Editor’s Note: Each year, Healthcare Informatics ranks the 100 vendors with the highest revenues derived from healthcare IT products and services earned in the U.S. based on revenue information from the previous year. This year, however, for the first time ever, vendors were also asked to estimate the percentage of revenue earned in all of their product segments. For the vendors that filled out the product revenue data, those percentages were displayed in pie chart form within each listing.
Beyond presenting the product segment revenues in each company listing, Healthcare Informatics editors wanted to further breakdown the top revenue earners in each of our seven segments: Financial Information Systems, Clinical Information Systems, Data Analytics, Data Management, Data Security, Data Exchange, and Consulting Services.
Throughout the next several days, Healthcare Informatics will reveal its top 5 companies by revenue—based on percentage of total health IT revenue—within these seven different categories. Serving as a supplement to the broader Healthcare Informatics 100 list, we hope that this data, along with the brief content that accompanies it, gives you our readers, a greater sense into the latest market trends within each of these respective product categories.
All data has been sent to Healthcare Informatics from the vendors themselves and confirmed by each company.
Taking a look at the data management vendor market, Shaman Akhtar, senior advisor with Naperville, Ill.-based healthcare consulting firm Impact Advisors, foresees a strong demand for legacy data management expertise. In 2015, the mergers and acquisition activity grew by 22 percent and nearly 1,420 hospitals were still using a legacy electronic medical record (EMR) that the vendor no longer supported, Akhtar says.
“From these numbers, we can safely assume, that for the next three to five years as organizations get ready to implement new EMRs and as these mergers get executed, the industry will demand expertise in the legacy data management area,” he says.
As organizations plan for implementation of a new EMR, one of the essential decisions is around legacy data and how it should be managed.
“Legacy data management strategies ideally need to encompass three distinct areas: electronic data conversion, manual data abstraction, and legacy data archiving. All three serve a different purpose and require extensive planning as well as focused and timely execution,” he says.
Effective management of legacy data is critical to minimizing the disruption of an EMR replacement and ensuring the transition does not jeopardize patient safety. For example, Akhtar notes, important patient data such as allergies and medications need to be brought into the new EMR, and in a structured forma, so decision support alerts will trigger properly. And, an appropriate amount of lab and radiology results need to be accessible at the point of care without clinicians having to toggle between multiple systems.
“The area of legacy data management is usually an after-thought for most executive leadership. A clear vision and strategy needs to be crafted to consolidate the systems. In addition, organizations must think about how legacy data can be managed to encourage utilization of the new system, reduce any disruptions in the transition process and be more cost effective,” he says.
Bharat Rao, Ph.D., national leader for healthcare and life sciences data analytics, at KPMG LLP, a New York City-based audit, tax and advisory firm, also notes that as healthcare delivery organizations increasingly leverage data analytics platforms, specifically reporting and business intelligence tools, organizations will need data warehouses that do more than just collect data.
“Vendor specific warehouses are not as good at giving back the analytics to make it useful,” Rao says.
Rather, Rao advocates the use of clinical data warehouses that can pull in information from multiple sources and “acts in a truly interoperable fashion.”
Top 5 Data Management Vendors
| Vendor | Product Breakout Revenue | % Of Whole Revenue |
|---|---|---|
| Hyland | $155,669,672 | 100% |
| Change Healthcare | $132,937,470 | 9% |
| Softheon | $100,000,000 | 25% |
| Lexmark Healthcare | $67,200,000 | 40% |
| Kronos Incorporated | $61,600,000 | 20% |
