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In the future, a visit to
your family physician, or any specialist, will begin with a quick scan of the
computer screen, where a few keystrokes will tell the doctor everything he or
she needs to know about you – all the way from how much you weighed at
birth, to X-rays of that bone you broke when you flipped your motorcycle thirty
years ago, to how much you spent on blood work last year, right up to the
hypertension pills you took after dinner yesterday (and maybe even what you
ate, although hopefully not).
Much of your medical info is
already stored electronically, of course, but much more is stuffed into old
paper file folders. Nor is there any centralized database that routes your
records wherever they are wanted. That is going to change,
and change dramatically.
The present system has too
many embedded inefficiencies, and the industry wants them gone with
yesterday’s used latex gloves. Whether you like it or not, someday soon
there will be a collection of bits and bytes that stores all the most
intimate details of your health history.
Making that happen is a daunting
job, and a touchy one.
On the one hand, think of how
much medical data each American accumulates each year. Multiply that by 300
million. The amount of paper currently required to track it all would stretch
to the moon. Doctors want to set fire to that stack.
But on the other hand, they
don’t want their patients’ records falling into the hands of
every Eastern European hacker for whom such data would be a major arm shot to
his fake Viagra business. Data security has to be tight.
Thus software solutions must
be developed both to serve and to protect. Billions will be spent in the
process of digitizing, maintaining, and guarding medical records, and guess
whose pocket the money will be extracted from. Did you select mine?
Don’t care for this
idea of white jackets anywhere in the world having access to your private
info at the click of a mouse? Or don’t like the idea of footing the
bill for the conversion? Well, tough. On both counts. You won’t be able
to prevent the medical business from setting up the grand database, nor from using
your own money to manufacture the electronic you.
In fact, the government has
already installed the plumbing that will feed the big money shower. As in, very big.
That happened on February 17,
when President Obama signed the Health
Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH), which
its sponsors had tacked onto the comprehensive American Recovery and
Reinvestment Act (ARRA).
Everyone
loves ARRA, right? Well, maybe. But citizens who cheered it might not have
been quite so happy if they were aware of everything they were agreeing to
fund with their hard-earned dollars. Buried inside HITECH is an allotment of
$19 billion (yep, that’s billion with a B) just for the
conversion of paper medical records into electronic.
Tell
you who was cheering lustily, for certain: health care software
developers. For example, maybe you read about the recent deal whereby Dell
acquired Perot Systems, a premium software company, for about $4 billion.
What that was largely about was HITECH. Dell didn’t have real access to
it. Perot Systems – whose annual revenues derive 25% from government
and 48% from health care – did. Sound the wedding bells.
Dell, of course, is by no
means the only company eager to step into the generous governmental shower
stall. You can bet that IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and the rest of the heavies in
the field are all busily preparing proposals, if they haven’t already
filed them.
And the big guys won’t
have that field all to themselves. There’s a lot of cash to be spread
around. Smaller competitors will nab their share.
Those are the kinds of
companies Casey’s Extraordinary
Technology searches for and
recommends as longer-term investments. The ones whose bottom lines will
profit the most from political largesse.
Subscribers learned about one
such firm in the September issue. There will be others, and not just in the
health care field. Because there is no surer thing.
Anyone who has both a solid product and the savvy to play Washington’s
money game, is going to prosper mightily in the
years ahead.
Tech is the most vital industry in the United
States, with the best opportunities to strike it rich if you know what to invest
in. Just imagine finding the next Google and getting in while it’s
still a startup… and the chances for that are quite good. Learn more
about how to profit from technology – just click here.
Doug Hornig
Senior Editor,
Casey’s Extraordinary
Technology
Also
by Doug Hornig
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