By Lisa Terry
Contributing Editor, VSR Magazine
Healthcare is a mobile profession -- nurses visit patient rooms, doctors move among examining rooms and from office to hospital, EMTs race to the scene, home health aides travel to homes. So it's no wonder that healthcare is embracing mobile computing.
Healthcare is also where the money is flowing. A combination of stimulus dollars, increasing safety regulations and the need to become more efficient are driving healthcare to play technology catch-up. Mobility is the answer to many of these challenges, and healthcare is becoming a major adopter of mobile solutions. More than 80 percent of global information technology decision-makers within the healthcare industry feel mobile technologies are more important to their organizations today than they were in 2008, according to the
Motorola Enterprise Mobility Healthcare Barometer.
But getting into healthcare takes time, and with the domination of mostly-closed hospital information systems in the clinical arena of large healthcare organizations, ISVs and VARs must choose markets with care. The good news is that that leaves plenty of opportunity across the wide range of healthcare provider types.
Opening a Closed World
In the hospital setting, clinical care technology is synonymous with the big HIS firms including Cerner, CPSI, Eclipsys, Epic, GE Healthcare, McKesson, Meditech and Siemens. These developers are steadily expanding their footprints in healthcare, including mobile technology. Some align with a select few ISVs and VARs to fill functional gaps' McKesson, for example, opened its audit logs to FairWarning, a patient records auditing application, to provide auditing and snooping alerts to its customers, and seeks VAR help with some implementations. But those alliances are few and far between. For a new installation, "The first 12 to 18 months we'll work with a VAR on implementation services, then as the business grows we'll get our engineering staff to do it internally," says Greg Tartaglia, manager, technology inside sales for McKesson, an HIS provider and Motorola VAR.
"Don't waste your time," advises Vivian Funkhouser, principal, Motorola Global Healthcare Solutions. "Beyond the big eight there are so many other opportunities in the healthcare environment."
There is some desire among healthcare organizations for open platforms and standards, but those appear to be a long time coming; hopes are pinned on electronic healthcare records to trigger software standards. "They're going to have to go to open systems to communicate back and forth with each other," says Brenda McCurry,
ScanSource POS & Barcoding sales director.
"People from other verticals are coming in as change agents," says Sandeep Bhanote, co-founder and CEO of
Global Bay Mobile Technologies, a mobile applications ISV; new technologies such as Web services will also help. Some software companies use screen scraping or other basic methods to extract data from these systems.
Channel News and Analysis 
