With stimulus money--about $546 million in HITECH for state grants promoting health information exchange projects--illuminating the way, healthcare software vendors are evaluating their offerings to see how electronic health records and health information exchanges can work together to create a true marketplace and business advantage.
Looming EHRs and HIEs, which should help facilitate access to and retrieval of timely clinical data on patients, can cut back dramatically on expenses. A single-clinician practice, for examples, wastes thousands of dollars a year dealing with referrals, consults, radiology and other orders alone. Integrating exchanges to be more than storage devices for clinical information could be a great step toward productivity and profit improvement across healthcare.
In this market, business advantage may mean acquisition. Lawson, for example, recently announced a $160 million deal to acquire Healthvision, a Dallas-based company providing integration and application technology and related services to hospitals and large healthcare organizations. MEDecision also plans to expand its HIE strategy this spring by unveiling new products related to its acquisition last year of HxTechnologies, Inc., a provider of HIE technologies.
The HIE market is heating up, said Scott Storrer, MEDecision CEO in an interview with InformationWeek. "We're adding over a 100 employees to support that growth," he said.
To learn more:
- read this InformationWeek article