With HIMSS10 now officially in the books, it’s time to switch gears and return to the projects and assignments that were put on hold for the conference. But before that can happen, it’s important to do a proper post-mortem, which entails reaching out to the people you met with, filing all of the press releases and media kits you collected, and sorting through your notes for any particularly newsworthy or otherwise useful information.
This year, I didn’t have to do much sorting. The session I attended featuring KLAS’ Kent Gale and HIMSS Analytics’ Dave Garets (KLAS and HIMSS Analytics Speak Out: What's Real and What Isn’t?) was full of great information. For those who weren’t able to attend, I thought I’d share some of the many tidbits that were discussed in the session, where the two industry experts identified and discussed key market trends using data from their respective organizations.
In comparing the top vendors, Gale, founder and chairman of the board at Orem, Utah-based KLAS, shared the following:
· Most physicians doing inpatient CPOE — Cerner, 27 percent (Eclipsys, Siemens and Epic also had a strong showing)
· Best scores for physician ease of use went to Eclipsys and Epic
· Highest likelihood of community physicians adopting CPOE — Epic, 62 percent (Cerner and Siemens also scored high marks)
· Products being used most by standalone community hospitals moving to CPOE — CPSi and Meditech
· Highest consultant ratings across the board — CSC
· Across all vendors, about 220 of about 6,000 hospitals have “deep CPOE.”
Garets, president and CEO of HIMSS Analytics (Chicago), focused on broader adoption trends, revealing the following:
· At the end of 2009, 52 percent of organizations were increasing their IT operating budgets, while 28 percent were decreasing the IT budget
· 41 percent of organizations are currently live on bar-coding
· 61 percent of academic medical centers have adopted CPOE, compared to 22 percent of community hospitals
· 84 percent of organizations have a clinical data repository
· In 2009, 39 hospitals had achieved Stage 7, and 86 had earned Stage 6 status according to HIMSS Analytics.
Garets also shared what he believes will be key market opportunities in the healthcare IT space during the next year:
· Having a solid infrastructure in place
· Privacy and security solutions
· Data warehousing, data mining and business intelligence
· EMRs (that are easy to use)
· Revenue cycle applications (ICD-10 should be a much higher priority than it is)
· Creating HIEs
CIOs and others in leadership positions should take note — if anyone knows what’s “real” and what isn’t, it’s Gale and Garets.
