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.

The weakest link in financial and clinical communications involves voice and telephone conversations. They aren’t documented or retrievable, leaving insurance companies free to claim payment misunderstandings or Joint Commission to deem information hand-offs as insufficient. The White Stone Group of Knoxville, Tennessee focuses on capturing and managing those “communications events” that drive reimbursement and patient care. We spoke to CEO and CTO Guille Cruze about the company’s TRACE and OptiVox products and the benefits customers are seeing from their use.

Give me some background on The White Stone Group.

There’s little doubt that system availability is more important now than ever. Hospitals are rolling out a host of mission-critical clinical applications. That means downtime directly impacts patient care and caregivers. Those systems usually run on Windows or Linux servers. What can an IT professional do to make sure that technical glitches don’t increase patient risk or clinician dissatisfaction? Alan Gilbert is the healthcare practice leader for Stratus Technologies, which specializes in high-availability architecture for healthcare and other technology-dependent industries.