Insider Perspective On Potential IT Spend In The Health Vertical

By Megan Williams, contributing writer

It’s beneficial to have the insight of insiders to understand the healthcare vertical. Nish Hartman, director of healthcare at Predixion Software (a provider in collaborative predictive analytics solutions) shares his thoughts on trends and opportunities, the current state of the market, and common mistakes VARs, managed services providers (MSPs), integrators, and software developers make in their selling processes.

Trends And Opportunities

Hartman emphasizes the fact that larger healthcare systems are having difficulties adapting to new reforms and penalties in the industry. They face financial penalties for showing improvements in quality metrics such as better managing length of stay, reducing hospital-acquired infections, and reducing preventable readmissions.

Companies that help these organizations leverage existing data will be well-positioned to help clients improve outcomes and drive actionable insights at the point of care.

Current State Of Affairs

According to Hartman, healthcare, as expected, is still slow to adapt to new technology. This has led to an environment where new organizations are “bubbling to the top” in the areas of leveraging innovation and analytics — the healthcare environment is inherently high-pressure and the need to reduce costs and improve outcomes is only increasing.

“Healthcare organizations need to rely on technology vendors and outside consultants who can guide them and augment their existing teams to solve key challenges, especially with a focus on achieving the Triple Aim,” Hartman says.

Advice On Selling

Hartman also emphasizes the importance of solutions providers that understand and connect with healthcare organizations … organizations that speak the language of the industry. Enabling your sales team to speak industry language is imperative in finding success in your work.

He goes on to discuss the importance of understanding the growth process health organizations go through in relation to their use of analytics, and especially predictive analytics. Vendors have an opportunity to position themselves as aids in helping organizations learn to make appropriate decisions during the process and walk with them in their journey to use their data assets to properly support patient outcomes.

Going Deeper

For insight into the health of the healthcare IT market, read “How Healthy Is The Healthcare IT Market?”