Neither of those sound like good news for Oracle Health. After the lofty proclamations of the last couple years. still…
Thomson Reuters to Sell Healthcare Business
News and information provider Thomson Reuters has announced that it will sell its healthcare business, which includes software and data products for clinicians, hospitals, and drug manufacturers. CEO Thomas Glocer said in the announcement that its healthcare business “lacks the integration with and global scale of our other units” and that proceeds from its sale will be reinvested in its core markets of financial, legal, media, and science.
Thomson Reuters is a publicly traded company with annual revenue of $13 billion and market capitalization of $31 billion. The company says the healthcare business generates $450 million in annual revenue, with a profit margin comparable to its consolidated 19.3%. Its products are used by more than 3,000 US hospitals.
Popular Thomson Reuters healthcare products include Micromedex (drug reference), CareNotes (patient education), ClinicalXpert Navigator (mobile patient information), CareDiscovery (benchmarking), CareFocus (clinical surveillance), Ascent (financial management), The 100 Top Hospitals program, and Clinical Performance Solutions (formerly Solucient and Medstat).
The company’s benchmarking database stores information from more than 750 healthcare organizations and is claimed to be the largest in the industry. Its MarketScan data warehouse contains information on more than 40 million unique patients. Thomson Reuters announced on May 25 that it had jointly developed a data and analytics solution with GE Healthcare to support population-based effectiveness and outcomes research.
The company says it expects the sale of the unit to close by the end of the year. Morgan Stanley and Allen & Co are its financial advisors.
We interviewed John Loyack, the company’s director of healthcare product management, in December.
This will probably become more common over the next couple of years, as large companies trying to dabble in health care realize that it’s not as lucrative as first imagined. Not to mention, health care is hard to figure out!! Exit strategies already being formulated at some companies, no doubt. Microsoft and Google have already scaled back significantly despite having good products, others sure to follow.
You know what I would do with it? Get rid of the giant up-front costs that are associated with the product. Place all of the data/content into a nice API container (that would make it easy for developers to adopt). Then charge on a per-call basis.
These HIT content providers need to realize the key to adoption is they need developers to use them! Plus the costs are ultimately going to be passed off to the hospital anyway once the product is in production. So its not like the big money is no longer there…
Barely a mention of a the product Thomson already announced it was sunsetting – Ascent. Many Ascent users are wondering if a new owner might salvage it. Or will the new owner scrape by with a barebones support staff to fulfill the rest of the contracts. The Ascent product, like most Contract Management Systems, can make or break a hospital/system – a 10:1 ROI is hard to beat. I have supported the product since 1998 and will be sad to see it go. But Thomson couldn’t quite get the software and support to meet many customer needs; the Thomson leaders didn’t understand the diamond in the rough, and so the software will fade into the sunset 12/31/2012.
This is proof that you can’t just purchase business and clinical healthcare assets and expect to flourish without know how and investment. TR could care less about improving healthcare as they profess in PR statements and the WSJ. It will be interesting to see who takes the tired brands in the portfolio and what they do with them.