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| IBM teams with Indian hospital to offer hosted apps |
13 April 2007 |
| (InfoWorld) - IBM has teamed up with the Apollo Hospital Group, a large hospital chain in India, to offer hosted software applications for mid-size hospitals in India.
This is a largely untapped market in the country, and the market opportunity is at least $300 million over the next four to five years, said Mohammed H. Naseem, vice president for healthcare at IBM India, on Thursday.
IBM will offer its hardware, middleware, and services infrastructure, while Apollo will offer its healthcare domain expertise, Naseem said. The applications will come from Apollo and independent software vendors (ISVs), he added.
In the first phase, IBM is doing about 20 pilots across the country. These will not be hosted centrally, but will be implemented at customer sites. The company will quickly move to a hosted model so that hospitals will not need to run their own IT infrastructure. "We need to have a hosted model to scale across the country, and for hospitals to get the benefit of lower costs," Naseem said.
Mid-size hospitals are willing to spend increasing revenues on software applications that will enable them to gain a competitive advantage, Naseem said. They are currently facing competition from large hospitals, and are also not able to price their services as high as those of the larger hospitals. With IT, a significant portion of their cost will be shaved off, he added.
The initiative, called Health Hiway, will also target physician practices, pharmacy and third party administrators who will benefit from the array of services with minimal investment, IBM said.
The multiplicity of players in the healthcare industry like providers, payers, pharmaceutical companies has created the need for a technology interface for interoperability and portability of patient data between service providers and payers to ensure quality of clinical care, as well as cost effective third party claims processing, IBM said.
Other than a few large hospitals in India that have successfully implemented IT, most seem to be grappling with too much choice and very little understanding to evaluate the options, Naseem said.
The current applications to be made available to users include revenue management applications that allow the hospital to automate their revenue generation processes, and also to identify new revenue streams, hospital enterprise resource planning (ERP), learning management, health insurance claims processing, and performance management, including decision support and knowledge management.SEE ALSO:IBM will stack chips for more efficient processing
IBM conference tackles system complexity |
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| Mbeki’s Support Erodes in Party Vote in South Africa |
28 November 2007 |
| President Thabo Mbeki’s control of South Africa’s ruling party has shifted to his former vice president and bitter rival, the populist politician Jacob Zuma. |
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| Saudi police arrest 208 militants |
28 November 2007 |
| Saudi Arabia holds 208 suspected militants allegedly planning a series of attacks, officials say. |
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| Party checks Alexander donation |
28 November 2007 |
| The row over Labour Party funding draws in the party's Scottish leader Wendy Alexander. |
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| Donations row dominates papers |
28 November 2007 |
| The Labour party donations row, and its implications for the government, dominates Wednesday's papers. |
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| Labour funding row: Your views? |
27 November 2007 |
| Gordon Brown is facing fresh pressure over the Labour donations row. How should the party react? |
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| Labour checks Alexander donation |
28 November 2007 |
| The row over Labour Party funding draws in the party's Scottish leader Wendy Alexander. |
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| BBC's city big screen goes blank |
28 November 2007 |
| A big screen in a city centre is to go blank due to a hitch with planning regulations. |
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| Panelists: Content management, meet social networking |
28 November 2007 |
| Enterprise content management and social networking form a natural nexus that is already taking tangible form, a software executive said during a panel discussion Wednesday at the Gilbane Group's annual conference in Boston."People have real requirements to secure information, but also have a demand to interact with people," said John Newton, CTO of Alfresco, an open-source content management software maker. "We are starting to blur the lines between what's inside the enterprise and what's outside the enterprise."Panelist David Mendels, senior vice president of Adobe's enterprise and developer business unit, echoed the idea. "The biggest single shift we're seeing is from the infrastructure of content management to humans -- to how humans engage with it," he said. "The real question is, what experiences are you going to build for your end-users, and how are you going to securely connect that back to your back-end systems?"David Boloker, CTO of the company's emerging Internet technology group, touched upon security concerns as well. "When you end up in the Facebook world or the Web world, you have to ask yourself, is that information correct? Do you have to annotate it, do you have to clean that information?""There are people out there who will try to take your information or plant a worm," he added.Mendels predicted that enterprise rights management software for securing content will see wider use. "We've talked about this for a while, but I think we're really on the cusp of it starting to accelerate," he said.Beyond addressing bottom-line concerns, such as security, enterprises will soon be compelled to apply social-networking principles in a wider range of areas, said Andy MacMillan, vice president of product management in Oracle's enterprise content management division. "The Web is going to lead the way, but pretty soon, you're going to be talking about the call center, the checkout kiosk at the airport -- how do I personalize those things?"Panelists took questions following the main discussion. One audience member asked them to render an opinion on content management's adoption rate around the world.Newton said lower-cost options have diversified the roles of content management software: "We see content management being pulled into types of applications it normally wouldn't have been before.... It's changing -- it's much more democratized. It's not so much about compliance."Mendels said hosted content management services, such as Adobe's Share and Buzzword offerings, will see faster growth outside the U.S., particularly among SMBs.Panelists at one point peered into their respective crystal balls. Mendels said Adobe's goal moving forward is "creating applications and experiences that keep people in context."Ideally, he said, the current practice of jumping among e-mail programs, instant messaging services, and the phone would be no more. "We see a world where you should have all those experiences tied to one document," he said.Mendels gave the example of a person sending an e-mail that prompts the recipient to return the query by phone. "Instead of picking up the phone and calling you, the document can call you," he said.Boloker pointed to mashups, saying they represent a new "application paradigm we're all walking into." IBM is working on a drag-and-drop mashup development environment called QEDWiki, which Boloker demonstrated for IDG News Service following the panel discussion.MacMillan said enterprises must now focus on not just cataloging their structured and unstructured data, but also applying analytics against it. "I think the next big step for content management from the infrastructure layer is to turn BI loose on it," he said.But Newton's take centered more on philosophy than a given technology. The Web 2.0-social networking boom has unleashed a "wave of creativity" that stands in contrast to "introverted, left-brain thinking" types, in Newton's view. "What our industry needs to do is get out of our left-brain, introverted mindset," he said. |
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