The announcement of long-anticipated Google Health Thursday by CEO Eric Schmidt may be more of a preview than a full-fledged launch, as this
CNet report indicates. And the offering does face many hurdles, as described in The Wall Street Journal and this Venture Beat Life Sciences
post. Still, by joining Microsoft Corp. and Revolution Health Group LLC in the space, Google is spotlighting the consumer side of an arena -- electronic health records -- that has seen and continues to see a large amount of strategic activity.
As we'll be reporting in more detail in the March Corporate Dealmaker magazine, big companies ranging from GE Healthcare to 3M Health Information to McKesson Corp. see major opportunities in digitizing the vast and paperwork-plagued U.S. healthcare system. Each has made acquisitions to help it approach the problem from a particular strategic angle.
In 2005, for example, GE Healthcare paid $1.2 billion for IDX Systems Corp.,
as reported in The Deal, gaining a specialist in electronic transfer of medical images. In 2006 McKesson Corp. paid $1.8 billion for Per-Se Technologies Inc.,
The Deal reported, gaining an electronic pharmacy network that spans 90% of U.S. drugstores.
At the opposite end of the spectrum are hundreds upon hundreds of startups, many of them venture-backed, some now fairly sizable, that were founded to tackle tasks ranging from medication management to electronic transcription to mobile diagnostics.
Indeed, the sheer number of these mostly incompatible systems is one major impediment to bringing electronic efficiency to the U.S. healthcare sector. But thanks in part to a push from the U.S. government for standardization, a wave of consolidation is underway. This October 2007
article in For The Record, a publication for the Health Information profession, reported 471 acquisitions in 2006 and said that 2007 was shaping up as another record year.
What's it like for corporate dealmakers to plot strategy and execute deals in a landscape that's changing this fast? That's what we'll explore in our March article. -
Kenneth Klee
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