HIMSS14: Cloud EHR Vendors Court Hospitals

Athenahealth brings care coordination app to hospitals, while startup iCare aims to take "cloud VistA" beyond academic trials.

To the extent cloud-based electronic health records (EHR) systems have won success, they have so far done it in the physician-practice market rather than with inpatient systems for hospitals. At this week's HIMSS Conference, Fort Lauderdale-based cloud EHR startup iCare will for the first time be actively courting enterprise customers for cloud apps that put an HTML5 front end on the established government open source VistA system. Athenahealth is also showing its ambitions to capture the hospital market, although so far with a care-coordination module it says will work with any EHR rather than its own AthenaClinicals EHR.

I met with iCare prior to the conference for a demo of its web and mobile apps. With refreshing modesty, chief marketing officer Don Cook acknowledged the product is probably not ready to run the operations of a big hospital yet -- "probably an under-100 bed facility would be our sweet spot" -- and will need to win the imagination of a daring hospital CEO, willing to try something new.