Trends That Are Driving Healthcare IT Revenue Opportunities

By Jackie Horn, Marketing Director, Information Management Division, Kodak Alaris

Financial analysts have once again identified healthcare as a leading growth market for 2015. Government-driven IT requirements continue to push healthcare providers to comply, creating opportunities for VARs and ISVs to sell software, hardware, and services to a wide range of healthcare facilities to support their implementations. The most attractive opportunities for solution providers in 2015 are as follows:

• Providing tools that help enable Direct Messaging and Meaningful Use (MU) compliance
  Many patient record management systems don’t meet the “interoperability” requirements outlined by the federal government — meaning electronic medical record (EMR) systems are still unable to efficiently and securely interface with systems outside of healthcare provider communities. Medical practices, hospitals, long- and short-term care facilities, and clinics not associated with established healthcare community EMR systems are challenged to comply. They are forced to communicate, as outsiders, via fax or manually delivered electronic/scanned files. This limitation directly effects patient volume and satisfaction, negatively impacting bottom-line revenue. Direct messaging is a new secure method that uses Direct framework standards to enable all providers to securely send and exchange patient information. Direct messaging includes scanning and converting patient records into electronic format. This new communication method lets providers efficiently transmit referrals and transition patient care, which helps keep patients satisfied while increasing opportunities to sustain and grow revenue.
• Improving patient engagement with scanner-enabled patient portals
  Patient engagement is a critical component of Meaningful Use with specific requirements for delivering better patient care.
  • Patient Interaction: Providers must give patients easy access to their records, no matter what the original format of the documents. Patient portals make direct engagement possible and enable providers to continuously educate their patients. Meanwhile, portals enable patients to access their information in a common electronic format. 
  • Patient Processing: The client experience begins with patient processing and efficiently entering personal information into the provider’s system. Patients typically have an insurance card to scan into provider systems and they often arrive with medication lists, healthcare records and additional provider information. Timely processing upon patient arrival, including digitizing and integrating this information into a provider’s patient record system, directly impacts patients’ experience.

Solutions providers that offer high-quality, affordable hardware and software can build long-term provider-vendor relationships.

For more insight, read Kodak Alaris’ white papers, “Closing MU2 Gaps Through Direct Clinical Information Exchange” and “Providers go DIRECT to Securely Accelerate Transitions of Care & Referrals.”

The State Of The Healthcare Market: Often One Step Forward, Two Steps Back … Another Two Steps Forward …

Provider and clinician teams have made great strides to meet government-driven requirements to convert their patient record management processes from manual to electronic. Investments were made to quickly implement Electronic medical record (EMR) systems but providers face a “moving target” of changing requirements issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS). Ultimately, the government wants to gather enough data to arm providers with the information they need to proactively manage patient care needs — with the goal of reducing expensive, reactive patient care caused by delayed diagnoses and missed opportunities to shift patients to healthy lifestyles.

As an example, there was a 21 percent increase in EMR adoption by providers in 2012-2013, with a greater adoption increase expected in 2014. Access to data grows as providers continue to secure healthcare data to support predictive modeling analysis on disease, health environment, patient behavior, as well as procedure or episode costs. Efforts continue, though providers struggle to budget to meet continuing changes in Health IT mandates.

President Barack Obama has pushed for more funds in 2015 to support the cause. This creates revenue opportunities by prompting providers to understand their patient information migration strategy and supporting budgets, and to figure out the timing of their purchases. The time for VARs and ISVs to engage their provider base is now and in the months that providers submit budget requirements for the following year.

The timing couldn’t be better to engage providers given their stress and frustration to meet government mandates. Keep the conversation going, as providers’ needs and objectives will change as they achieve incremental milestones.

For more insight, read Kodak Alaris’ recent white paper, “Top 4 Benefits of Leveraging Healthcare Analytics.”

Help Your Healthcare IT Clients Discover Your Value

Remember to do your homework. Listen to the industry and your customer. Be savvy about healthcare initiatives and your customer’s specific objectives. Ask questions, and then identify solution options that address customer challenges. All sales people need to have a deep understanding of the specific issues their customers face. Thankfully, healthcare market information is at your fingertips at any given time. The challenge is distilling this information so you can respond to your customers’ needs, so you can ask relevant questions and offer the right products, software, and services to solve their problems.

Gather information from business process owners first to understand their challenges and objectives. Reach out to a chief nursing officer (CNO) or chief medical information officer (CMIO) with an approach to understand their primary 2015 objectives. Keep it simple. Be consultative in your approach. Ask for only 10 minutes of their time. Your first goal should be to listen and understand. This is a “no pitch zone.” You will likely begin to build influential relationships that take you further than cost conversations with purchasing. Help your purchasing contacts be champions by not only meeting their financial objectives but also those relevant to the provider’s business and regulatory goals.

This approach may add a step or two to your process, but the results will be priceless in establishing a trusted long-term relationship with your providers.

For more insight, please read Kodak Alaris’ recently posted educational flow infographic on how “Everything Needs to Connect in Healthcare.”