Obama Health IT - What does it mean to IT consulting companies

The Obama Health IT investment is going to create a lot of opportunities for IT consulting companies. The big question is what are these opportunities and what should IT consulting companies invest in to be there when it happens.

From my initial understanding of the Obama plan, I am just going to talk about Physician practice here, in my next post I will share thoughts on Providers and Payers.

EHR Adoption by Physician Practices

Currently as per a research 13% of the physician practices have a EHR in some shape or form, out of that only 4% is actually operational. Given the incentive that will be driven by Obama plan - This is going to be a very large but fragmented opportunity.

Every physician practice is going to need help from consulting companies to understand what they need to do in the next six months, one year to get the EHR implementations going. Finally once the implementation is completed, it needs to be certified to qualify for incentives. Based on this here are the opportunities

• Consulting for initial blue printing the road map for practices
• Implementation of EHR - Qualified EHR consultants, infrastructure and ongoing support opportunities
• Certification - Consulting to audit and certify implementations

Interoperability

Every EHR implementation irrespective of the package selected needs to talk to each other, the opportunity around integrations would just explode. New integration packs and consulting in the space to make integrations faster are going to create a lot of revenue opportunities.

My view of the opportunity

• Integration implementation and support opportunities
• HL7 consulting and models to implement integrations faster

Infrastructure for EHRs

Every EHR implementation will have to be hosted and supported by a state of the art infrastructure. This will create a lot of demand for data centers, EHR as a software service kind of models. I am still wondering why sales force dot com has not made aggressive strides to get into the EHR market.

• Data center and basic infrastructure for physician practices
• Initial configuration of EHR for physician practices
• Ongoing support of the EHR platform

The toughest thing about this market will be the fact that its very fragmented. Most of the deal sizes will be very small and players like eClinicalworks are going to rock this market.