The 2017 Healthcare Informatics 100 Product Breakouts: Data Management

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 is what makes up the Healthcare Informatics 100 (THE 100). And for the second straight year, as part of THE 100 questionnaire, vendors were also asked to estimate the percentage of revenue earned in each of their product segments.

Beyond presenting the product segment revenues in each company listing, Healthcare Informatics editors took to further breaking down 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 within these seven different categories. Serving as a supplement to the broader Healthcare Informatics 100 list, we hope that this data, along with the 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.

Top 5 Data Management Vendors by Revenue

Increased regulations, consumerism and the need to drive down healthcare costs are all factors driving the increasing use of healthcare data, coupled with an explosion of electronic health data following the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act and Meaningful Use requirements.

“The HITECH Act EMR-ified America, and then you have the move from ICD-9 to ICD-10, which is creating far more granular and detailed data than ever before. And, then you have genomics and the other devices, we are getting data from Fitbits, so there is data, data everywhere,” says Bharat Rao, Ph.D., principal, lead data and analytics group, healthcare and life sciences at KPMG, a New York City-based audit, tax and advisory firm.

Patient care organization leaders now have a critical need to effectively capture, store, access, normalize and use data to drive actionable insights to improve both business operations and patient care, Rao says.

“A few years ago, there was this mantra, ’Get the EMRs in and we’re done.’ So, you’ve put the EMRs in and now what do you have is a lot of data, and you don’t know what to do with it. Now the provider organizations are asking themselves, ‘What other data do I need about the patient? How do I capture it?’ The second piece is, ‘How do I analyze the data? And, what are the tools I need to mine that data?’ Getting more data isn’t going to help unless you can harness it, analyze it, and actually get down to those one or two key insights, not 50 pages of charts, that you can use to drive business decisions and for managing populations.”

As patient care organizations delve into population health management initiatives this is driving the need to be able to seamlessly access and share a patient’s data across the continuum of care. Rao says there is an opportunity for healthcare organization leaders to move beyond traditional data warehouses to a more fluid system for capturing, storing and analyzing data. “There is really an opportunity for a data warehouse 2.0,” he says.

What’s more, Rao sees smaller hospitals with limited IT departments as an underserved market and a potential opportunity for product and services vendors in the data management space.  “I think their needs are relatively less complex than that of an academic medical center. I think there’s a real opportunity, not just for data management, but a managed services opportunity; ‘We’ll manage your data, your back end, your reporting, billing.” And for those smaller hospitals, that saves them cost as they don’t have to run a large IT department or have to constantly fight for talent. I think some of those hospitals are coming to the conclusion that if there is a cheaper, cloud-based opportunity, where they can be sure their data is secure and they have access that is seamless, that’s a real opportunity.” Rao adds, “So data management as a service. The traditional way is that everybody has their own IT department, IT systems, their own CIOs. I think data management as a service is an emerging need in which people haven’t realized that there is a better way to do this.”