One of the nice things about all the writing done over the past year is that one can go back, apply some analytics and see exactly what topics/posts were popular over the past year.
So, drumroll please…
Following are the Top Ten Posts at Chilmark Research for 2008 with brief commentary:
10) Zagat Physician Rating Goes Live: There are now a plethora of physician rating services with this being but one example. Unfortunately, this service is restricted to Wellpoint members. Based on what we’ve seen from most payers in their seeming inability to truly engage consumers/members, doubt this Zagats service is getting much traction.
9) Wal-Mart EMR Mandate Implications: Wal-Mart is a massive presence in any of the markets it enters. Their decision to chose a single EMR solution for all of their retail clinics reverberated throughout the market. Now that Wal-Mart is rolling out the Personal Health Platform Dossia among its employees, one can expect eClinicalWorks to be closely tied to Dossia as well.
8 ) Oracle+Cerner=Opportunity: Rumors come, rumors go and some seem to take on a life of their own, resurfacing on a firly regular basis. The rumor that Oracle will acquire Cerner does have some logic to it, but with the current financial mess, this won’t happen anytime soon.
7) Defining a Functional Model for PHRs or How Many Cooks Does it Take: This post took a critical look at the three functional models: one by HL7, another from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Project Health Design and the third from the payer organization AHIP. We’re not too keen on any of these models as it is the market that will define a functional model that delivers value, not academics which predominate the first two groups or one from the payers, which have selfish self-interests at heart.
6) Google Health Goes Live: Post went up the day that Google formally released Google Health to the market. A belated launch, some eight months after Microsoft released a pre-mature HealthVault. Google Health will slightly more mature than HealthVault coming out of the gates, as seemingly stalled. See post in the Number 5 spot.
5) HealthVault Surges, Google Health Flounders: After all the anticipation for Google Health and the pending battle royale for mind-share between Microsoft and Google for the hearts and minds of health concious consumers, the battle is turning out to be boring. Google is following its common laissez faire approach to developing its service (very thin on resources being deployed) while Microsoft is investing significantly, and it shows.
4) Mobile Health on the iPhone: Since the launch of the 3G iPhone earlier this year we have seen an incredible number of health & wellness apps showing up on the AppStore, which number well over 400 today. Recently, Apple redesigned the site to make it easier to see which apps are most popular. Loads of opportunity remains for those that are creative as most apps are pretty simplistic.
3) eClinicalWorks Tight-lipped on the Wal-Mart Deal: This post followed on the heels of Number 9 above. eClinicalWorks is one of the EMR darlings for smaller practices which remains a relatively untapped market.
2) Walgreen’s Ups Ante in Retail Health: In March, Walgreen’s made the dual move of acquiring both I-trax and Whole Health Management, two providers of corporate campus health clinics. What seemed like a good move then, may now be one that they are regretting as employers continue to downsize and trim costs. If Walgreens would have waited (and they could get the $$$ in this tight credit market) they would have been able to pick up these companies for a song today. Alas, hindsight is always 20-20.
and the Top Post in 2008 was…
1) Google’s Schmidt Outlines Health Platform: We all knew Google was going to release some form of PHR in 2008. We even saw some early screenshots back in August of 2007 when a few presentation slides slipped into the public domain. But after those slides, we heard nothing, saw nothing, but knew it was coming. Thus, when Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt took the stage as a keynote speaker at HIMSS, we waited in anticipation and Schmidt did not disappoint.
And that dear readers is what YOU, found most interesting at Chilmark Research, that is if we not include the post where we announced te release of our iPHR Market Report Executive Summary. We were absolutely thrilled with how popular that post was (it far exceeded the number 1 post on Google above) and even more thrilled at all the people who have downloaded this Ex. Summary (nearly 400 downloads for all corners of the globe, at least all continents, withthe exception of Antactica, we’re still waiting for that one to come in.
Thank you all for visiting, reading and commenting. We value your input and hope in return, we have provided some valuable analysis on the market.
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