STUDY FINDS INNOVATION GRIDLOCK IN HEALTH AND LIFE SCIENCES INDUSTRY
Hewlett Packard (HP) recently commissioned a research study that was conducted by independent research company, Coleman Parkes Research, in February and March 2010. The survey results include findings from the United States and Canada, Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East and Asia Pacific regions. The below findings highlight the challenges that organizations in the Health and Life Sciences (HLS) industry face with innovation gridlock. This term is defined as "a situation where the IT organization is blocked from driving new business innovation because the majority of funding is consumed in operating the current environment." A total of 103 executives working in the HLS industry were interviewed.
Key Findings
* Fifty-two percent of the HLS executives felt that their organizations suffered from innovation gridlock.
* In looking at the effect of innovation gridlock, 70% of the HLS executives indicated that this gridlock prevents them from investing in new technologies to meet the changing business needs. 60% of the HLS executives noted that that this gridlock prevents them from generating real flexibility in their operations.
* Ninety-four percent of the HLS executives said that innovation gridlock resulted in lost opportunities for their organizations, while 92% felt that it resulted in lost effort (from resources).
* The study found that 37% of respondents' current budgets were spent on legacy systems and 36% on mission-critical systems, with only 27% left for new technology initiatives.
* Fifty-three percept of the HLS executives indicated that the amount of budget spent on operations prevents them from investing more in IT innovation.
* In terms of the most important barriers to IT innovation, 58% of the HLS executives indicated that competing with other corporate investments for capital is the most important barrier to IT innovation. 49% felt that proving the return on investment is the most important barrier to IT innovation.
* HLS respondents indicated that business leaders define the success of an IT project by measuring the business impact (55%) and impact on productivity (52%).
* The top two areas the HLS industry is investing in are "application transformation/modernization" (64%) and "IT infrastructure agility/flexibility" (54%).
More Information
More information about the overall survey and regional results is available at http://www.hp.com/go/HPEnterpriseResearch2010.
CISCO AND ELECTRONIC HEALTH NETWORK BUILD MEDICAL DATA EXCHANGE PROGRAM IN SOUTH CAROLINA
Cisco Systems' Medical Data Exchange Solution (MDES) has been selected for deployment across 22 locations in South Carolina by Electronic Health Network, a leader in patient health education and wellness applications. Palmetto Primary Care Physicians will use the Cisco MDES as the platform for Electronic Health Network's electronic health record and personal health record solutions to create a medical information exchange among 60 general practitioners and 137 specialist physicians. Physicians served by this program span a wide range of specialist areas, including wound care, dermatology, and psychiatry, and an estimated 250 000 patients are expected to benefit from the data exchange program.
Cisco and Tiani-Spirit developed Cisco MDES to meet the growing demand for medical data exchange and improve the quality of patient care across multiple specialty fields. To improve the quality and costeffectiveness of patient care, the MDES incorporates patient indexing and image and document exchange functions into the network, regardless of providers' individual information technology systems. Electronic Health Network's application and integration services, along with the Cisco MDES, produce a comprehensive and robust multiple application secured health, or MASH, information network.
The MDES is capable of exchanging both records and images from a single scalable platform. Healthcare providers from multiple institutions can quickly and easily find and review a patient's medical data gathered by different applications, locations, and exchanges via a hierarchical patient indexing and record locator service based on Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise frameworks.
The MDES provides the ability to exchange images at both a clinical review and diagnostic-quality level, offering the opportunity to create a vendor-neutral image archive and avoid costly image data migrations.
The MDES offers a federated data architecture with optimized search algorithms for records and images, reducing network traffic for more efficient data queries and access. The architecture eliminates the need for large centralized data storage environments and reduces the associated costs, making it easier to scale the solution as the need or number of serviced facilities grows.
Palmetto Primary Care Physicians will use Electronic Health Network services to achieve PCMH/NCQA level 3 requirements for their Patient Centered Medical Home program, which facilitates health information and data exchange among physicians, patients, and their families to enable appropriate care and health management. Electronic Health Network's deployment of the MDES will help Palmetto Primary Care Physicians to meet "meaningful use" criteria under the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
Electronic Health Network is a privately held company based in Charleston, SC. Its bundled solution consists of a health information exchange, electronic health record, personal health record, and health and wellness tools in a secured HIPAA-compliant environment, while protecting the privacy of physicians and patients. Electronic Health Network scalable solutions can be implemented throughout the United States and globally. For more information, visit http://www.healthstik.com.
Palmetto Primary Care Physicians is an independently owned physician group practice located in several cities throughout South Carolina. Palmetto Primary Care Physicians has been delivering quality care since 1997 and has been using a fully implemented Electronic Medical Record system since 2000. For more information, please visit http://www.palmettoprimarycare.com.
Cisco Systems, based in San Jose, CA, has provided networking services and technology innovation for 25 years. Information about Cisco can be found at http://www.cisco.com. For ongoing news, please go to http://newsroom.cisco.com.