Look Who Turns Up When A Big Bucket of Money is On Offer!

This appeared a day or so ago.

August 5, 2010, 11:00 am

I.B.M.’s Strategy in Electronic Health Records

By STEVE LOHR

I.B.M. has been quietly saying for months that it planned to enter the market for electronic health records, a business being primed with hefty government subsidies.

The only question has been how Big Blue, a company geared to deal with big corporations, would cater to the messy, fragmented market of physicians.

I.B.M. provided its answer Thursday morning. It’s not going in alone, but as a technology partner. The offering will be a Web-based subscription service, but enhanced by I.B.M. data-mining technology and tweaked by the scientists in its research labs. And I.B.M. is going into electronic health records selectively, and not yet marketing to small practices with just a few doctors.

I.B.M.’s partner is a subsidiary of the insurer Aetna, ActiveHealth Management, which makes disease management software and personal health records. ActiveHealth will provide the user record and decision support technology, while I.B.M. provides the cloud computing services and data-intelligence technology.

The offering will tap I.B.M. researchers for advanced features like matching patients to specialists with the best measured record of results for similar patients.

Physicians will not have to install new software in their offices. It will run on computers in I.B.M. data centers and be accessed by doctors with a Web browser on personal computers. They will pay monthly fees for the service, from several hundred dollars to nearly $1,000 per doctor, I.B.M. says, depending on the number of physicians in a medical group and on what features they use.

“This is our first software-as-service play in clinical health care,” said Robert Merkel, vice president for health care in I.B.M.’s global business services unit.

Full story here:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/05/i-b-m-s-strategy-in-electronic-health-records/

This is the downstream effect of having a funded, sensible e-Health strategy. The private sector will work to provide attractive offerings and roll them out pronto.

Enough said!

David.