Glorikian believes China also has to adopt HIT in order to manage care for its massive rural population, as well as handling emergency response to epidemics, such as bird flu and H1N1. "You just start adding up the reasons it becomes persuasive as to why they need to migrate in this direction," he says.

And unlike many other countries, it's easy for China to move into HIT as they can basically start from scratch. "There isn't a huge infrastructure in place they're trying to make things fit into," Glorikian says. "If the you want to implement something that's best-of-breed or best-in-class, they can migrate to it, there's nothing in their way."

Clinical decision support systems

Scientia believes the beneficiary of much of the growth in HIT will be tools like clinical decision support systems (CDSS) that help doctors better manage patients to save costs and improve outcomes.

"A very interesting area," says Glorikian. "Clinical decisions support systems; we're seeing that crop up in different embodiments in different places. In some, you're seeing diagnostic tests that have sort of a CDSS component built into them. It's not just telling you the results of the test," he says. "It really arms the physician with... a directional piece of information. It's not telling them what to do, but it's highlighting areas of interest."

For instance, if a physician decides on a course of treatment outside the normal paradigm, an alert pops up. Such safeguards can help avoid unneeded tests or medications, according to Glorikian.

While flagging dangerous drug interactions is relatively easy, and in place at most pharmacies in the U.S., Glorikian says, he believes there are more exciting tools in the pipeline, including genomics-based CDSS systems that can tell doctors when a drug or treatment plan isn't right for someone based on their genetic makeup.

By making personalized medicine an accessible reality, these CDSS systems could give a marketing edge to front-of-the-pack hospitals that want to stay competitive. "It's very quickly becoming something implemented in different hospitals," says Gloirikian, "as a strategic differentiator from the place next door."

Already Partners Healthcare, a major Boston health system encompassing world-class centers like Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women's Hospital, has signed on with Hewlett-Packard to develop genomics software for its network.

Of course, there are still some kinks that need to be worked out. "There's not going to be a straightforward way to make money [with CDSS]," says Glorikian. It all depends on the model. "Is it based on the package? Or based on updating the system constantly? There are multiple ways to skin this cat," he says.

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