Picis maintains its momentum in the perioperative IT sector
By ARTHUR GASCH
Healthcare InfoTech Contributing Editor
Picis (Arlington, VA), continuing its impressive momentum from the end of the year, when it announced new contracts with the Mayo Clinic (Rochester, MN), Emory University Hospital (Atlanta), and Jackson Memorial (Miami), has now announced a new contract with St. Luke’s-Shawnee Mission Health System (Kansas City, MO) that includes 126 pre-operative, surgery and post-op locations in four hospitals.
The installation will include CareSuite, Picis’ point of care management application; Chart+, which automates anesthesia records; IntelliNotes, which automates nurse caregiver charting; and HospiAudit, a costs-and-outcomes module. It also includes QuickQuery, which generates ad hoc queries and reports from the clinical data stored. One of the strengths of this product is its ability to interface to so many different medical devices, which provides automatic input of data to their database and reduces the amount of data which must be manually input.
We continue to believe that it is not the data input optimization which sells these systems, and that there is no great reduction in time to chart automatically. Rather, it is the realization by anesthesiologists that data is power, and the need to document utilization, outcomes and quality issues is the determining factor. The doctors have become willing to put up with the trouble of getting the data into these systems, so that on the back end of the process, they can get back the data they need to manage the perioperative setting and to fine-tune their practice of anesthesiology.
It may be that Picis’ competitors don’t announce contracts or something, but we are seeing nothing like the string of successful sales negotiations that Picis has been able to put together in the last few months from any other competitors in these inpatient POC segments. However it is doing it, the company has hit on a successful formula for penetrating the perioperative information systems market something its competitors will either need to figure out or face being displaced by this growing and successful vendor.
There are about 32,000 inpatient operating rooms in the U.S., and about two PACUs per OR in inpatient settings. In the last four months, Picis has obtained contracts to automate more than 640 perioperative beds. While still a drop in the U.S. bucket of 96,000 OR/PACU beds, it is still impressive for four months’ sales activity.
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