US health IT vendors hunt Vegas jackpot

The US health IT community has descended en masse to Las Vegas for the week long Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society exhibition and conference – HIMSS12.

The US healthcare IT industry is betting that ‘meaningful use’ – through which billions of federal dollars are being promised to family doctors and hospitals to buy and start using electronic medical records – will continue to pay off.

The concept of meaningful use was devised after US President Barack Obama promised to spend billions of pounds on medical records, as part of his attempts to kick-start the US economy.

The 2009 Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act – or HITECH – said the aim of the spending was not just the adoption of EMRs, but to get them used by providers to “achieve significant improvements in care”.

However, meaningful use has become an industry in its own right – spawning fearsomely complicated regulations and rules.

Details of the stage two criteria – the criteria the federal government says must be met to achieve incentive payments – are due imminently and are keenly anticipated.

To date, just over $3.1 billion has been paid to US healthcare providers, but this is just the tip of a total of $27 billion being targeted through Medicare and Medicaid – the publicly funded parts of the US healthcare system.

Jonathan Bush, chief executive of health IT vendor Athena Health, argues that the figures paid out so far are tiny considering the scale of the US health industry. “Meaningful use paid out just $1 billion in its first year.”

Despite the relatively small sums so far, the number of US hospitals and physician practices using EMRs is rapidly accelerating. Indeed, the numbers are dramatic.

Last week, US health and human services secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced that the number of hospitals using EMRs has more than doubled in the last two years, growing from 16% in 2009 to 35% in 2011.

According to a new survey by the American Hospital Association, some 85% of hospitals now plan to seek incentive payments through the meaningful use programme.

And according to the Centre for Medicare and Medicaid, 124,089 individual physicians, clinics and hospitals have registered for meaningful use.

This surge of activity and interest has created a turbo-charged level of activity in the electronic medical records segment of the US healthcare IT market.

Big, traditional hospital vendors like Cerner, Epic, McKesson and Meditech have all benefitted.

More innovation appears to be coming from the primary care EMR sector, where a wave of new vendors, such as eClinicalworks, now offer cloud-based EMR services.

The cloud is another big theme at HIMSS12, as is the continuing mobile revolution. There is a bewildering array of apps and services available on near ubiquitous iPhones.

But the emerging opportunity to use the vast quantities of data generated by digitised healthcare – to analyse and improve quality, productivity and performance and to create new health services – may prove the most far-reaching trend of all.

Professor Lowell Catlett, economist at New Mexico state university, told the CIO Forum the liquidity and transparency of data will spawn new services and consumer demands that will radically transform healthcare. “It’s a brave new world and its data driven.”