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A peek into one man’s guesswork
So you’ve been trying to remember where you’ve encountered the EHR market, or maybe something similar, before.
And then you remember your freshman biology lab.
No? Well, that’s what occurred to this commentator, and the analogy he cooks up does a nice job of framing his speculation about where the EHR market is heading over the next few years.
First, his recollection: “In freshman biology lab, I had to conduct the classic bacterial growth experiment. The experiment measures how bacterial cultures respond when nutrients are introduced into their environment. Colony growth exhibits a well-defined pattern of four distinct phases starting with a lag phase, followed by exponential growth, then a stationary period where growth stagnates, and finally a death phase as the nutrient supply is exhausted.”
Turning to the current EHR landscape, he walks through the parallel conditions: “There is a viable ambulatory EHR market consisting of mostly small companies in equilibrium with a slow-growing customer base (A). . . . EHR incentives enrich the environment (B), increasing the colony count with new vendors. Next, the competition for dollars and customers (and perhaps technical talent) increases, resulting in stagnant vendor growth (C). Eventually, someone has to go (D).”
In his eyes, the “death phase” is when the HITECH incentives run out. And what happens next? Obviously, that’s anyone’s guess, but he briefly lays out what seem some pretty realistic possibilities, including vendors who relied too heavily on the incentives to build a client base and a glut of RECs given the number of providers who’ve opted to suffer the Medicare penalties rather than invest in the digital leap.
For our money, though, the safest bet is what he calls “disruptive entries . . . an entry into the market that no one anticipates, and which changes the market’s character and focus.”
What will it be? Probably not one single thing, but an array of technological developments that, taken together, allow for much more fluid transfer, storage and manipulation of patient data.
Of course, such developments will need to go hand in hand with effective privacy and security developments, but those things are going to have to happen anyway.
So what do you think? What’s in your crystal ball?
Photo courtesy of garryknight via Creative Commons
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