Will Silicon Valley lead health care's next revolution -- or miss it? <\/p>\n
Reuters. <\/p>\n
(Editor's Note: the following commentary was co-authored with Tory Wolff, a founding partner of Recon Strategy, a healthcare strategy consulting firm in Boston.) <\/p>\n
Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors have never quite been able to figure out health, and they know it. <\/p>\n
For years, the clever technology fixes dreamed up by engineers have largely failed to take hold, their well-conceived rationality no match for the complexity of medical care, the persistence of clinical habit, and the counter-intuitive impact of existing incentives. Many of the Valley's most audacious VCs have become leery of the space, electing instead to pursue innovation elsewhere. <\/p>\n
The new battlefield is on the technologists' home turf: information systems for electronic medical records (EMRs). Will this time be different? Are technology entrepreneurs finally ready to disrupt medicine? <\/p>\n
Here's the context (please see our last commentary, available here, for more details). Most of the nation's largest and most prestigious medical centers seem headed towards a relatively closed health information system, driven by a single dominant private company, Wisconsin-based Epic, which excels at the near-flawless, customized installation of their client-server platform in big hospitals. <\/p>\n
While Epic is meticulously working its way through the largest hospitals, the long tail of stand-alone ambulatory practices operate largely on a jumbled mess of EMRs, using many emerging vendors (such as AthenaHealth and PracticeFusion) with a multi-tenant model, similar to salesforce.com. <\/p>\n
Since medical care as a whole is consolidating, the basic question is whether emerging EMR vendors will gain enough traction and offer enough capability to enable stand-alone practices to remain independent. Or will platform fragmentation put unaffiliated practices at such a competitive disadvantage that they'll be even more motivated to join up with larger hospital systems (the most important of which will rely upon Epic)? <\/p>\n
What makes Epic particularly interesting is that its success seems to fly in the face of how so many of us -- Silicon Valley technologists in particular - have come to view innovation; it also contrasts with the much-celebrated, widely accepted strategy of open innovation. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Read more:<\/p>\n
Is One Company About to Lock Up the Electronic Medical Records Market?<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Will Silicon Valley lead health care's next revolution -- or miss it? Reuters. Continue reading