Innovation Pulse

With Google, IBM and Microsoft all setting sights squarely on healthcare, and analysts predicting 30 percent of providers will run cognitive analytics on patient data by 2018, the risk of investing too late may outweigh the risk of doing so too soon.

Now the question is whether cyber criminals could someday emulate that approach to access encrypted patient data.

Even though it has felt, perhaps, as if the opposite was true for several years, hospitals and medical practices are captains of their own ICD-10 ships -- a fact that's more apparent now, literally days from shore, than ever before.

The notion of gleaning insights from mountains of health information -- and then applying those precisely to individual patients -- hinges on the confluence of various factors. But it all boils down to one magic word.

Could chronic care management be the new meaningful use? Some entrepreneurs see even greater financial incentives on the immediate horizon.

Around the turn of this century, a saying popped up in certain IT circles: We're all going to agree on specification and compete on implementation. When health IT vendors start adopting and implementing HL7's FHIR spec, things could start to get interesting.

When Mayo Clinic CEO John Noseworthy, MD, challenged his staff to broaden its patient access reach, he went big. Really big. His goal? Connect with 200 million patients by 2020. Other providers are getting just as ambitious.

Boston Children's and Penn Medicine faced similar choices: They could purchase existing apps on the open market, with no guarantee they would fit smoothly into their existing infrastructure and workflows; or they could write the apps internally.

Healthcare organizations willing to break the tried-and-true approach to acquiring IT products are creating applications that are more closely aligned with their needs. And potentially getting equity in a successful startup.