One of the things I love about blogging is the comments that I receive. Many of them come in the comments of the blog, but just as many get emailed to me privately in response to my posts being emailed to readers. Every once in a while I want to share the emails I receive with the readers (Note: You can now subscribe to all of the Healthcare Scene emails in one place). This is one such response that I got in response to my post about Siemens Selling its Health IT business.
I remember the good ol’ days of being a 25+ year SMS Unity customer. Siemens who had recently purchased SMS told us that Unity would be going away. They showed us Soarian (which at the time was not actually built) and said that they would move us there for free. Of course, since it didn’t yet exist we would have to transition to Invision first for about a year. That would also be free. However, they would have to expense us for professional fees which they estimated to be in excess of $1,000,000. This is how we became a Meditech customer.
This kind of back story is what makes healthcare IT so interesting and so challenging. Many who want to enter the healthcare space forget about all this history and they usually fail. The very best hospital health IT companies that I know usually do an amazing job pairing new innovations and technologies together with someone who understands and has been part of this history. Pairing the two together is a powerful combination.