Archive for February, 2008

Every hospital struggles with medication reconciliation. Done right, it can provide immediate and dramatic impact on patient safety. Hospitals have learned one important fact: paper processes almost never work. Today’s big-box information systems, particularly when used in a multi-vendor hospital environment, don’t perform medication reconciliation particularly well. The result is wasted nurse time, poorly documented processes, and a lost opportunity to not just comply with a standard of care, but to really improve that care. Design Clinicals was formed by clinicians to develop an elegant, easily implemented solution to the medication reconciliation problem. We spoke to Mary VanHoomissen, vice president of implementations for the company.

I admit that I wasn’t familiar with Awarix until industry expert Jon Phillips told me that McKesson’s acquisition of the company was potentially the most impactful of all the high-profile transactions of 2007. I see why: every hospital has throughput, handoff, and caregiver communications problems that the company’s technology can help solve. The ROI is apparently fast, even without considering what hospitals might otherwise spend to expand physical facilities to address patient backlog problems. We spoke to Paul Gartman of McKesson, who has product responsibilities for what is now called Horizon Enterprise Visibility™.

Medical practices are conservative with their technology investments, so it’s no wonder that Sage Software meets the needs of many thousands of them. The company is financially stable, boasts a healthcare legacy spanning over 25 years, and provides products and services that practices need to succeed. Its parent organization has 2.8 million customers in North America alone. We talked to Paul Stinson, senior vice president of product management for Sage Software Healthcare, Inc., about the company and the state of the physician systems industry.

Consulting companies are polarized around two extremes. On one end are the tiny companies made up of a few colleagues who’ve left their corporate jobs and hung out a shingle, making everything up as they go. On the other end of the spectrum are the huge, industry-agnostic firms that send out rookies willing to work under difficult conditions for a couple of years until something better comes along, following cookie cutter methods and relying on home office backup for anything not covered in the standard boilerplate.