusual organizational structures (in which doctors work primarily for themselves)."

As EHRs get populated, sharing them across the wide network of physicians and health care facilities is the next challenge.  RHIOs are sprouting up everywhere in the US to address issues around standards, privacy, certifications as this article describes. In the UK, the Connecting for Health initiative has already been at it for a while  now.

Much of the investment is going in to proprietary implementations - hence the focus from systems integrators (and the long article in Consulting Magazine) - Accenture, CSC, IBM, Perot among others have large healthcare practices.

And packaged software comes from industry specialists including Axolotl, Cerner, GE Healthcare, iSOFT, RxNT and others, not the mainstream SAPs and Oracles.

Of course, as I have written on my technology  innovation blog New Florence, New Renaissance lots also going on in medical technology and patient care - swallowable and implanted sensors, patient monitoring ,  assisted care, robotics and telepresence

Pretty soon technology costs will beat out  physician and other personnel costs, and malpractice insurance as major costs in health care. As employers struggle with health plan costs, most corporations are wary of all this "innovation" in health care.

Which is why I liked this perspective The Tipping Point for Healthcare from Joe Hogan, CEO of GE Healtcare.

He talks about 5 broad industry challenges

Focus on early health, not late disease
Turn information into insight
Measure healthspan, not lifespan
Increase transparency of quality and cost
Commit to equity in healthcare access

Comments

[James Taylor]

The use of technology in healthcare is a fascinating topic. We have the obsessive focus on electronic medical records, as though these are a solution not merely an enabler (as I argue here http://www.edmblog.com/weblog/2006/05/interoperable_m.html). We have some great progress on using technology to eliminate or reduce errors (http://www.edmblog.com/weblog/2006/07/medical_errors_.html) and the challenges of evidence based medicine and getting doctors to agree so that technology can be applied (http://www.medrants.com/index.php/archives/2920 and http://www.edmblog.com/weblog/2006/05/live_from_inter_3.html) and, of course, the elephant in the room of having to eliminate fraud to have the money to do anything (
http://www.edmblog.com/weblog/2006/07/eliminating_fra.html).
Like you I like the list and feel technology has much to offer. Just a long way to go, that's all...