The Shifting Health Care IT Markets

I’m at the end of my Fall Healthcare IT Conference season (although I’m still considering attending RSNA for my first time) and besides being thankful to be done with all the travel, I’m also taking a second to think about what I’ve learned over the past couple months as I’ve traveled to a wide variety of conferences.

While the EHR market has been hot for so many years, I’m seeing a big shift in purchasing to three areas: Analytics/Population Health, Revenue Cycle Management, and Privacy/Security. This isn’t a big surprise, but the EHR market has basically matured and now even EHR vendors are looking at new ways to market their products. These are the three main areas where I see the market evolving.

Analytics and Population Health
I could have easily added the other buzzword “patient engagement” to this category as well. There’s a whole mixture of technologies and approaches for this category of healthcare IT. In fact, it’s where I see some of the most exciting innovations in healthcare. Most of it is driven by some form of value based reimbursement or organizations efforts to prepare for the shift to value based reimbursement. However, there’s also a great interest by many organizations to try and extract value from their EHR investment. Many are betting on these tools being able to help them realize value from their EHR data.

Revenue Cycle Management
We’re seeing a whole suite of revenue cycle solutions. For many years we’ve seen solutions that optimized an organization’s relationships with payers. Those are still popular since it seems like most organizations never really fix the problem so their need for revenue cycle management is cyclical. Along with these payer solutions, we’re seeing a whole suite of products and companies that are focused on patient payment solutions. This shift has been riding the wave of high deductible plans in healthcare. As an organization’s patient pay increases, they’re looking for better ways to collect the patient portion of the bill.

Privacy and Security
There have been so many health care breaches, it’s hard to even keep up. Are we becoming numb to them? Maybe, but I still see many organizations investing in various privacy and security programs and tools whenever they hear about another breach. Plus, the meaningful use requirement to do a HIPAA Risk Assessment has built an entire industry focused on those risk assessments. You can be sure the coming HIPAA audits will accelerate those businesses even more.

What other areas are you seeing become popular in health care IT?