Takeaways from this year's HIMSS:
The enterprise majors all announced enhancements to hardware, software and services to enhance their health solutions. IBM was talking about Watson in health, and really using it to reinforce the notion that IBM doesn't just sell and deliver technology – they also invent it. While Watson is interesting, the real news is that IBM continues to attract very large providers to their outsourced services programs. HP announced its HP Digital Health lineup including Digital Hospital 2.0, and HP V-Health, an outpatient and home care coordination solution. Together, they represent an interesting platform for accountable care. Dell rolled out an Information-Driven Healthcare program featuring mobile clinical computing and unified clinical archiving. All three of these companies stressed the fact that they are trying to better integrate hardware, software, and service delivery to improve the customer experience.
Oracle rolled out an integrated HIE platform using the best of their portfolio of technologies. This is a true enterprise HIE solution, and I am sure it will generate interest in the market. Even SAP had significant new healthcare capabilities with an innovative Collaborative E-Care Management solution. This is a fully functioning remote patient monitoring application based on a high performance, in-memory data architecture. This represents a new and unique entry point in health for SAP and we expect this will force the market to reexamine SAP solutions for health, including ERP, supply chain, and analytics. This market is really heating up, and this is all good news for providers looking to purchase in the coming year.
As a topic of discussion, accountable care was red hot. An Intel breakfast featuring a cast of industry luminaries discussing accountable care organizations drew an invitation-only crowd of several hundred at 6:30 a.m., Monday morning! Any supplier worth its salt from a marketing perspective is trying to position themselves as a leader in the new post-reform accountable world. Analytics, integration, process quality, and emerging physician network based business challenges all raise the bar for providers and suppliers. Expect more industry outsourcing, more provider consolidation, and the formation of new payer / provider integrated delivery networks. Everyone should take note of Steward's $1.1B offer for the failing Jackson Health System in Miami. Expect more national operators to emerge over the next several years. The Harris acquisition of Carefx also suggests national aspirations and creates an interesting new participant in this market.
New challenges for providers are driving a renaissance in management and business consulting services. PWC, E&Y, Delotte, CSC, and many others are obviously benefiting from the need for providers to establish new PMO and technology capabilities. Hospital CIOs have never faced the need to change so much, so quickly ever before. Balancing meaningful use, cost containment, process quality and innovation is extremely difficult now. Every CIO will be purchasing services over the next few years, and there is definitely a growing market in providing advice and guidance over the best strategy for change in these organizations.