Selling Technology to Healthcare: The Time is Now
Wednesday, April 7, 2010 11:39Due to the turmoil surrounding President Obama’s new health care bill, one of the hottest topics of conversation in this country in 2010 has been healthcare. No matter what school of opinion you side with, both sides of the healthcare spectrum from insurance providers to pharmacies, are continuing to innovate, and therefore providing actionable opportunities to sell technology. This strive to keep a competitive advantage in their respective markets, in conjunction with the continuous industry and political buzz, makes now the perfect time to sell technology to businesses in the healthcare industry.
On the consumer-facing pharmaceutical side, CVS Caremark is taking huge strides and making big investments to improve the customer experience through personalization capabilities and simplification. Not only will it be more crucial than ever to have secure, reliable data storage to host customer and patient data, but CVS is connecting this information with a “customer engagement engine” in its stores. The project, called “RX Connect,” began rollout in the beginning of 2010, and CEO Thomas Ryan stated that CVS will “[make] investments in technology that will position [them] well for the evolving healthcare environment.”
CVS Caremark CIO Stuart McGuigan said, “The vision behind the merger [with Caremark] was to bring together all the different touch-points in pharmacy care…to create one unified experience for the patient, providing the most cost-effective pharmacy solution for the client or payer. To help make this vision work, our IT organization was presented with the challenge to ensure that we could appropriately support this approach with reliable, scalable technology. This means that we still need to do everything that a good IT department does—doing things faster, better and for less money year over year—but we also need to continually invest in new capabilities to keep CVS Caremark’s competitive advantage.”
http://www.cioinsight-digital.com/cio/200912/?pg=22
It is clear that CVS’ focus for the near future is to create a comfortable, dependable, and personal environment for their customers both in their retail stores and online. Storing all of their patient data and translating it into a functional and personalized service will require huge investments in technology, and it appears that the company is more than ready to take these massive steps.
Next time, we’ll take a look at the health insurance side of the industry and the kinds of initiatives providers are making, and how enterprise technology sales reps can maximize on these opportunities.
- Carolyn Sebasky
carolyn . sebasky@salesquest.com
978.749.9999 ext. 107
