Today on Health in 2 Point 00, we resume our two-part series with part B and bring our promised special guest! Continuing from the first part of Episode 110, Jess and I discuss the women and family health startup Maven raising $45 million in its Series C round with celebrity investment. 1UpHealth, the MassChallenge HealthTech Finalist, raises $8 million; IntelyCare raises $45 million bringing the gig-economy approach to nurse staffing raises, and HealthJoy raises $30 million in Series C funding. The hospital owned ACO umbrella services company Caravan Health acquires Wellpepper, and Sharecare acquires Visualize Health; are these good acquisitions? -Matthew Holt
Why We Won’t See EHR Consolidation Anytime Soon
All too frequently I get the question:
When will we see the EHR market consolidate?
Not an unreasonable question considering just how many EHRs there are in the market today (north of 300) and all the buzz regarding growth in health IT adoption. There was even a recent post postulating that major EHR consolidation was “on the verge.” Even I have wondered at times why we have not seen any significant consolidation to date as there truly are far more vendors than this market can reasonably support.
But when we talk about EHR consolidation, let’s make sure we are all talking about the same thing. In the acute care market, significant consolidation has already occurred. Those companies that did not participate in consolidating this market (Cerner, Epic & Meditech) seem to have faired well. Those that pursued a roll-up, acquisition strategy (Allscripts, GE, McKesson) have had more mixed results.
It is the ambulatory sector where one finds a multitude of vendors all vying for a piece of the market and it is this market that has not seen any significant consolidation to date and likely will not see such for several years to come for two dominant reasons.
