What Ben Rooks Sees

Is this a particularly unsettled time in the healthcare IT vendor industry, or is it just my imagination? It’s not my imagination, Ben Rooks confirms. Ben, a member of our editorial advisory board and one of the most astute observers of the vendor sphere, says he sees this as a time of “frothiness,” and indeed as a third period of time in the past two decades in which merger and acquisition activity has spiked within healthcare IT.The first period, Ben notes, happened during the mid-1990s, when the collective realization dawned on leaders (and vendors) in healthcare that other industries, notably including banking and non-healthcare insurance, were investing considerably higher percentages of their revenues on IT infrastructure, and IT, particularly clinical IT, first began to get the level of investment appropriate to operational success in healthcare. The second period was, of course, during the dot-com boom of the very late 1990s into the first couple of years of the past decade.And now, as Ben notes, there is a rapidly rising need among vendors to create capabilities for information exchange, which is helping to fuel some of the more high-profile mergers and acquisitions of late.What’s next in the vendor sphere? Ben will be contributing his annual analysis of mergers and acquisitions in the June issue of HCI.In the meantime, the deadline for vendors to submit their revenues to the Healthcare Informatics 100 process is this Friday, April 1. Please make sure your company is represented in this uniquely authoritative compendium! Just click on the link on our home page for all the details. And make sure to read Ben’s MandA analysis in the June issue, along with the HCI 100, our Most Interesting Vendors profiles, and Up and Comers!