Pri-Med is a medical conference geared towards folks involved in the primary care medicine of healthcare services.These could include small to large group practices to hospitals in a multi-specialty environment.
I generally do not attend talks for 2 reasons, (a) the pure-play clinical talks are not of interest to me and if they were, as I am not a physician I would not gain much out of it; (b) the action and the real answers are on the trade floor. Most often, talks for subjects that interest me are at a very primary level in such conferences.
5 years ago, this conference had no tech companies. Now, there were at least 35 tech vendors from gadgets to software to hardware to services. 2007 had a modest drop in the number of such vendors compared to 2006. This was mostly in the software space because of consolidations, change of focus for some of these firms and the now expensive real-estate to advertise and have a booth compared to previous years.
I spent most of my time talking to EMR (electronic medical records) companies like Allscripts, MediNotes, Cerner, McKesson, GE Medical, HCS, etc. I was disappointed in some of their representatives as either they knew only about their product and were clueless about their overall product release strategy or were generally clueless about the product once I started asking detailed questions. Some of them proudly talking about how they jumped ship. One would think that a company would at the very least put folks who know what they are doing as their representatives.
Further on the EMR's, I did ask the classic question of how each of them were different than other and no one really had a good answer on defensibility. Some of the systems I liked were from HCS and Catalis and folks like GE, Cerner and Allscripts, in my opinion, were at the bottom of the barrel. Maybe my standards are high, which they should be - given we are talking about 3rd generation systems in this domain.
The pharma folks did and always do a great job at company and product representation with much less obnoxious display of raw cash power in the kind of things they were giving away. It came as a welcome change for many ethically driven physicians.
Innovation: There was not much on the software side of the business, as I had expected. The EMR's are still in the "late 90's" stage of user intuitiveness, which is not entirely their fault given the massive complexities behind delivering even a resonably tight system. There were no start-ups that are truely changing some of the business models, neither was there any representation from GoogleHealth or Microsoft's HealthVault group. My take is that it though it may be a bit early for some of these folks to come, it would have been worth showcasing whats in the coming. Overall, disappointed and nothing new going on.
I did not spend anytime at the pharmas but the general sense was big on marketing low on evidence compared to last year. Again, a disappointment.
The real innovators however, were the large academic medical centers like Beth Israel Deaconess who had a modest booth but some incredible things to talk about.
Trends: The software folks, almost all of them, seem to either have some sort of a patient portal or have already launched one. The trend is in its 1st generation phase and will take a while to be truely integrated with all the modealities like labs, radiology, referral management, appointments, etc. Currently, from what I saw, the functionas and interface were in their infancy. Again, some of the academic centers were way ahead of the curve.
The device companies were hugely popular with the whole unregulated "medispa" speil. This is one of those industries that have grown to be a $6Billion+ capitalization since 2002 and continues to grow. Several of them were the usual suspets with a few "just seen on TV" types I'd like to call fly-by-night operators. What surprised me that they were targetting primary care physicians from a revenue upsel model.
Some of the pharma based device companies were showcasing several devices geared towards the self-use market.
I did see a 12 Megapixel Digital Camera with some incredible functions under $350! And I heard that the talks were good. I would not be inclined to go to Pri-Med next year unless the vendor list changes.
Labels: MEDICAL INFORMATICS
posted by Janak Joshi @ 10/15/2007 02:52:00 PM
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