The news this week that IDX has lost one of its two contracts for the UK's national health infrastructure upgrade may be bad news for them and good news for Cerner. But it's also a reminder that IT projects of any scale are big and complex, and also that healthcare IT is sufficiently complex that only specialty companies are in the market. Apart from Siemens, whose acquisition of SMS has not been as smooth as it might have hoped, no major tech company has a serious presence in the provider software business.
While Oracle, Microsoft and IBM have been prowling around this market, the core software still comes from companies that are generally focused on just healthcare. While the market is growing, the lack of presence from the giants reveals that it remains a difficult market to make money in and that many of the benefits of the tech explosion seen elsewhere in the economy will still take time to trickle down into healthcare. But the rally in Cerner's stock price in the last two years suggests that some on Wall Street believe that the giants won't ignore this market for too much longer. - Matthew