While healthcare institutions are groaning under the piles of data they must now analyze and use and protect, IT companies are cashing in. Developing the analytics “to draw meaningful conclusions out of mountains of data like electronic medical records and claims information leaves IT companies well-poised to take advantage of this, according to a story by Brandon Glen at medcitynews.com.
Much of this demand has been brought about by the new healthcare law, which has a goal of providing health insurance to the more than 30 million people now without it, “primarily by expanding Medicaid and providing federal subsidies to help lower- and middle-income Americans buy private coverage.”
Back in 2007, writers at electronichealthcare wondered whether healthcare organizations found that the huge investments needed today for data storage, security and analysis really pay off, and it’s not much different today. But the market potential for global healthcare IT companies is a no-brainer; it’s been predicted that it will grow from “$99.6 billion in 2010 to $162.2 billion in 2015, at a CAGR of 10.2 percent from 2010 to 2015.”
Now, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center has decided to get in the middle of this by launching a new startup, called QI Healthcare, “which has been founded to commercialize technology developed at the renowned children’s hospital,” Glen writes.
QI Healthcare has started out with a $400,000 investment from Cincinnati Children’s and “nonprofit, state-supported economic development group CincyTech , according to a statement from CincyTech,” Glen reports.
The cash will be used to boost sales and marketing, and product development efforts, he writes, adding that the company also recently hired a CEO, John Atkinson, whose background includes stints at health technology companies including WebMD and SourceMedical.
QI Healthcare first rolled out Surgical Outcomes Collection System (SOCS), in use at Cincinnati Children’s for more than a year. The SOCS application pulls together data “from various hospital systems, including electronic medical records, to enable ‘institution-wide analyses of cases to identify opportunities to improve patient care,’” according to the company’s statement, according to the story.
“Before SOCS, we spent countless hours manually gathering data,” Dr. Paul Ryckert, senior vice president of medical operations at Cincinnati Children’s and a developer of QI’s technology, told Glen. “SOCS improves the process through automation and enhanced analytics — and it frees up clinical resources to focus on quality improvement.”
Edited by
Rich Steeves
