Through The Digital Looking Glass

Some dominant EHR vendors are building out their platforms for the emerging needs of health systems

- Paddy Padmanabhan

An analysis of the financial and market performance of the top 15 publicly held global technology consulting firms tells us one thing; in 2017, global IT consulting firms struggled in the healthcare segment.

Our report, we call out the WITCH companies (an acronym for Wipro, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Cognizant, HC), mostly saw declines in growth rates for their healthcare businesses.

One firm, Wipro, saw a YoY decline in revenue from 2016 to 2017, while at the other end, Cognizant saw the HLS business outgrow the company.

The outlook for 2018 seems a little blurred for all companies we reviewed. Policy uncertainties at the beginning of the year seem to have given way to anxieties about the overall demand environment for traditional IT consulting companies. As a result, they all are trying to figure out their next play in the healthcare markets. Our latest annual survey report on healthcare IT demand tells us that there is a clear shift toward value-based care in the markets and a focus on digital transformation led by patient engagement and care transformation initiatives, with data and analytics being key enablers for the transformation. IT consulting companies are responding to market signals and classifying everything as “digital,” which is proving to be a meaningless term when assessing their healthcare market strategies.