FUTURISTIC GROOVES

Some interesting developments are going on in the current IT and healthcare business world. Today, IBM plans to announce that it is buying Healthlink, a Houston-based consulting firm and a leader in the fast-growing niche business of helping hospitals and clinics convert to electronic health records.

The move is the second acquisition in health care technology services within a week. Accenture announced last Wednesday that it would buy the North American health practice of the large European consulting firm Capgemini for $175 million.

The purchases by big technology services companies are investments made in preparation for an expected surge in spending on health care information technology. The Bush administration and medical specialists say information technology must replace paper records to improve the quality of health care and contain costs.

The administration is promoting the use of electronic patient records, common technology standards and reimbursement policies for Medicare that measure quality performance. Indeed, the government has set the ambitious goal of adopting electronic health records for all Americans over the next decade and building a national health information network for tracking diseases and treatments.

“Only companies like IBM, with deep technology and financial resources, are going to be able to pull this off,” said Ivo Nelson, chief executive of Healthlink.

IBM is also working on one research application with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health to simulate the spread of infectious disease. An IBM database modelling tool that includes census data, maps, local transportation routes and traffic patterns will be used by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins to study how diseases are spread and thus devise containment strategies.

“It’s war games for infectious diseases,” said Dr. Donald S. Burke, a professor at the Johns Hopkins public health school. “You use complex simulations to ask a series of what-if questions.”

Those trends should stimulate investment in health information technology and accelerate consolidation among suppliers and hopefully will positively benefit the war against world diseases.