The 'Turbocharged' health IT industry

Allscripts, the Chicago-based electronic medical records company, has more than doubled its profits since last year, Forbes reports in a special report. Its stock doubled, too, and it attracted nearly 50 percent more business. It's been a "sweet year" for Glen Tullman, the company's chief. That's due in part to a $19 billion infusion into the health information technology industry from the federal stimulus package. The money is meant to encourage doctors to switch from paper records, and in the meantime, is enriching technology vendors. "We are watching what will be the fastest transformation of a major U.S. industry in history," said Tullman, who expects paper to be largely replaced with computers at doctors' offices within three years (Whelan, 10/8).

Another beneficiary of the rush to move to digital patient records, is known for it's silence, Forbes reports in another story from the same series, "Special Report: The Cyber Cure." Epic Systems "does little marketing or advertising, shuns acquisitions, never issues press releases and tries to stay out of the headlines," and once commissioned a billboard that read, "Marketing Sucks… Epic Systems." Nevertheless, Epic has recently been winning around 40 percent of new contracts to electronic medical records at major hospitals, industry watchers say. It also boasts big name clients such as Kaiser Permanente and the Cleveland Clinic (Langreth, 10/8).

Read the entire series at Forbes.

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This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.