Austin Merritt

Intuit has a large presence among SMBs in most vertical industries aside from healthcare. They have muscled their way to significant market share in the retail, manufacturing, distribution, nonprofit, property management, and construction industries primarily through its QuickBooks product line.

Last week Microsoft announced it is entering into a partnership with Athena to make their systems more compatible. The move was predicated on two hospital clients building bridges between Amalga and AthenaClinicals to share patient information. Is this the first step toward an EHR acquisition?

The medical software industry is far from supporting the iPad on a meaningful scale. Buyers would think that vendors eager to grow market share would quickly adopt new, flashy technologies, but software vendors are surprisingly slow to react. Electronic health records vendors need to get on board or face the prospect of losing market share to faster-moving competitors.

Is “horizontal” accounting software dead? Well, maybe not dead, but these days most organizations are looking for vertical solutions – software designed for their industry. While every company needs accounting software, a surprisingly small number of firms are implementing horizontal (i.e. generic, cross-industry) accounting systems these days.

Selecting electronic medical records software is notoriously difficult. The EMR market is flooded with several hundred vendors that cover the full spectrum of pricing and functionality, and clinics often have trouble cutting through the marketing noise. All healthcare providers are in a precarious situation, EMR systems are very expensive and can be tough to implement.