How To Set A Course As A Successful Healthcare IT Solutions Provider
Healthcare IT continues to evolve and change, and IT solutions providers in this vertical need to address the challenges their clients face as they try to keep up with standards, regulations, and trends.
In this exclusive interview with Business Solutions, Shahid Shah shares his insights on how VARs, managed services providers (MSPs), and ISVs can be competitive in this market; which technologies can lead to sales opportunities; and where to start if you are new to the healthcare space.
Shah, known as the “The Healthcare IT Guy,” is CEO of Netspective Communications, an IT professional services and custom software development firm. He has served as chairman of the Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance (OSEHRA) Advisory Board, CTO for Cardinal Health’s CTS unit (now CareFusion), CTO of two electronic medical records (EMR) companies, a chief systems architect at American Red Cross, architecture consultant at the National Institutes of Health, chairman of HealthIMPACT Conferences, and SVP of healthcare technology at COMSYS.
Shah will deliver the keynote at the Smart VAR Healthcare Summit, powered by ScanSource and Business Solutions, on August 11 in Dallas.
BSM: More and more, IT solutions providers are called upon to deliver technology that facilitates the right patient experience. What should VARs, MSPs, and ISVs do to stay competitive in the future?
Shah: VARs and IT solutions providers who do not help drive net new revenue through better patient experience or do not understand how value-based outcomes work for their healthcare clients will not be competitive over the long term.
Solutions providers can fall into the following categories of healthcare IT partners:
- Top-line revenue growth: Companies that help grow revenue for their clients are always welcome. There are fewer competitors when you’re selling solutions that grow revenue.
- Free cash flow improvement: If you can help healthcare companies improve cash flows, you’re going to have a much easier time than companies that don’t.
- Bottom-line or margins enhancement: Companies that can show how they can grow their customers’ margins will skip to the front of the line when setting appointments with their clients.
- Cost containment: If a solutions provider can clearly show how they can help contain costs, they will see many competitors but will still have a good story that can help differentiate them.
- Technology: Being “just” a tech partner is now table stakes, and it will be very difficult to compete.
Only solutions providers that see themselves as revenue partners and cost containment partners have the ability to survive in this very competitive healthcare IT VARs and solutions space.
BSM: Healthcare providers have a goal of preventing people from becoming “patients” at all. Can technology solutions address prevention and wellness?
Shah: Technologies that help with prevention and wellness are seeing great traction in some marketplaces, especially where health systems are starting to “bear risk” for their patients. Where there are more fee-for-service (FFS) institutions, prevention and wellness are less popular because incentives aren’t aligned properly. However, where there are more risk bearers (like accountable care organizations or traditional insurers) seeking value-based or collaborative reimbursements, we’re seeing good uptake of technologies 
that cater to wellness because the payment incentives are properly aligned. VARs, MSPs, and ISVs looking to get into the healthcare sector need to understand these payer/patient/provider alignments in order to succeed in the marketplace.
BSM: Regarding the market for technologies that support wellness, can you offer a few examples of what our readers can provide that can help their healthcare IT clients work toward that goal?
Shah: Wellness is difficult for many solutions providers to understand because it has a number of facets. A good starting point is to review the various wearables and other devices being designed by companies like IDEO. If health and wellness devices are treated as part of the Internet of Things (IoT) and solutions providers become experts at the myriad of ways the devices work and integrate, then they can become real partners for care delivery organizations that need that assistance. Another example is PrescribeWell, which I co-founded. This company was created in an era of new Medicare reimbursements for wellness and obesity management that didn’t even exist a few years ago. By integrating deep technical understanding of IT and excellent knowledge of payment models, VARs and MSPs can successfully provide solutions such as these to health systems. Then, once they’re trusted partners, they can expand into other offerings.
BSM: Communication and providing patients access to information seem to be other areas of focus. What role can IT solutions providers play?
Shah: Patient engagement, caregiver engagement, and provider activation are all in vogue at the moment — especially where risk bearers (like insurers or accountable care organizations) want to reduce healthcare spend. Almost any kind of engagement requires communications tools — be it email, SMS, or push-based messaging via mobiles. Healthcare institutions are not really seeking “communications tools;” instead, they’re seeking dynamic, feedback-based engagement tools so that they can identify gaps in care and understand physician/patient interactions. This is a huge opportunity for VARs who understand the difference.
BSM: Can you provide more information on the differences between communication tools and patient engagement tools? Are there components that directly address patients as well as healthcare providers?
Shah: General communications (which is asynchronous and mostly textual) is quite different from patient engagement (PE). PE involves clinical or biometric data collection for the healthcare provider that is placed into the clinician’s workflow and can lead to better decisions when it comes to patient needs and satisfaction. Yes, there are many components for the patient as well, such as better access to information and notices of educational opportunities or activities.
BSM: Announcements come weekly — if not more often — about healthcare regulation changes, advancing stages of implementation, and new bills introduced for additional requirements or programs. What should VARs be focusing on now to prepare for 2016 and beyond?
Shah: VARs should understand that the major uncertainties surround the Affordable Care Act (ACA or “Obamacare”) are now generally settled. This means having their teams comb through the regulations and see how value-based reimbursements, collaborative payment models, analytics, and other requirements will come into the mix. The ICD-10 rollout, Meaningful Use Stages 2 and 3, and the data deluge that is coming with ACA are all things that they need to understand. If VARs are getting started in healthcare, I’d recommend reading healthcare reports from Accenture, McKinsey, Deloitte, and PwC. Doing a simple search on “
BSM: What other advice can you offer for a VAR that is interested in beginning to work in the healthcare vertical?
Shah: The best way to get some healthcare IT customers is to start with small physician practices, urgent care clinics, or outpatient surgery centers. Whether small or large, most care delivery organizations have similar workflows, and the most important understanding solutions providers can and should gain is that of the complex workflows that are inherent in healthcare. There are no “simple” workflows given the safety and legal liabilities routinely undertaken by care providers. If you start working with small providers that are cash-strapped (and give them a price break) then you can learn the complexity of healthcare in small settings and grow into larger institutions. The market is huge and the opportunity is worth chasing.