Research Topics

Our research subscription program provides our clients with ten reports annually, as well as complimentary telephone inquiry and consultation services. The reports draw upon the following themes and topic areas for 2010. Individual reports are also available for purchase by non-subscribers and telephone and on-site consultation services can also be arranged. Please call or email us for further information and pricing.

Conversion to the creating and sharing of digital patient records is accelerating, driven by both internal and external forces. What are the key drivers? What barriers remain? How are regulatory factors, such as “meaningful use”, impacting healthcare organizations’ technology and implementation decisions? What are the latest advances in technology and how is the market reacting to them? How does organization size affect adoption? Who are the winners; the losers? What lessons can vendors and healthcare organizations alike learn from the successful adopters? At SRS, and through our business partners, we have been intimately involved in defining best practices and assessing the performance of healthcare organizations in this critical area.

For the past 50 years, government has been a major influence on the course of the healthcare industry. Under the Obama administration, this influence is growing even stronger. An expanded role for information technology is seen as a foundational element of the growing tide of federal and state initiatives. What are the latest announcements related to EMR incentives, interoperability standards, IT-related grants, federal and state-funded projects, regulatory reporting? How will these initiatives affect technology investment decisions in both the public and private sectors? At SRS, we closely track these initiatives at both the federal and state levels.

While the industry is consumed with the implementation of EMRs and EHRs, investment in these technologies alone, while necessary, is not sufficient to achieve a return on the investment. Leaders in the adoption of EMR technology are now deploying the next wave of applications that leverage their investment in these transactional systems. Typically, this involves an investment in the business and clinical intelligence technologies that allow healthcare organizations to provide clinical guidelines and to combine data from multiple applications to obtain the insights needed to assure that tangible operational, financial, and clinical benefits from this investment are realized. Who are the leading vendors? How do they differ? What are the challenges, barriers and best practices? At SRS, we have worked with both leading edge healthcare providers and analytics software suppliers and understand how to maximize the benefits that can be realized from these emerging technologies.

The concept of health information exchange has been a part of the industry’s vocabulary for more than 10 years yet, until recently, it remained a nascent and immature concept. The exchange of health information between both related and unrelated healthcare organizations is a cornerstone of the Obama administration’s policies of transformation and reform of the industry. What types of exchanges exist today? What are the key trends? Who are the key suppliers? How similar or varied are their offerings? What are the barriers, challenges and benefits of this concept? Where are we today? What are the business and technical prerequisites for success? What were the challenges and barriers faced by the early adopters? What best practices have emerged? What are the emerging federal interoperability standards and what are the implications for vendors and buyers? At SRS, we have tracked trends in this area for more than four years and have worked with a variety of both leading edge adopters and suppliers.

Wireless technologies of various types, including wireless networks, point of care tablets, smart phones, Voice Over IP (VoIP), and a variety of unified communications (UC) technologies, are transforming patient care delivery by integrating data, text, voice and image applications to provide instantaneous, untethered communications. These devices, combined with advanced information systems and real-time location systems (RTLS) technology are the harbingers of a new wave of operational transformation and process improvement. Although healthcare organizations are very early in the adoption cycle of many of these technologies, a confluence of factors, including the relentless drive to improve operational efficiency, patient safety and overall care quality, along with increased adoption of EMR and IP telephony technologies, can be expected to raise both awareness of, and investment in wireless, UC and RTLS technologies by healthcare organizations in the coming years. Where have these technologies been successfully applied today? How can the synergies between them be leveraged to optimum advantage? What are the challenges and barriers? What can be learned from early adopters? Who are the leading vendors; the niche vendors? What are some of the leading edge applications of these technology? At SRS, we have developed case studies profiling early adopters and have worked with leading technology suppliers in each of these areas.

Telemedicine traces its earliest roots back more than 40 years and, in many clinical areas, such as radiology, it has achieved mainstream status. But recent advances in wireless and communications technologies have spawned a new era and led to the commercialization of a wide variety of new applications. Newer, and perhaps even more exciting, has been the proliferation of a wide variety of wireless sensors and remote patient monitoring devices that augment more mature telemedicine applications with innovative wireless technologies that provide patient physiological and activity monitoring. But as vendors seek to commercialize these new technologies, many questions remain as to their widespread acceptance by physicians and patients and, therefore, their ultimate success in the marketplace. Where are we today? What are the key trends? What are the most innovative of these technologies? Who are the key suppliers? Which have the most promise for commercial success? What are the barriers, challenges and benefits of this concept? What are the business and technical prerequisites for success? What were the challenges and barriers faced by the early adopters? What best practices have emerged? At SRS, we have tracked trends in this area for more than four years and have worked with a variety of both leading edge adopters and suppliers.

At SRS, we survey senior healthcare organization executives and publish our “key indicators” survey results twice yearly. These surveys take the pulse of the industry in the areas of technology adoption, key IT management and governance issues, purchasing priorities, budgets, costs and other IT benchmarks. We also integrate information from vendor briefings to highlight product announcements with the potential to be disruptive and market changing, as well as announcements related to new business models, such as the “medical home” and the HIT market impact of these events. We combine this with extensive secondary research sources and match the results against our HIT maturity model to publish our annual “state of the industry” report, which also includes our predictions for the coming year and spending forecast.

At SRS, we monitor more than a dozen HIT news feeds and trade publications, as well as multiple professional research journals and abstract key events of interest consistent with our current research agenda and augment these abstracts with our analysis of why we deem them important to our clients. These analyses are published quarterly to our research subscription clients. We also publish a free monthly newsletter, which you can sign up for above.

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