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Acer America
Acer America Corp. is a computer manufacturer of business and consumer PCs, notebooks, ultrabooks, projectors, servers, and storage products.

Location

333 West San Carlos Street
San Jose, California 95110
United States

WWW: acer.com

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News

May 20, 2011 |

Boosting Profits with New Services in Health IT

In addition to electronic health records, storage, analytics, and cloud services offer value for clients and bottom-line benefits for partners. By Hailey Lynne McKeefry

By Hailey Lynne McKeefry

Healthcare subjects, from discussions about reform to concern over care for an aging population, have dominated the news. One subject that doesn’t get as much air time, however, is healthcare IT—technologies that can help medical professionals provide better patient care and streamline their businesses.

Health IT is a lucrative market. This year, worldwide IT spending by hospitals and physicians will total more than $92 million, according to December 2010 figures from analyst firm Gartner Inc. In 2012, spending is projected to grow to more than $96 million.

But healthy spending does not translate into mass adoption. “The small doctors’ offices—one- to five-provider practices—are moving the slowest in terms of [IT] adoption and will need the most help,” says Judy Hanover, research director, provider IT strategies, at market research firm IDC. “We expect [solution] providers to start to reach out to those organizations a bit more.”

Concerns about cost often make it difficult for medical practices to pull the trigger, notes Jeff Auerbach, CEO at the EMR Group Inc. in Tucson, Ariz. “A lot of physician practices feel like it is expensive to go from a paper-based system to a computer system when you consider lost revenue and the cost of training and equipment,” he says. Auerbach’s company helps medical providers ease into acquiring the technology by putting together a budget for clients so they can plan their spending.

Bayshore Technologies Inc., a solution provider in Tampa, Fla., takes a different approach, educating its customers with seminars, webinars, and plenty of face-to-face time for knowledge transfer. “Doctors offices are historically late to the table in technology, so a lot of their systems are old and don’t support new software,” says Peter Anderson, the company’s president and CEO. “There is an educational process that you go through to show why to spend money.”

STARTING WITH EMRs
For many healthcare organizations, electronic medical records (EMRs) or electronic health records (EHRs) are a logical place to begin adoption, leading to hefty growth numbers for the technology. In fact, IDC forecasts that the EHR/EMR category will experience a compound annual growth rate of 11.5 percent from 2009 to 2015.

“That’s twice the growth rate for health IT software in general and four times the annual growth rate for the IT market,” says IDC’s Hanover. “We project a growth rate of 10 or 11 percent in 2011.”

“The American Recovery and Reinvestment Actof 2009 means opportunity and incentives are driving clinics and smaller practices to get up to speed with EMR—to take advantage of incentives and stimulus dollars—and they need the help of VARs,” says Mike Thompson, president and CEO of Groupware Technology Inc., a VAR based in Campbell, Calif.

Thompson also notes that the shift to EMRs is increasing the focus of healthcare IT on data storage, warehousing, and virtualization, which are key to improving workflow and ensuring compliance with privacy regulations. These additional technologies also enable VARs to serve clients beyond the installation of electronic record and practice management solutions.

Andrew Principe, director of healthcare solutions for Arcadia Solutions LLC, an IT consultancy in Burlington, Mass., says that when working with a client interested in implementing electronic records, it’s important to get them concentrating on the end game—improving their overall practice. “There seems to be an unusual focus on achieving the technology result [buying the system] and very little on the actual business outcome [lowering the cost and increasing the quality of care, and doing it in a way that is scalable],” he says.

To achieve that best result, Principe makes clear connections from the technology to the work that’s done in the practice, and explains how the technology and data support that work—all the way up to being a “better performer in the healthcare system.”

REACHING FOR THE CLOUD
Other technologies on the shopping list for healthcare customers are mobile applications and cloud-based solutions, says Larry Albert, president of the Agilex Healthcare sector of Agilex Technologies Inc., based in Chantilly, Va.

“The recent HIMSS [Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society] conference was exploding with mobile applications that [empower] clinicians—from physicians doing rounds, to nurses checking on patients using notepads, to smartphones and tying them back to legacy systems,” says Albert. “Right behind that folks are really starting to focus on using the cloud.”

Cloud-based applications may be a boon for smaller medical practices, although use of the cloud overall will be small. According to an IDC report published in February, healthcare will represent less than 5 percent of the cloud computing market by 2014. Even so, by that year the compound annual growth rate for the segment will reach 23 percent.

“In the past, two- to six-doctor practices have been inhibited by cost. But when I move applications to the cloud, look at it as a service, and let small physicians pay by the drink—and then couple that with meaningful use reimbursement—suddenly I am making IT manageable,” says Albert.

Whether electronic records, mobile apps, or cloud-based offerings, one thing health IT technologies have in common is data—and lots of it. “We’ll start creating a tsunami of digital data that will create an enormous need for analytics,” notes Albert.

With help from their VAR partners, “health providers are putting more and more emphasis on analytics and how the data can be used to make changes, create products and services, and improve care,” says Alan Worsham, vice president at Beacon Partners Inc., an IT provider with offices in Weymouth, Mass., and Danville, Calif. But analyzing data doesn’t just help health providers run their practices more efficiently. It is also a critical component for reporting on meaningful use, a requirement for federal funding.

BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS
As with most technology areas, technical expertise will not be enough to succeed in the medical market. “One of the oldest truisms in business is that you have to be close to the customer,” says Albert. “People get frustrated calling into the call center and undergoing death by voicemail. They want that local representative who can come and help them troubleshoot a problem or help train them.”

Sales cycles can be long and sometimes convoluted when working with medical providers as well. “New entrants into the healthcare market will struggle until they realize just how much buying decisions and stakeholders cross organizational boundaries,” says Principe of Arcadia Solutions. “You may be selling to a single healthcare entity, but you may, because of the funding work, have to get approval from a state or local government agency that may have skin in the game. It takes a different mindset in how you network and drive new business and generate sales.”

Solution providers already serving the healthcare market also note that additional staffing could be needed to serve clients in the vertical. After all, if you’re not responsive, customers will start looking for someone who is. “There is phenomenal opportunity in this space, but the key is going to be that your eyes don’t get bigger than your stomach,” says Albert. “Pursue as much as you can, but as you capture business, make sure you have the resources to adequately cover it.”

HAILEY LYNNE MCKEEFRY, a freelance technology writer based in Silicon Valley, has been writing about the channel for more than two decades.


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