As we noted last week (Opens in a new window), the new Salesforce Health Cloud data aggregation platform (Opens in a new window) is not alone. Several aggregation and secure communication services exist for sure, and some have tried — and failed — with similar projects. Others may be on the way.
Salesforce CMO Dr. Joshua Newman told MedCity News that he sees competition from three places: electronic medical records vendors, startups and analytics firms.
EMR vendors may be entrenched, Newman said, but “they’re never going to be Internet-focused and multi-tenant.” A multi-tenant approach typical of a cloud service like Salesforce helps manage patients seen by physicians with privileges at multiple hospitals, according to Newman.
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Startups such as Hale Health, Phyzit and even the more established Zynx Health might not have the scale that a multibillion-dollar company like Salesforce does.
Analytics companies are “strong,” Newman said, but many — particularly IBM Watson (Opens in a new window), which bought two healthcare data companies (Opens in a new window) in the spring — are struggling to integrate all the technologies they have acquired.
Some have made similar attempts and either failed or changed direction.
Notably, Intel invested millions of dollars in healthcare and mostly ended up selling a lot of servers to hospitals, not any sort of revolutionary technology. Verizon backed off its Converged Health Management (Opens in a new window) initiative less than a year after a splashy introduction.
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Some other big players are eyeing the market.
In May, the founders of Alere Analytics bought that company back (Opens in a new window) from parent Alere Inc. and rolled it into a new precision-medicine operation called Persivia, which seems to be competing with Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong’s deep-pocketed NantHealth (Opens in a new window).
While Salesforce Health Cloud does not offer advanced genomic processing like those firms do, precision medicine is in the Salesforce plan, according to Newman.
Could it be in the Microsoft plan as well?
In more of an acknowledgement of the importance of data aggregation than a strategy or product announcement, two days before Salesforce introduced Health Cloud, Microsoft’s senior worldwide health director Dr. Bill Crounse blogged about his vision (Opens in a new window) for the post-EMR world. Analytics, workflow improvements and cloud computing are central. Salesforce seems to be offering all three with Health Cloud.
Photo: Flickr user Infocux Technologies