July, 2003
Volume I, Issue 9

News

Health industry experts are warning of a "meltdown," but it has nothing to do with this summer's heat.

With the Oct. 16 HIPAA electronic transaction and code set mandates less than 90 days away, many are predicting serious problems. According to a July 18 press release from Milliman, a "great number of payers and providers...are seriously behind on their implementation process...many vendors claim they can handle the situation when in reality they can't."

To learn more about the Milliman study contact the author John Phelan.

What are the public relations opportunities as the deadline approaches?

Companies that have solutions to offer to physicians, hospitals or employers can obtain coverage in several ways. Rather then simply announcing "our products are compliant," it is better to spell-out what the new regs mean for your customers or market segment (e.g. physicians).

For example, one of our clients warned physicians about the dangers of reverting to paper claims to avoid the new electronic standards.

Editors are now looking for interviews with CEOs who can discuss the implications of the regs and bylined articles that analyze HIPAA and the need for new standards.

A good place to keep on top of HIPAA developments is Health Data Management's online HIPAA news page.

Trends

A new report from Forrester says we are in the middle of a healthcare IT "smackdown" that will "wring out weaker players."

According to the report by Forrester analyst Eric G. Brown, "As giants Siemens Medical Solutions and GE Medical Systems storm the industry, vendors like Misys, QuadraMed, Eclipsys, and even Cerner will feel the heat. Larry Ellison's bid for PeopleSoft is an alert to core application vendors in any industry: Mature markets only leave room at the top for three."

"Vertical integration has run rampant in the healthcare industry...as hospitals trim their IT supplier list and tame integration costs."

Another point of view is discussed in an article in the June issue of Health Data Management, titled "The Main Event: Best-of-Breed vs. Single-Source."

The article notes that while McKesson, Siemens and Cerner have announced many new sales recently, "some of the CEOs of large health care organizations...are not convinced that those three have a full suite of products they can deliver."

In any case it is critical for healthcare IT companies to engage in a strategic marketing effort. An effective media relations campaign should be a key part of the effort. Your PR firm should be actively placing articles that position your company and your products as cost-effective solutions.

Industry Insight

"The classic answer when (a computer) goes wrong is to reset or reboot and start again. This solution has worked so far, but very soon it's not gong to work for, say, devices in houses. It won't be clear, what to reboot...there is no PC that is the center, there is no central server to which everything is connected."

"Everything is spread around and soon they will be talking to each other. There will be times when you touch something in one room and it adversely affects something in another room."

"Engineers (didn't ) think about failure-detecting systems before the Internet (because) systems were very well engineered - the telephone network, for example. AT&T understood its behavior and owned the whole system. Now, no one owns the whole system - it is too big, it is too distributed."

"We're just starting (on technology to address this). How can grandma use this (new) system? Does she find the IP address of the telephone and delete it? No, she's not going to do that."

--from "When Rebooting is Not an Option: a Q&A with MIT computer scientist Larry Rudolph," in Technology Review, July 16, 2003.

Resources

If you liked the above excerpt, you can subscribe to the magazine, published by MIT, for $28. MIT also has available a free online publication, Emerging Technologies Newsletter. It includes short synopses of stories from the magazine and other sources. While the newsletter is not focused on healthcare, it does include many stories that impact the industry.

To subscribe, go to the Technology Review home page and click on the "free newsletter" box on the upper right.

The publishers of online magazine Bio-IT World have introduced a new publication, Health-IT World, a twice-weekly electronic newsletter that gives five or six news and analysis stories on industry issues. While focusing on the hardware and device world, it also has many stories on software and data management issues.

To subscribe go to the publication home page.

You are welcome to forward this publication to other public relations professionals for noncommercial use.

© 2003 Westside Public Relations. All Rights Reserved.