The Rise of Healthcare Solution Companies

Today, in the world of Healthcare and Information Technology there are a huge number of small companies that are entering the competition, now -- as a matter of fact, these so called 'small healthcare technology companies' have been much more successful than these large non-industry-specific technology companies and specifically in addressing the the issues related to the industry-specific needs of healthcare.

In the years leading up until this present day, there are many examples around us where we saw that the large and the better known technology organizations -- those that had invested in the Health Information Technology market with high expectations ended up hitting up bad values such as low sales, low revenues, negative investment returns that displayed their inability to capture the right mindset required to take a lead in this market. These large organizations, with the help of the newly integrated technology industry began to build the so called Healthcare Solutions and began selling them, in the present day there are many companies that provide Custom Healthcare Solutions which are totally customized to the clients needs, this change is the change that brought in a new wave of clients than before, if you did want such software solutions, there were a defined set of them from which you had to choose, there was no way to provide better features even if you wanted to this all changed with the aid of HIT.

The interesting part of this all is the way these different organizations put forth their approach and ideas on the subject of the application, the solution and the addressing of the business and clinical challenges in healthcare. Today, the solutions such as Electronic Medical Records (EMR's), Health Information Exchanges (HIE) and as of most recently, Enterprise Business Intelligence Solutions more commonly known as Business Intelligence (BI).

These Healthcare Solution Companies also provide Custom Medical Solutions that include the likes of EMR's and EHR's now since we are on the subject of things such as EMR's we can say that the key to a successful and well run medical practice is the bedrock to understand that being efficient and effective is an important factor for patient care. The present-day medical practices are shifting away from the outdated paper charts and are heading towards technologies such as Electronic Records and Patient Portals. So in a nutshell, the Electronic Health Records (EHR) software is nothing but a digital file cabinet or digital storage per se for patient charts. It is used for the storage of the patient's medical history, medications, lab results, treatment plans, and even patient billing information in a centralized database.

The reports created by these EMR's use a kind of unique algorithm which takes some factors of each product into consideration such as the active customer count, active user count, the social presence. These 'Active Customers' are defined as organizations that license the product these can range anywhere from practices, hospitals, etc, and 'Active Users' as medical professionals who access the system, these include doctors, nurses, office staff, etc. These software solutions are highly customizable and gives the user the opportunity to reach out to all the companies that listed in the EMR's software directory database and gives the option to request the required information.

The implementation of medical solutions such as an EMR has been the top-most discussed topic since it is known to give a huge boost to the components such as medical practices’ productivity, quality of care that is given to patients, the job satisfaction and last but not the least, customer satisfaction.

Coming back to the topic of Healthcare Solution Companies, let’s talk about why these large tech organizations struggle in Healthcare and what sets the success of small organizations apart from the giants.

1) Impatience – Healthcare is a industry where one has to be heedful, caution is the number one priority but that does not always go well with patience for some companies. The sale cycles here are long, and a lot of buyers will make a purchase only if there is a good return on investment. Meanwhile the smaller, healthcare focused organizations, that are run by leadership are have inherently lower overhead, are usually run by leadership that really understands the industry, and have the awareness to set realistic expectations for growth in their chosen segment.

2) De-focusing of Brand – A large technology company usually has a business unit that would understand healthcare and is assigned to focus on the vertical requirements of their customers. Here is where the problem arises, these business units are still a part of the larger company and this larger company is not really interested in this segment until and unless there is a large volume of products and service deals across their brand landscape. The focus (and control) is spread across multiple brands within the company, such as storage, servers, and system-level software and services. This is a domain that is more easy to contain in a smaller company.

3) Deal Structure – The big companies, the ones that have specially diversified themselves across multiple industries, have a very systematic and structured sales and contracting process, these processes are really difficult to change once they're set, they take a long time to work through, and may cause considerable pain and a feeling of dismay for their customers. Development of structures is simple to understand as the company grow to an extremely large size and then cannot otherwise exert control across a large and global organization. Now the smaller companies have a benefit due to their size and a strong understanding of the healthcare industry which they can apply to able to react to the changing dynamics of the industry and provide the required flexibility the customers may need.

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