With billions in stimulus dollars available to help doctors and hospitals digitize their health records, it stands to reason that tech companies want to make spending that money as easy as possible.
Several of the players--Allscripts, Cisco, Citrix, Dell, Intel, Intuit, Microsoft, and Nuance Communications--have teamed up in an alliance aimed at educating doctors on the many tools available to help set up electronic health records.
The EHR Stimulus Alliance is pulling out all the stops, with a road tour, Webcasts, telephone hotline, and other tools all aimed at demystifying the technology and showing case studies of where it has worked.
President Obama's stimulus package provides on the order of $20 billion for health care technology, with the central focus being nudging hospitals and doctors to move their records from manila folders to computers. Even with the money, though, it's seen as a daunting task.
"The EHR Stimulus Alliance is a unified movement toward turning the national dialogue surrounding the EHR transition into action," Nuance Healthcare President John Shagoury said in a statement. "Each of the partners involved has unique solutions that are crucial to EHR implementation. In our case, because most doctors speak at least three times faster than they type, speech recognition technology helps increase the meaningful use and efficiency of EHRs by decreasing physician reliance on the keyboard and mouse."
The alliance hopes to reach half a million doctors with its message.
Although the alliance represents a number of the big names in tech, there are a lot of other players in the electronic health records business, including Cerner, General Electric, eClinicalWorks, McKesson, and NextGen, as well as start-ups such as Medsphere. Other tech players also pushing hard for their piece of the industry include IBM and storage giant EMC.
By the way, I and some colleagues will have a ton more to say on this topic next week as CNET News takes an in-depth look at the push toward electronic health records.Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway is hoping that Microsoft's telephony software can help it replace its aging phone system. But it also hopes the software might help it replace another asset that's getting older: its workforce.
About 40 percent of the company's workers will become eligible for retirement in the next few years. BNSF is hoping that by adding tools like unified communications, it can help attract workers who have grown up with tools like instant messaging and video conferencing.
"We've got to attract and recruit that next generation of workers," said Gary Grissum, BNSF's assistant vice president of telecom. "That's the way they communicate. They expect that same type of communication in a business environment."
Just how much that helps recruitment remains to be seen.
Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway sees Microsoft's telephony software as a way to get younger workers to hop on the company train.
(Credit: BNSF)In any case, it's a nice win for Microsoft, which was up against competing products from Cisco and IBM that had also been tested by BNSF. For several years now, Microsoft has been trying to expand its corporate presence from the desktop to the phone. The company took its corporate instant messaging product and transformed it into one that can handle phone calls as well.
BNSF has been piloting Microsoft's software with about 700 workers in its tech unit since December. Next month, it plans to expand to 1,000 workers, including its top executives, with plans to go to 15,000 workers by year's end.
Microsoft almost didn't get the railway deal. "We looked really hard at Cisco," Grissum said. "We are a Cisco shop from a network infrastructure side."
Cisco is still ahead when it comes to telephony features, Grissum said, but, in the end, it was the PC software experience that sealed the deal for Microsoft.
"Microsoft owns the desktop," Grissum said.
Heading into the project, Grissum imagined that the toughest part would be convincing the company's workers--many of whom have been at the company for 20, 30, or even 40 years--to embrace the technology.
"What we found was just the opposite," he said. "The biggest challenge has been managing demand."
Although the early pilot was supposed to focus on just those in the technology services unit, about 100 people outside that group have managed to get in on the trial.
BNSF isn't throwing away its desktop phones. For now, it will add Microsoft's PC-based "soft phones" as an option in addition to using standard handsets.
"At this point Microsoft doesn't have al the features we need," he said. "We're not replacing phones right now...As Microsoft moves to 'Wave 14' (the next version of Office), we'll look hard at the Microsoft solution."
Down the road, the company is also thinking about trying to expand into intra-company social networking using SharePoint. "We just have to get our head around how to incorporate that," Grissum said. "As soon as we get the first wave of unified communications out of the way we are going to take a hard look at that and what we do."
Microsoft, Intel, and Cisco plan to announce Tuesday that they are working together to help ensure that proper standards are created for measuring digital literacy.
Microsoft VP Anoop Gupta
(Credit: Microsoft)The three companies aren't coming up with the assessment criteria themselves, but rather bringing together a group of education leaders and academics to identify the characteristics that should form the basis of global standards.
While such standards have emerged for math and science, they are also needed for other kinds of 21st century skills, Microsoft Vice President Anoop Gupta said in an interview last week.
To head the effort, the troika has tapped professor Barry McGaw, currently the director of the Melbourne Education Research Institute at the University of Melbourne, to serve as the project's executive director.
Gupta, who heads Microsoft's emerging markets effort, said that although leading companies are often advocating for similar education reforms, their work is often done solo.
"Today we often speak in different voices," Gupta said in an interview last week. "That confuses the decision makers."
Microsoft itself has been pouring millions into its emerging markets programs, including its Partners in Learning effort. Gupta said education remains a focus for Microsoft, but declined to say whether any cuts in his budget were looming amid the troubled economy.
"Certainly for us, like any company,...we are evaluating," he said. "We are being wise in how we manage the spend."
Overall, he said, there should be more dollars heading to education, particularly in the United States, where incoming president Barack Obama has outlined plans for major spending on infrastructure, including schools.
"Then, in fact, when we emerge out of this, suddenly the schools are truly wired for broadband," Gupta said.
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