Selecting Your Healthcare Software Company

When you buy typical software, you usually have a narrow range of software companies to choose from. Office software tends to come in a limited range of choices.

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Perhaps there are only one or two primary providers of the kind of software you need. This makes it relatively easy to make the choices you need to make. Sometimes, if you have questions or concerns, all you have to do is check online forums for ratings on an individual product. You can also just ask questions about the feature.

Over the years software companies have come and gone. A prime example is WordPerfect Corporation. Once the dominant word processing software company, WordPerfect slipped into oblivion while the software itself went through several other owners and is still a major contender in the field of office suites.

However, when it comes to healthcare software companies, the field is very broad. For once thing, there is a wide variety of healthcare software programs available but the demand is much narrower than it would be for an office suite or a video game.

In the Software 500 list for 2003, the healthcare software and services segment showed growth. At that time the largest healthcare software company was Cerner and it showed a growth of 40 percent over the previous year. For Cerner, that meant that they did $617 million in software and services revenue that year.

In the most recent listing (2006) for the Software 500 list, there were 12 healthcare software companies (including Cerner). In 2003, there were only 8 in the top 500 software companies.

These are the big companies. Typically they provide software management programs that allow medical practitioners to kept records, make claims, track patients, and analyze patterns.

There are also targeted healthcare software companies that focus on specialty practices and health issues such as diabetes, renal failure, liver disease, various forms of cancer, and bowel disease.

What makes healthcare software companies different is that there are many combinations of healthcare issues and concerns throughout the world. They have to be aware of the needs of the bigger healthcare institutions as well as having to be aware of the different healthcare systems around the world.

Healthcare software that focuses on a specific health issue can focus just on diabetes, for example, but a healthcare software company that focuses on the provider has to be aware of the laws of the country and changes in legal requirements such as the privacy issues relating to individual healthcare.