Case study: U of Pittsburgh develops with vendors

At the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), execs are on to something really cool. Sure, they've deployed EMRs to 18 of their 19 hospitals, but that's already a given. What's really interesting is the extent to which execs at UPMC have taken the vendor-buyer relationship to a new level. Within the past 18 months, CIO Dan Drawbaugh signed an eight-year, $402 million deal with IBM to overhaul the facility's three data centers and a $300 million deal with Alcatel to upgrade telecom/network infrastructure. What's neat about these deals is not just their broad scope, which embraces 19 tertiary, community and specialty-care hospitals, health plans with 700,000+ members, 400 physicians' offices, home-care, rehab and senior-care services, but the way the deals are structured.  In the IBM case, both parties will invest up to $200 million to jointly develop healthcare software and systems, and with Alcatel, the two will work on first-responder technology. Drawbaugh has also struck similar deals with smaller players, including dbMotion, which provides web-based clinical data sharing. Drawbaugh expects these investments to provide "billions of dollars" in returns. Hey, you gotta love an IT investment that actually pays, rather than simply saves money (not that there's anything wrong with savings, of course). Go Dan!

Find out lots more about Drawbaugh's technology issues and strategy:
- read this detailed Information Week article

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IBM hopes open source will open HIT silos. Article

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