Getting To The Heart Of The Matter

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First things first: Health care isn't recessionproof. If you're a solution provider eyeing the vertical with that perception -- or with the idea that the business of selling into health care is anything less than a twisted, complex and often unmanageable tangle of opportunities -- you may wind up among the scores of VARs who step in and out of health care every year, disillusioned by regulatory compliance, bureaucracy, legacy systems, everything.

But there may not be a better time to build your health-care practice than right now. The $787.2 billion federal stimulus package promises huge opportunities for health-care modernization and IT upgrades, especially with regard to electronic medical records (EMRs). And while the health-care segment is not immune to recessionary conditions, it is better equipped to weather the economic climate than most any other, based on the care needs of an aging baby-boomer population alone.

"This is really an unprecedented investment in bringing health information online across the country," said Marian Lowe, senior vice president for federal health policy at lobbying firm Strategic Health Care, during a seminar this past spring for health care-oriented VARs put on by distributor Westcon Group. "The government is making a very strong policy statement to support the adoption of EMR. They believe very strongly that technology will promote improvements in quality care, improve coordination of care across providers and generate systemwide savings."

"We're getting the perfect storm," said Pam Markle, senior markets manager at distributor Ingram Micro. "The feds want to get really good at standards so that EMR can be moved nationally across the U.S. Without standards, you're going to have these little silos of health-care communities. And now with the stimulus, there's incentive for all health-care providers to come on board."

"Health care is a moving target," added Todd Stewart, director of health-care technology solutions for InfoLogix, a Hatboro, Pa.-based solution provider. "I don't want to be held speculating on what it will do, but it's always moving in an upward direction. People will always get sick."

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 provides health-care technology-relevant funding through direct provisions to providers, money to states to establish state grant and loan programs and money to federal agencies, such as the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), to distribute dollars through federal grants. Some of the best resources for VARs remain www.grants.gov and www.recovery.gov -- federal sites that chart the flow of stimulus dollars to grants, statespecific opportunities and other buckets where VARs can look.

In health care, ARRA, at least theoretically, leaves no stone unturned (see chart, page 56). It impacts HHS, other federal agencies like the Social Security Administration, Department of Defense and Veterans Affairs, state or state-designated agencies and the broader health community, including everything from hospitals and physician practices to Health Information Exchanges (HIE).

A recent seminar by government IT researcher Input predicted ARRA to be a transformative force in health-care IT, but Input analysts cautioned that the cost to implement health IT in many settings remains prohibitive. That's the heart of the matter, many solution providers and integrators agree.

Dr. George Taylor Jr., vice president of Health IT Programs at Northrop Grumman, agreed that the stimulus "lowers the financial hurdle, undoubtedly."

There were a number of integrators and smaller solution providers expressing similar sentiment at this year's Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference in Chicago. What's most helpful about ARRA funds is that, as Taylor pointed out, "the really important money is years out, so now is the time to get out there."

The long and short of it is that health-care settings need to meet the 21st century sometime before the 22nd. For solution providers, the challenge is to help get them there: The local physician who doesn't understand why merely sending an e-mail to his assistant doesn't constitute an EMR; the large hospital trying to upgrade an increasingly ancient infrastructure; the clinic using a firewall security solution so basic it could be hacked by a 10-year-old; the nursing unit that's constantly having to recharge laptop batteries and use cumbersome stacks of paper to record and share medical data.

What can a solution provider do to get them up to speed without blowing their budgets or disrupting the crucial daily workflow?

NEXT: Electronic Medical Records

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