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| Companies pay dividends for a number of reasons. Two of the foremost are 1. To return retained earnings to shareholders when the company believes that it cannot find a better use for the capital, and 2. To raise the share price if the company thinks its market valuation is too low.
My guess is that QSI's circumstance is the former. |
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| It is impossible to assert categorically that healthcare IT reduces the overall risk within a given institution. True, technology may provide a hedge against specific risks, but there will be a moral hazard in the way human beings respond to that reduced risk. And it is difficult to predict ex ante whether the moral hazard will outweigh the direct effect of the reduction in risk that is being sought in the first place. |
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| No doubt you've read the news: A 25-year-old Kaiser employee named Justen Deal has blown the whistle on the HMO's multi-billion-dollar implementation of HealthConnect, Kaiser's in-house name for the product suite provided by Epic Systems Corporation of Verona, WI. There's no need to rehash the story here, but I would be remiss if I did not take this opportunity to point out how these allegations relate to the economics of healthcare IT and software in general.To sum up: The problem at Kaiser seems to be one of taking a system that had been quite successful on a smaller scale with ... |
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| RaleighHIS seems to infer that Meditech's "integration story" propels them to success. I disagree. Meditech's system seems to be no more or less "integrated" than those of the other major vendors, all of whom seem less than eager to admit that they have some fairly loose coupling within their allegedly highly-integrated architectures. |
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| This morning Mr. HIStalk ran a very good interview with Jonathan Bush, Chairman and CEO of athenahealth, who seems to be a visionary and articulate executive poised to do great things for the industry. I'll comment on one of his points in particular: |
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| In a previous article we took a critical look at Metcalfe's law, focusing on the recent and well-reasoned argument that otherwise-intelligent people frequently overestimate the intrinsic value of network effects. In this article we'll examine the second half of Metcalfe's law — the cost curve — to demonstrate that while there might be a "critical mass crossover" point in communication networks beyond which network effects begin to dominate and the network explodes as a success, software systems exhibit the exact opposite behavior: A crossover point beyond which a system rapidly collapses on itself, creating a black hole that sucks up every unfortunate dollar that floats within its Schwarzschild radius.
If you think the following topic is esoteric, hard to follow, or even scarily geeky, you may be right. But given the amount of money you may have riding on bets that any one software architecture can be all things to all people, you owe it to yourself to become somewhat familiar with the underlying principles that seem to govern how software behaves on a large scale. Best of all, this article will provide a foundation for a subsequent empirical analysis of the long-term viability of the software and vendors that currently power the healthcare IT industry. Read on, and I'll do my best to keep the topic understandable.
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| In the previous article I promised to delve into the question of how the "big three" vendors and their peers can justify themselves as legitimate niche businesses within the broader IT and services market while simultaneously scorning their smaller rivals as "niche" healthcare IT vendors. To understand the answer, we need to turn back the clock more than 30 years to an early Silicon Valley success story that indirectly may have inspired the irrational exuberance of the Internet bubble and may — according to at least one group of people much smarter than me — be the driving force behind the recent Web 2.0 (or Bubble 2.0 as some cynics would say) phenomenon. Can we extend the same reasoning to the healthcare IT market? Read on and decide for yourself.
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| If you have not already done so, you must pick up a copy of Chris Anderson's excellent new book, The Long Tail (or at least visit his blog). It will likely change the way you think about many markets, but I'll comment on how it applies specifically to healthcare IT.
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