Sorry David, I haven't gone quiet on purpose, but I've been quite busy at work and home (the holiday thing, you know) and just had not been to the site in a while.
Here's my rough read of things, while not trying to be critical of a competitor, but also reasonably frank:
Currently only APACHE delivers product that does point of care decision support, and we've been doing that for more than five years. While our clinical R&D heritage goes back to the 70's, our commercial corporate experience since our inception ~6 years ago is to deliver these products on a state-of-the-art client-server platform to open standards, with full turn-key support including clinical and technical support, available 7X24 if the application warrents it. We currently deliver our systems utilizing Sun Microsystems servers, windows clients, Oracle's relational database, and our own HL7 interfaces. Typical installations inlude these interfaces that capture 95-100% of the information required for risk adjustment and decision support from other existing HIS systems. Our clinical R&D shop is pre-emminent and world reknown in model development for these purposes, and the data bases we own, aqcuire, and develop are also by far the best in the country for developing these models. We also have products for the "retrospective" decision support for all of our product lines, which is where the bulk of our competitors are at today. Also of note is that we have NEVER lost a customer. Feel free to vist our web site at apache-msi.com to see the official latest and greatest on our company. I would also suggest trying Summit's web site summitmedical.com , but it has been down more that its been up lately.
SUMT's old business model was built around being a data collection and management vendor of choice to professional medical societies)...low cost, low service, but of higer volume. Thier historic products were DOS based, then they moved to windows a year ago, and have not totally converted this base over.
SUMT's new business model is aimed at entering the market space we are in today (point of care decision support), and is supported by thier access to the "Duke" CV databases (single institution represented only). Both of our companies (I believe...I know ours does) work with the ACC. Their new business model is based on a similar architecture for deployment I gather (client server etc...) but their just developing this capability, and with it learning (presumably) the lessons we learned years ago.
I personally believe that more competition in this market will expand the market place for all, since this is such a emerging market segment, I am pleased that Summit is gearing up. And remember, cash is great, but it does not define the market place winners. Be sure to do an exteremly detailed business plan analysis before placing a value on the assets that will be "built and/or acquried" via those assets. That's very difficult to do in this market place, and is what the analysts recommending/panning our companies spend thier time doing.
Hope your holidays are great!
Regards,
Scott |
