1. ACO2C – HIMSS 2012 A Journey To The Cloud?
by Jim Bloedau of Information Advantage Group
Judging by the signage and conversations on the exhibit floor with healthcare
strategists, vendors and business leaders at the 2011 HIMSS conference this week,
it’s clear that providers are responding strongly and at various stages of success in
securing reform and meaningful use stimulus incentives from their EMR, CPOE and
HIE efforts.
What was also clear was that these new challenges were driving major enterprise IT
vendor’s and consulting group’s responses. HP’s Digital Health, Oracle’s awesome
HIE offering, Dell’s strong Healthcare program and even SAP showing a remote
monitoring collaborative eCare product shows that the market continues to heat up
under reform. New challenges for providers to plan for enhancement of their
technology capabilities has refueled the management and business consulting
services market benefiting majors like Ernst & Young, CSC, Delotte and PWC. Much
of this attention can be attributed to hospital and physician groups consolidating to offer a “point of buying
concentration” that has enough girth to attract the large IT vendors.
The more interesting booth chatter was forward thinking and centered on
post meaningful use and growing reform efforts around accountable care
(ACO) and medical home models. A key tenet of the rapidly heating ACO
model is that the patient, family caregivers, home health and non-
professional companion/domestic services participate more while
physician reimbursement has them being more patient-facing for lifetime
care rather than hospital-facing for episodic care. The problem is that
there’s no money in reform legislation for the development of ACO
infrastructure. If an ACO has enough financial girth, like a large
hospital/physician group with rudimentary infrastructure in place already
and the right zip code, then they will fair better than a smaller semi-rural
ACO that has little money for development.
A harbinger of how this problem will be solved was the high interest shown
to “the cloud as a service” - mantras that were popular…lot’s of this for
storage on the exhibit floor. We’re seeing many new cloud entrants every
day outside of healthcare…we can only imagine how many cloud startups
are in stealth for healthcare. Despite lots of talk, there were few viable
applications that were ACO and medical home focused that would offer
branded private clouds to them with integration possibilities to licensed and
non-licensed caregiver entities. What was also missing was some kind of
ground swell for mobile healthcare that supports all the hype about it for
the last couple of years. Although Meaningful Use reigns King with the
buyers, reimbursement models promise that next year in Las Vegas, we
can expect to see many marriages between the ACO, medical home and mobile tech being administered
by the cloud as the ACO2C market continues to heat up.