HIMSS: Dell, Perot Systems Unleash Health Care IT Salvo

Dell and solution provider Perot Systems (2008 VARBusiness 500 No. 35) announced a partnership Monday to provide products and services to the health-care IT industry, including virtualized desktops, servers, storage and electronic medical records (EMR) either on-premise, hosted off-site or in secure private clouds.

According to a Dell press statement, released at the Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society (HIMSS) conference in Chicago, the solutions include mobile clinical computing, a virtual server platform, virtual EMR offerings and virtual medical archiving storage for data management.

"The role technology plays in shaping the future of health care around the globe has never been as important as it is today with medical professionals and government leaders looking for ways to improve the quality of health care and reduce its cost to citizens, employers and government," said Dr. James Coffin, vice president and general manager of Dell's Healthcare and Life Sciences Group, in a statement. "Our partnership with Perot Systems is focused on developing new solutions and delivering them in new ways to improve delivery of health care and patient outcomes."

"In the current environment, clients are seeking solutions which improve services while reducing expenses," added Chuck Lyles, president of Perot's Healthcare Group. "With the combined capabilities of Dell and Perot Systems, these virtual solutions will increase user satisfaction and ease administration effort while reducing cost and preserving capital."

Among other offerings unveiled at HIMSS were the Dell Mobile Clinical Computing Solution, which enables physician access to patient records from any terminal using smart cards, and the Workspace Corporate piece of Symantec's Endpoint Virtualization Suite.

Finally, Dell, of Round Rock, Texas, launched a social networking site called IdeaStorm for Healthcare and LifeSciences -- a site whose home page asks users to "Give us your ideas on how to improve the efficiency of health care using IT solutions."

Dell's original IdeaStorm community was launched in February 2007 and, according to Dell, has yielded more than 300 actionable ideas out of 11,000 suggestions.

"These partnerships, solutions and tools demonstrate the benefits of organizing our company around specific customer segments," said Frank Muehleman, vice president and general manager of Dell's North America Business Group, in a statement. "We are listening to our health-care and life sciences customers and developing specific solutions to meet both their technology and budget needs."

Dell also confirmed it is partnering with EMR vendor eClinical Works and Walmart-owned Sam's Club for a solution tailored to small medical practices. The solution combines eClinical Works' EMR, patient portal, e-prescribing and other health-care-specific solutions with Dell tablet and desktop PCs. Wal-Mart originally mentioned that partnership last month.