I came across a rather disturbing article in the NYTimes today about a study done on healthcare savings from digital patient records.  Both the study and the NYTimes article are extremely misleading to the general public and possibly damaging to the healthcare IT industry.  The prompt of this study and article are the billions of dollars being pushed into healthcare for the promotion of digital records for high cost savings overall.

Medfusion makes health record software and software that lets patients communicate online with doctors, clinics, and other healthcare providers to schedule appointments, pay bills, request prescription refills, fill in medical forms, and review lab results. Its software is used by more than 30,000 healthcare providers, most of them small businesses. This acquisition will accelerate Intuit’s healthcare strategy. Intuit already has a healthcare presence: in 2005, its Quicken Health division developed Intuit Expense Manager for managing healthcare bills, and last year it launched Expense Tracker for paying healthcare bills online. A very large portion of the healthcare market is small physicians’ offices. This strategy pretty much keeps Intuit within the small business category but adds vertical specific expertise. I like the strategy.

With the U.S. government pushing for digitization of the healthcare sector, there is a lot of interest in the SaaS healthcare sector. I have recently done interviews with CEOs of healthcare companies including Kryptic, with revenue in the double digits, which uses email applications to bring collaboration to the healthcare industry. Navinet has about 40% of U.S. providers using its multipayer portal that automates health plans. Phytel, with $20 million to $50 million in annual revenue, looks to motivate patients to reconnect with physicians, optimize healthcare with better decision-making data at the point of care, and extend its reach beyond the walls of a practice.