Industry Trends
Hospitals, pharmacies, community clinics, practitioners and others - even patients - using systems enabled with Health Level Seven (HL7) standard messages can readily exchange electronic data, without hindrance of geography, specific hardware and software. With this ability to freely exchange data among different computer systems, the vision of an Electronic Health Records (EHR) can become a reality.

Industry Trends
Hospitals are struggling to contain healthcare costs, staffing shortages, pressures from the CMS and the government, and having to compete with other organizations for delivering quality care. To deliver on these parameters healthcare providers require significant amounts of actionable information on their financial operations and their clinical efficiency to improve hospital quality. Not all of these organizations are being able to realize the full value of their investments in operational systems, which contain a wealth of untapped 'intelligence'.

Industry Trends
Planning for the efficient and effective delivery of healthcare services is a significant challenge. To meet this challenge, achieving the appropriate balance between human and non-human resources is important and requires continuous monitoring, evidence-based decision-making, and appropriate tools for resource optimization. Challenges experienced by organizations today include:

Industry Trends
In recent years, there has been an increase in the use of technology in the Healthcare industry resulting in making communication easier, aiding the decision-making process, and helping achieve a higher quality of patient care. However, all of the benefits of healthcare technology through these healthcare solutions will be lost if the availability, integrity and confidentiality of patient data is compromised. Since HIPAA was enacted in 1996, regulatory compliance has been a front-burner issue in the Healthcare industry.

Industry Trends
Revenue Cycle Management is one of the core processes affecting the cash flow for the healthcare providers. Its complexity lies in its system and knowledge intensity. The long cycle of obtaining revenue from payers is one of the major causes for higher costs, along with unpredictability of payments.

Industry Trends
The primary mission of healthcare providers is to deliver high-quality patient care in a cost-effective manner. However, the healthcare providers are facing several challenges, including acute shortage of medical personnel including physicians, trained nurses and paramedics, changing government regulations, pressure to keep pace with latest technology to beat competition, myriad administrative work and a host of other issues which creep into their duties as a healthcare provider.