Newsline
HIT FUNDING
I.T. Ranks High in Capital Spend
James Turnbull,
a 37-year veteran
of the American
and Cana-
dian health care
industries, has
been named the
CHIME-HIMSS
2012 John E.
Gall, Jr. CIO of
the Year. Gall pio-
neered electronic
health records at
El Camino Hos-
pital in California
in the 1960s.
The College of
Healthcare Infor-
mation Manage-
ment Executives
and the Health-
care Information
and Management
Systems Society
select the re-
cipient annually.
Turnbull is CIO at
the University of
Utah Health Care
in Salt Lake City.
He has overseen
deployment
of EHRs and
computerized
physician order
entry systems
at three different
delivery systems
with three differ-
ent vendors.
Turnbull
Named CIO
of the Year
Hospitals and health systems
nationwide expect their capital expenditure budgets to drop below 2010
levels as they anticipate patient admission reductions, according to the
Premier health care alliance’s fall 2012
Economic Outlook. Just forty-one
percent of 617 survey respondents—
primarily hospital C-suite, and materials and practice area managers—are
projecting their capital spending to
increase compared to last year. This
is down from 42 percent in fall 2010
and a two-year high of 46 percent in
spring 2011.
When asked about the area in which
they expect to make the largest capi-
tal investment over the next year, the
hospitals surveyed noted I. T. as a top
priority. Some 43 percent cited health
care information technology and tele-
communications as the area
of largest spend, up from 34
percent in spring 2011. After
that, 34 percent cited capital
investments in infrastruc-
ture and construction as
their biggest area of out-
lay, up from 28 percent
in fall 2011.
MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS
Athenahealth to Buy Epocrates in
Big Move to Expand Market Share
Watertown, Mass.-based athenahealth Inc., which offers outsourced
physician billing services with practice management/electronic health
records software, will acquire point-of-care drug and disease reference
vendor Epocrates for about $293
million.
The acquisition brings to athe-
nahealth a mobile computing ven-
dor with sizable market share of the
nation’s physicians—some 330,000
users—but with a history of being un-
able to fully monetize its content and
huge client base. Clinical users get the
Epocrates content for free with spon-
sors, particularly drug companies,
funding the service. Athenahealth
expects Epocrates to have about $110
million in revenue during 2012, down
from $113 million in 2011.
