March 3, 2008

1. HIMSS Fills Orlando with Non-Mouse Ear Wearing Tourists

Facts and Background

The HIMSS Annual Conference & Exhibition concluded its five-day run at Orlando's Orange County Convention Center Thursday, beating its previous record attendance by nearly 15% and featuring 900 exhibitors.

Opinion

Gripes aside, the ultimate vote of confidence is attandance and it's tough to argue with over 28,000 signing up for one conference. Despite the fact that the conference is so huge that each attendee probably had an unrelated experience from everyone else, it's still a good investment of time and money and the numbers prove it.

Musings

• Booths had a little less silliness, it seems, although that still left plenty.
• Attendance numbers aren't quite apples to apples, as HIMSS offered some lower-cost day passes to draw in locals.
• The usually rosy go-go Leadership Survey had much less optimistic results this year, as hospitals are obviously struggling to implement all the clinical systems they bought over the past few years and are hitting a wall on available capital and operating funds for IT. That's the most under-told story of the conference, one that vendors won't be happy to hear (or see).
• Chicago will be more expensive, more congested, and less family-friendly than the usual HIMSS cities. Plus, April conflicts with a lot more events than February and the convention show trade unions there are notoriously uncooperative. So other than for the convenience of HIMSS employees to hold a conference in their own town, why Chicago?
• HIMSS09 will kick off Sunday morning, with apparently no concern about those who attend church or don't travel on Saturday for religious reasons.
• HIMSS has several keynote speakers at each conference, most of them entirely forgettable slick politicians, businesspeople, or B-list celebrities who deliver the same uninspiring talk-for-hire speech that everybody else gets. Attendance at those sessions seems to reflect lack of interest. Maybe the idea of shutting everything down to herd a small percentage of folks to see Dana Carvey or Barbara Bush has run its course and that time slot could be better used for more real education, which seems to take a back seat to the exhibition hall when HIMSS makes the schedules.
• Cerner's decision to pull out of the HIMSS09 exhibition is a wake-up call, either because (a) the HIMSS show atmosphere needs to change as vendors do, or (b) vendors aren't getting their money's worth. It will be interesting to see what changes between now and then. The HIMSS spin-meisters will be out in force to protect their cash cow.

2. Eclipsys Gulps Down a Cool EPSi

Facts and Background

Eclipsys announced Monday that it has acquired St. Louis-based Enterprise Performance Systems, Inc., a vendor of budgeting, productivity, and contract management software.

Opinion

Good acquisition, provided Eclipsys can do a better job with EPSi than it did with Transition Systems (TSI), which went from market leader to trivia question following its acquisition and subsequent ignoring by Eclipsys.

Musings

• Too bad Eclipsys waited until everyone forgot of them as a decision support systems vendor before once again buying their way into that market.
• Eclipsys paid $53 million for a company doing what appears to be about $10 million a year in sales. Seems a bit rich.
• EPSi has stellar KLAS scores, but it's not exactly a competitive market with just three vendors listed.
• As hospitals are forced to get serious about financial performance and capital rationing again, the timing by Eclipsys is perfect, getting in early in the pendulum's swing back from clinical systems focus.
• The only doubts aren't about EPSi's products, they are instead based on how Eclipsys will package and present their offering given their focus on a small number of large academic medical centers that are the traditional sweet spot for Sunrise.
• There doesn't really seem to be much synergy here, although clients still stuck on TSI finally have a same-company alternative.

3.  Cleveland Rocks Google Health

Facts and Background

Google Inc. finally acknowledged its healthcare ambitions with a brief demonstration of the long-awaited Google Health by Chairman Eric Schmidt at the HIMSS conference on Thursday. The company announced partnerships with several organizations to provide content and interoperability, including Cleveland Clinic and its MyChart personal health record by Epic Systems.

Opinion

While it took longer than expected to get to this point, Google works fast once announcements are made. Microsoft, Revolution Health, and everybody else will be relegated to second-tier status of history is any indication.

Musings

• Google says it won't sell ads on Google Health immediately, but there's zero doubt it will happen soon since that's the company's entire revenue model and there's actually value to users if privacy concerns related to targeted advertising can be overcome (like by paying users to see the ads, which hasn't been mentioned but which could happen).
• Nobody beats Google on ease of use and Google Health's user interface shames those of its competitors, although the current version also has limited capabilities.
• Google Health was announced, but was it launched? Not really.
• The key point that Google needs to address: will doctors look at the data so carefully hoarded by their patients? If not, nothing else matters because it won't be worth maintaining.
• Google says its strategy is "launch and iterate," which is smart.
• Google Health Advisory Council is mostly high-profile, non-practicing physicians who work in industry, seemingly chosen because of the star power vs. capable but lesser known counterparts, not necessarily all physicians, who actually see patients and deliver care.
• Most fascinating is the hint that Google Health will allow easy uploading and downloading of medical information to and from EMR systems, allowing consumers to serve as a human interface between disconnected systems via their Google Health storage.

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