In case you missed it, I wrote a post on EMR and HIPAA that talks about how patients will choose healthcare. In the article we talk about the impact of brand on healthcare decision making. Plus, I talk a bit about how many real national healthcare brands there are in the industry.
With this in mind, I was struck by this tweet from @theEHRGuy:
I'm not going after the next best technology to solve the healthcare problems.I'm going after the next best brand that will.#HealthIT #HITsm
— Michael Planchart (@theEHRGuy) June 22, 2015
As the post above illustrates, I’d considered the impact of brand on healthcare decision making by patients. I hadn’t thought about the power of brand for healthcare IT companies. Over the past couple of years, we’ve definitely seen how important brand has been as many hospitals have chosen to buy from the brand as opposed to taking a best of breed approach to their IT systems. This has been an extremely important trend in healthcare IT.
In my recent post, I also talked about the move away from Best of Breed EHR systems and how that could apply to patient engagement solutions as well. I think this cycle is inevitable and I think patient engagement could be an area where a big brand establishes their name in the industry. Especially because the incumbent EHRs aren’t competing well in the patient engagement space.
I’ve also written about how I think that the Care Management System could be the next system purchase now that we’ve done HIS/PM and EHR. Could someone or a group of companies build a great brand for Care Management Systems? Could they build momentum around the need for every hospital to invest in some sort of Care Management System the way there’s been momentum for hospitals to adopt EHR?
Back to the tweet embedded above, I think it’s pretty interesting to think about the next big healthcare IT brands. Which brands do you think are going to be the next big ones? Every hospital CIO should be spending some time thinking about and watching these trends.