Hospitals Need to Diversify – What’s It Mean for EHR?

In a recent article on Health CXO, they made the following comment:

In the report “Building Value: Investments Aimed at New Priorities Create Opportunities for Not-For-Profit Hospitals,” experts at the New York-based financial firm note that the decline in inpatient volumes seen over the past several quarters is no fluke but rather a long-term trend driven by health reform. This means that hospitals that want to remain successful need to look beyond just inpatient services and become full-service health systems that are able to follow the patients to the lower cost and frequently higher value outpatient setting. [emphasis added]

This trend is definitely worth noting. We’ve discussed the acquisition of outpatient clinics a number of times, but never the trend of declining inpatient volumes. The article suggests that the key to viability for a hospital will be to diversify into outpatient services. I’m not sure all hospitals want to become full-service health systems and so it will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Assuming this trend continues, I’ll be interested to see what this means for a hospital’s EHR strategy. Will they go with the one big EHR across their hospital and ambulatory environment? If you look at these recently posted EHR market share statistics, you can see that this method is happening a lot. As the deals get larger, I think we’ll see push back against moving to one unified EHR software. That presents an interesting opportunity for what Alan Portela and Airstrip are doing. Not to mention the need for a private HIE.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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