First off, it is always suspicious when a blog post covering trends includes a product category that is provided by the author’s company.  However, with that being said, the author in the article has some good points that I would like to add some commentary to.

1. Increased emphasis on business intelligence. 

– Completely agree with this statement as it is becoming a necessity for the quality reporting being required for physician performance and the healthcare reform.  However, the challenge that still faces large healthcare entities is that in a lot of cases have multiple EMR data repositories that make it very challenging to get synced into a single data warehouse.  This challenge will drive large healthcare entities to continue to standardize on a single EMR.

2. The advent/adoption of Patient Relationship Management (PRM) software.

PRM’s must be fairly new as this is the first time I have seen it any stream and have not heard it discussed in any EMR vendor discussions.  It is always interesting to see how new systems/approaches affect the large EMR vendors.  Will they add PRM functionality to their existing system or partner with another company that can be integrated.

4. Patient portals will shift from being static, one-way sources of info to dynamic, two-way collaboration environments.

Not only are they static but they are still non-existent in a lot of cases.  There are major healthcare entities in this nation that still don’t have a portal rolled out to all their patients.  For those that lag behind, will they implement these collaboration features or continue to be late adopters?

Note:  content on shifts is provided by Healthcare IT News.

Maybe but…2013: The year healthcare IT will experience these six shifts