The annual AHIP Institute 2010 meeting was held last week in Las Vegas.   What was hot, along with the 108 degree temperatures:  assessment of the medical loss ratio target implications, positioning for the individual market; technology as enabler of efficiency.  What's not:  ICD-10.

In this past quarter of annual industry conferences and user groups, the notion of Sustainability has entered the vernacular of the healthcare market.  Driven by healthcare reform and cost pressures, sustainability is a platform for business decisions and future market success.  In this blog, we begin to decode the new sustainability messaging:

Reflecting legislative discussion and national debate, meaningful use investment was a dominant HIMSS theme.  With multitudes of options for establishing an electronic health record core, now the discussion moves on to “what do we do with the data?” to execute and demonstrate meaningful use. Many of the next steps of investment for meaningful use mirror actionable information and business intelligence investment among healthcare payers during the past 12-24 months and much of the planned investment in 2010 and 2011.  Duplicate and unaligned investment suggests a coming collision and considerable technology and business market confusion.  With this category at the top of the technology investment list for both payer and provider markets, wasted investment is also likely without careful attention to rationalization and alignment.

 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.

In previous blogs, I have discussed the emerging "actionable advice" solutions in the healthcare payer market. On December 8, we presented an IDC Health Insights webinar on healthcare payer actionable advice initiatives amidst the reforming market.  Healthcare payers and vendors are actively investing in analytics, workflow, predictive modeling, visualization and a myriad of related technologies that will sift through the ever increasing information stores to identify critical information upon which an action can take place to reduce costs and/or improve outcomes.  These analytics are or are planned to be integrated or embedded into a wide variety of healthcare payer solutions by the end of 2010.  It is action based on information to improve health and outcomes, not just information, that the healthcare market really seeks.  And this notion is also at the heart of the "meaningful use" discussion/debate around EMR investment.