Stem Cell Meetings

Just returned from the CIBMTR/ASBMT meetings in Hawaii. We introduced our new ComprehensiveBMT product for Blood and Marrow Transplants. Its obvious that HSCT is a major growth area for our software and for medicine in general. I can almost hear the old industrialist who told Dustin Hoffman to go into plastics telling a 2011 Graduate to go into "stem cells, that is the future".

The researchers and clinicians who are working in this area really need some new product options. They are mostly scientific types so they do not appreciate all the features of our products (ontology, dynamic revision of the data structure, configuration without programming, etc) but they really understand the benefits of being able to aggregate data from all sources to pull together a 360 degree view of each patient and they understand the pain from having one size fits all systems that cannot be customized to their individual needs. Yet they certainly do not want to enable some software company to tell them how to conduct their research. Could be a great opportunity to help these folks dramatically improve their research and clinical effectiveness.

Reading Tea Leafs of the Federal Budget

We have been waiting anxiously awaiting President Obama's proposed budget for FY 2012 to see what kind of signals he sent regarding spending priorities for the future. It was released yesterday and contained a reasonable increase for the National Institutes of Health compared to the decrease that had been suggested by House Republicans. The absolute amount of the increase is less important than the demonstration that the administration will continue to fund healthcare research.

We have been waiting to see if the funding priorities continued in the same direction before we decided to dedicate time and resources to the Accountable Care Organization (ACO) initiative. It appears that we have enough information that we can finish our ACO product and begin to sell to selected ACOs. While the exact specifications for ACOs are still under development our products are sufficiently flexible that we can configure them based on what we know now and then reconfigure them if the government takes a surprise turn.

Gary