More on Financial Advisor UpdateTrading Tax Stiffs the Little GuyKass: The Animal SpiritsCramer: How to Play the Dubai Dip
Opportunity: As much as $36 billion is being allocated for healthcare providers that demonstrate the use of Electronic Health Records from the HITECH act, which is a portion of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
On paper, it’s listed as $19 Billion, but that’s after savings it assumes that will result in the $36 billion in funding.
Significance of 2010: The stimulus package that was passed has lots of funding going to physicians to demonstrate “meaningful use” of electronic health records. Many will be eligible at the physician level to receive grants up to $44,000 over a 5-year period, with payments going out starting in 2011. They need to have it implemented, and so to take advantage of that money, many will be starting the sales process very early in 2010, if they haven’t already. This means that revenues should ramp up significantly next year.
What is an EHR? EHR’s, or Electronic Health Records, are the set of documents containing a patient’s medical history and healthcare. These medical (health) records allow doctors to quickly learn about a patient and reference their past history to make good decisions.
What do these records contain?: Demographics, medical history, family history, social history, habits, immunization records, growth chart, orders, progress notes, test results, and even items that need to be monitored on a regular basis for chronic illnesses.
Electronic Medical Records: Refers to data created and held by the provider, like the hospital or physician.
Electronic Health Records: Refers to easy sharing of data between organizations.
Overall goal? With EHR’s/EMR’s, you can improve health care quality by preventing medical errors, reduce the cost of health care by increasing administrative efficiencies, decrease paperwork, and enable technologies that require these electronic records – patient discharge technologies and telehealth devices.
Does it work? What’s the catalyst this time for even more growth? Advantages: Increased quality of care, better documentation (audit trail), decreases costs, increased access to documents. Disadvantages: Questions of privacy, reliability fears, backups/disaster recovery plans, implementation/training costs, and question of ROI.
Growth Catalyst: This largest catalyst here is the stimulus funding. Physicians will be eligible to receive over $44,000 by implementing a certified solution. This should hopefully make it a good investment for healthcare providers today. In addition, with some EMR/EHR providers offering as Software As A Service solution (SaaS), the initial fears of implementation costs and backup/disaster recovery planning can be significantly decreased. These SaaS providers have already worked through those issues, and through a web interface, can offer full functionality. This also decreases the barrier to use in terms of the computer hardware required.
Who will benefit? The stimulus funds are going to create a lot of business opportunities, and if you look in the right places, even some investment opportunities. The rest of this article will be covering publicly traded companies in the electronic health/medical record space, in alphabetical order. Note: Siemens Medical (SI), GE Healthcare (GE), and MedPlus (Division of QDX) have not been listed because their EHR-specific divisions account for a small portion of their revenues.