Colleagues,
Another key insight coming out of the HIMSS meeting is from Dana Blankenhorn of ZDNet Healthcare on the emergence of Software as a Serice (SaaS) offerings as an important competitive entrant into the EHR market ... Your thoughts are welcomed ...
ENJOY!
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... One conclusion I was able to draw from last week’s HIMSS show is that
Software as a Service (SaaS) is the only way clinics and small medical practices are going to get health IT in time to collect that sweet, sweet stimulus cash...
...From big SaaS companies like
AllScripts
to smaller ones like
Practice Fusion, the buzz was electric and the lesson obvious...
... Most large hospitals have their solutions in place, or are in the
process of implementation. This vendor relationship may be the most important thing on a hospital CEO’s plate right now...
...Many small practices have been assuming that the hospitals will bring
them their health IT ... But small practices may well ask, what’s in it for me? ...
... You have
your clinic because you want to stay independent. And many hospital
systems were not really designed to scale down...
...Thus,
SaaS.
There is little up-front expense, no server in the closet. You can back
up records overnight with
Carbonite or a USB-linked hard drive — you can backup 2 terabytes at Costco now for
under $300, including software...
...SaaS vendors can scale quickly thanks to cloud computing. The biggest
problem may be assuring clinics that their broadband connection won’t go down mid-day. But a lightweight version of the software, again on a nurse’s station, can handle that eventuality...
... This tells me there is still an enormous opportunity to automate
small practices, but 2011 will be here before you know it and the only way I can see them going is to buy it as a service, stimulus cash or no stimulus cash...
Read on at:
http://healthcare.zdnet.com/?p=3411&alertspromo=&tag=nl.rSI...