Healthy Returns

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In the August CRN ("The Heart of the Matter," pages 54-58), we examined some of the trends driving VAR business in health-care, centered on the unprecedented push toward electronic medical records (EMRs) and the infrastructure needed to support them. In this second of two parts, here's a look at other factors shaping the health-care IT spend this year and beyond.

Compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 is one thing. But now that electronic medical records technology has been around awhile and is headed for the mainstream, health-care IT security concerns will skyrocket. Cybercrime is as sophisticated as ever, and with EMRs making the news, so are potential security concerns about medical identity theft and other data breaches.

"The security concerns have elevated exponentially," said Bob Rossi, senior director of CDW Healthcare. "That means regular Trojan horses and data breaches of patient info, but also network security, data encryption, data loss prevention, everything. Just the sheer amount of data being loaded and the number of touch points to access it -- it's enormous. And while most organizations will do consulting, we're also looking at small providers whose version of security for electronic medical data is a firewall. You see that a lot in the smaller, rural providers and independent facilities. There are a whole lot of holes out there."

"Losing data for hospitals is a big one," added Brad Osborne, vice president of data center consulting at Force 3, a Crofton, Md.-based solution provider. "Because of HIPAA, identity theft -- I think a lot of hospitals have left that open and they're not always seeing a problem."

Security is the most overarching concern, most solution providers agree, and most vendors and distributors offering health-care-specific training to their VAR communities keep security needs up front no matter what the specific opportunity being described.

"All of these solutions, whether digital imaging, collaboration, video -- it all requires security and all depends on the reliability of the network," said Denny Trevett, director of operations for U.S. Channels at Cisco Systems Inc.

Networking And Infrastructure

The convergence of networking and the data center is everywhere, including in large health-care settings, and vendors like Cisco and Hewlett-Packard Co.'s ProCurve by HP continue to square their total solution offerings to target health-care business.

Point-of-care access to EMRs, mobility, wireless LANs, RFID, patient monitoring systems, visitor access to the Internet, video surveillance -- all are considerations that are quickly shifting from luxuries to necessities, suggested HP ProCurve Worldwide Director of Channel Sales and Marketing Greg Pisano.

"The interesting thing about health-care is that even though a reseller might not have specific experience within a health-care organization, that health-care organization might now be in need of something that reseller-'s already doing," Pisano said. "Video surveillance, they might be doing that already. Same with RFID. Voice over wireless LAN. And that's just the wireless end where there's also still so much with the wired side of the network as well. Think of the whole span: When a channel partner looks at the entire solution, it can span everything from the client-type devices through the wired infrastructure, and right through the data center."

Unified communications have also crossed over into health-care settings.

"That's one of the biggest things," said Joshua Lande, account manager at Maureen Data Systems, a New York-based solution provider. "Now you have doctors who can communicate with other doctors more efficiently, and it gets really cool in terms of the money you can save. Cisco is really our stronghold for UC, and they continue to have a lot of success in health care."

"We look at it in terms of three buckets where our partners can make money with Cisco," said Trevett. "First, you have the vertical health-care solutions or applications -- EMR, connected imaging and some of the very specific things customized for that market. Second, you have all of those business-critical applications that need to be supported and need to run across what we call the medical grade network. Third, you have the services."

At a recent seminar on wireless opportunities in health care and education offered jointly by Westcon Group and Motorola, Westcon's director of vertical markets, Ron Sheps, reminded VARs that in a health-care setting, there are as many as 12 different departments to talk to about pain points.

That's absolutely the case, agreed Trevett, adding that he'd recently heard from a solution provider who by talking to a hospital's nursing department started to better understand the different pressures. In other words, if a VAR talks to only the hospital IT managers, he or she gets only as much as the IT department knows -- and misses some potential solutions.

"The partner was competing against someone who was looking to do a core network upgrade," Trevett said. "So they changed the playing field, and all of a sudden it became a UC-driven, wireless upgrade. They won the business with significantly more gear and services deployed, all because they spoke to the nurses and understood the solutions needed. Partners need to approach these customers from all angles. If they do, they can get very creative."

And if it's not new implementations, it could be upgrades; Sheps said at least 20 percent of hospitals and groups of hospitals with wireless networks in place were looking to upgrade their network at any given time. The proliferation of 802.11n is fueling the wireless opportunity, but that's part and parcel of another crucial piece of the health-care puzzle: mobility.

NEXT: Mobility

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