Sitting here at the SAS analysts conference in Colorado, an elegant representation of the decision analytics value chain was presented.  Beginning with standardized reports and moving through automated alerts en route to predictive analytics and finally optimization, the decision analytics value chain characterizes the maturity of tools available to decision makers at all levels within an organization.  In our discussions with industry leaders across the entire health industry spectrum, their ability to access and exploit available information to reduce risk in strategic decision making is clearly recognized as a highly desirable capability and their current capabilities can be easily ranked using the SAS decision analytics value chain.  Execution of effective information management is clearly a more difficult proposition, requiring change across the organization supported by both effective IT infrastructure and applications.  As companies have strengthened their commitment to near term initiatives supporting improving operational efficiencies, focused R&D pipelines towards efforts with an increased likelihood of success, and drastically cut costs across the organization, there has been increased focus and investment in efforts that raised the access to and visibility of data that can directly influence future success (and potential failure).  By systematically enabling more real time access to data and analytics to support actionable decision making, companies that are more efficiently moving down the decision analytics value chain will be better positioned for both near and long term success.

 Unrelenting cost and market challenges are creating new technology movement and opportunities in the US State Medicaid markets.  In 2009, a variety of technology models have emerged for the State Medicaid market, including vendors refreshing traditional legacy models and also introducing flexible COTS options. This week, Molina Healthcare announced a definitive agreement to acquire the Health Information Management (HIM) business of Unisys Corporation. This business unit provides technology solutions and services for the administration of State Medicaid programs.

As analysts here at IDC Health Insights, each year we have the task of looking at the big picture and examining the technologies, trends and drivers that we believe will most heavily impact healthcare organizations in the coming year.  We present these to our clients and friends in the predictions reports and webcasts each January, with separate editions for the U.S. and EMEA regions.  While I focus on the U.S. market, as I was reading through the 2010 EMEA predictions I was struck by both the similarities and the differences between the predictions as identified by our analyst teams in both regions.  I wanted to discuss some of the differences between the two sets of predictions as they are informative and provide an interesting insight into the different healthcare delivery environments across the U.S. and EMEA.  The main difference between the two environments is the existence of major national healthcare systems in EMEA, while the U.S. remains a largely private payer and fee-for-service system. 

eClinicalWorks, Dell and Wal-Mart are all leaders on price and value, and this shared interest has led them to collaborate on a new bundled product offering that will make electronic medical records available to members of Wal-Mart's Sam's Club. The new partnership will bundle eClinicalWorks' unified application, which combines an electronic medical record (EMR) and practice management system, with Dell hardware to be marketed on Sam's Club's Web site. Sam's Club claims to have 200,000 practices among its members, amounting to access to almost 65% of the available market for ambulatory EMRs, based on an estimated 308,900 office-based practitioners in the U.S. in 2006, according to the CDC's April 2008 publication of the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NAMCS).