By Austin Merritt, Softweare Advice
Microsoft Dynamics is largely present in just about every software market but medical. And they’re missing out big time. The United States healthcare IT market is growing at about 13% per year and is expected to reach $35 billion in 20111. The biggest opportunity for growth in the industry is among ambulatory care physician practices, partly due to the Stimulus Bill requiring the use of electronic health records (EHR) systems by 2015.
You would think Microsoft would be in such a promising industry, but you won’t find a Microsoft EHR available. The primary reason why is that EHRs are highly specialized, and Microsoft’s main products (Dynamics, CRM, and SharePoint) don’t come anywhere near the needs of physician practices. It would be very difficult for Microsoft to build an EHR from scratch and introduce it to the market. So what should Microsoft do to enter the industry? Acquire a current player.
Such an entry into the medical market would mimic the acquisition spree that Microsoft conducted between 2000 and 2002, when it acquired Great Plains, Navision, Damgaard, and several related vendors. These systems were re-branded and offered as Microsoft Dynamics. Before these acquisitions, Microsoft was not present in the enterprise resource planning (ERP) application market. Its only ERP presence was as an infrastructure vendor, licensing SQL Server databases and related platforms to support application rollouts. However, this lack of application presence gave competitors such as Oracle and SAP the opportunity to squeeze Microsoft out of the ERP infrastructure market by pushing Unix, Oracle databases and IBM DB2. By acquiring several applications, Microsoft was able to drive sales of its SQL Server and Windows Servers directly, in addition to the Dynamics applications themselves. This strategy proved effective in giving Microsoft a multi-billion dollar share of the lucrative ERP market.
Setting its sights on the medical market, Microsoft is starting to squeeze its way in with a few smaller acquisitions and developments of its own, mainly Amalga and HealthVault. However, these current medical offerings are on the periphery of the market and do not really target the sweet spot: electronic health records for physician practices. An intelligent acquisition of a large EHR player would provide a key piece of the puzzle for Microsoft’s entry into the medical market.
Acquired by Microsoft in 2006, the Amalga family of products (Hospital Information Systems, Life Sciences, and Unified Intelligence System) addresses hospital administration, data aggregation for biotechnology firms, and information connectivity to large enterprises. Microsoft may be planning to expand Almaga’s presence or may be looking to acquire another vendor to complement it. Regardless of Microsoft’s strategy, Amalga still would not address the physician practice EHR market.
On the other end of the spectrum, HealthVault is a patient-managed, centralized health records solution. It is essentially designed to be a reference point for consumers, not a substitute for medical records. If Microsoft were able to introduce an EHR to the market and enable its users to make records accessible to patients, labs, specialists and pharmacies via HealthVault, then they would really be on to something. This synergy with its other products would just be an added bonus to having its own EHR.
So what would Microsoft prioritize as its key acquisition criteria when evaluating EHR targets? They would certainly want target vendors who possess the following:
- Large market share and name brand recognition. Microsoft usually likes to be the largest name in the business, so they would definitely want to sell a “big-name” system with which most buyers are already familiar.
- A scalable product for small and large practices. Microsoft would need to be able to cover a wide range of medical customers. While its bread and butter is always in the small and mid-size market, they would want scalability into the largest organizations.
- A .Net architecture to drag along infrastructure sales. Reinforcing the position of .Net in the medical software marketplace would be important because it would drive further sales of Microsoft infrastructure while squeezing out Unix, Oracle and IBM.
- An established, indirect sales channel. Microsoft historically favors selling through partners, including the existing Dynamics dealer network. An EHR vendor with a large dealer network would provide Microsoft an easily transferable sales channel and process.
So which EHR vendor should Microsoft acquire? This is where it starts to get interesting. We decided to examine Microsoft’s ten most logical targets in detail. Two very popular products, GE Healthcare’s Centricity and McKesson’s Practice Partner, did not make the top ten list. While these systems meet many criteria, the parent companies – General Electric and McKesson – are not really acquirable by Microsoft. The remaining ten are outlined below.
www.softwareadvice.com/medical/electronic-medical-record-software-comparison/
