Best of the Best: Analyzing the leaders in Healthcare

Welcome everybody to another Health Care Bear blog post! This month, I've been looking at industry award winners in healthcare in an effort to find the best use cases of technology and identify patterns between them that could be emulated for other healthcare systems.

For the purposes of my research, I have analyzed three of the HIMSS Davies Enterprise Award winners based on their use of IT (primarily EHR implementations.) These are (in no particular order: Children's Health System of Texas (Children's), Texas Health Resources (THR) and the University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics (UIHC.) To make it a little easier, I am focusing on US based healthcare systems as healthcare structures vary greatly from country to country. These are a few of the key notes from my research:

1. UIHC absolutely dominated against the other two chosen hospitals by achieving not only the most ROI ($103.6m (159%)) of the three but also invested the least to achieve this ($65.30m), which is incredible.
2. Even if UIHC hadn't received Government incentives, it still would have achieved 104% ROI, mainly due to the financial benefits of integrating monitoring devices which reaped $37.16m (36% of total ROI.)
3. Both Children's and THR have a common IS Vendor Selection Strategy in that they are looking to migrate towards a single vendor approach. UIHC however is looking to migrate toward best of suite/cluter throughout its organization. What is interesting is that this approach is also taken by the top 3 most profitable healthcare systems of America*.
4. The same pattern arises as UIHC is the only hospital not stated as having a Health Information Exchange (HIE) / Regional Health Information Organization (RHIO) initiative either planned or in use.
5. The number of IT vendors these hospitals deal with is staggering with 70 listed between the three chosen for this research. Considering two of them are looking to reduce the number of vendors, this could lead to significant vendor landscape consolidation.

That's it for now folks! Many thanks for staying tuned and as always, I'd love to hear your feedback in the comments below and if you liked this post, please spread the word via social media and finally check out my earlier blog posts. Ciao for now!

* Top 3 most profitable healthcare systems of America selected through the ownership of the top 20 most profitable hospitals of America.

Best Regards,

Jonathan Cordwell
Research Analyst, Healthcare Strategy
ResearchNetwork, CSC

1. HIMSS Enterprise Davies Award Recipients, http://www.himss.org/resourcelibrary/TopicList.aspx?MetaDataID=2803

Dell's Competitive Advantage in Prescriptive Analytics

Hello there and welcome to another blog post by the Health Care Bear! I've recently been looking at Dell's position in the Healthcare industry and one talking point that stood out for me was its strategy and focus on prescriptive analytics. As we all know, IBM is at the forefront of the analytics space with Watson but it looks as though Dell is looking to nibble into that market so I thought I'd write a few words on what I've come across during my research and how Dell has a competitive advantage in this area. As always, I'd love to hear what you have to say so please leave your comments below and share this on social media with your friends and colleagues. Let's begin...

1. Analytics relies on a lot of data: You may be wondering why I included the image at the top as we're not talking about the cloud at the moment. The reason I included this was because of the factoid that Dell manages over 6 billion diagnostic image objects in the cloud, which covers 7% of the US Population (these stats are from 2013 so have likely increased since.) This is a huge competitive differentiator as the larger the data set, the greater the analytical potential. As Dell considers the US Provider market as its largest and most fruitful, it would make sense to focus on this and build up its repository which will simultaneously add potency to its analytical offerings.
2. Growing ability to speak to the business: Traditionally, Dell has struggled to shake off the perception of being purely IT focused and so usually finds itself speaking to the IT department. A vendor is able to culture much stronger and longer client relationships if it can speak to the business value of the solution it is putting forward. Although this is currently one of Dell's weaknesses, it's interesting to note that its partnership with Deloitte could assist in this area as they will be able to capitalize on each others' strengths and this will help Dell take more of a consulting approach, thereby selling into the business. If it can properly articulate the business value of the prescriptive analytics it is selling, this will increase its win:loss ratio.
3. Dell has a solid network of partners: The chart below, although from 2011, shows that Dell is partnering with some of the most influential players in Healthcare at this time. When you also add its more recent partnership with CGI, which focuses on cloud solutions, security solutions and vertical-specific analytics, it's easy to see that it is well positioned to not only capitalize on the amount of data at its disposal but also bring in partners' capabilities to expand the possibilities of what can be done with this data.

That's it for today folks, I sincerely hope you've enjoyed this blog post and look forward to hearing from you!

Best Regards,

Jonathan Cordwell
Research Analyst, Healthcare Strategy
ResearchNetwork, CSC

1. Dell, Future Ready Healthcare IT Programs, 2013, http://www.slideshare.net/dellenterprise/futureready-healthcase-it-platforms-get-to-the-cloud
2. Dell, Healthcare ISV Alliance Program, 2011, http://www.slideshare.net/ericvanthoff/dell-healthcare-isv-emea-alliance-program-11601716