Panel: Vendors talk health IT business

BOSTON—Increased adoption of health IT products is resulting in an abundance of healthcare data and patient information that could help to transform the healthcare industry, but providers are still unsure of what exactly they’re supposed to do with it. A panel of representatives from health IT vendors spoke at the 2012 Harvard Business School Healthcare Conference to talk about what they’re doing.

The population is aging and healthcare reform will result in many more insured patients, which means that the healthcare industry will have to do more with less, noted panel moderator Tom McKinley, MS, MBA, of Cardinal Partners, a venture capital firm in Princeton, N.J. He asked the health IT vendor employees what they’re doing to help.

“We’re focused on the physician as a customer,” said Robert L. Cosinuke, chief marketing officer for athenahealth, a health IT vendor headquartered in Watertown, Mass.

Although athenahealth will shortly change its pricing model, Cosinuke said that his company has implemented IT systems in providers' offices for free and make a profit by collecting a percentage of the claims they file each year.

“As they do better, we do better,” he said. “It makes doctors feel like we’ve got their back and doctors get paid for doing the right thing. That seems to be a value proposition that is motivational in the marketplace.”

Cosinuke added that part of the difficulty attracting customers, though, is that the healthcare market doesn’t operate like other markets, observing that the internet can’t be used in the same way as it is in other markets and the exchange and sale of data in healthcare is often illegal.

McKinley wondered how the smaller health IT companies were able to get their message out in a market that is already occupied by a lot of big players spending big money. Graham Gardner, MD, MBA, CEO of data management company Kyruus in Boston, responded that his company uses capital to penetrate markets and he also said the healthcare industry's propensity to delay has allowed smaller health IT companies time to catch up. “Healthcare is always behind, so other industries have provided a road map,” he said.

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