The 18^th annual Executive War College for lab managers was held last week in New Orleans. Attendance was at its highest ever and the speakers and sessions were again top notch in sharing best practices, industry trends, and emerging technologies. Two consistent themes emerged. The first was accountable care, and how labs must exhibit their value within an ACO. The second was how labs must compete for the fastest growing segment of the testing business, the outpatient practices.  

A labs value to an ACO? Labs contribute 70% of the objective clinical data to a patient’s chart, at only 2-3% of the overall healthcare spend. That’s pretty good value. Yet, the CMS reimbursement rates and ACO allocation for lab testing is feeling downward pressure. So labs are pressured to prove their value in more ways. One suggestion was to use lab data more effectively in the management of chronic disease. For example, report on whether your diabetic patients are being tested at the right intervals and whether their conditions are improving  (through HBA1C levels). Another suggestion was to actively engage patients in their care --- sending lab reports in a way that patients will actually understand and act upon them. Wouldn't outcomes improve if patients participated actively in their care plan?

Competing for the lab business of the outpatient practices... Keith Laughman, President/CEO of Med Fusion, a clinical lab in Texas claims that labs are largely focused on their own lab operations, and might be more competitive if they viewed the problem through the eyes of the outpatient physician. Keith showed a great picture of a primary care group trying to deal with clinical data from 4 different labs, 2 imaging systems, two specialists, and the hospital in trying to see the single comprehensive clinical picture of the patients they treat. Doctors in these settings would benefit from a system that brought all of those service providers together in a single environment; either in the practice’s EHR or through a universal reporting system.

So, I have two questions that I’d love your thoughts on.

1. Do you feel that your patients are well informed of their lab results? Before you answer, take a look at the #2 gripe patients have about their doctors at this consumer reports survey.
2. Does your outreach solution work well for orders/results to only your lab, or can it accommodate the other labs that the practice MUST also order from.

Pat

Liaison Healthcare’s EMR-Link team members are headed to New Orleans for the 18th Annual Executive War College on Lab and Pathology Management. Pat Wolfram and Jim Sheils will be there to share their perspective on solving business challenges that clinical laboratories are facing during 2013.  

Liaison Healthcare’s EMR-Link connects clinical laboratories to EMR solutions, streamlining order entry for physicians, clinicians and lab employees. “We have a stake in the game as well”, stated Pat Wolfram, Director of Marketing and Product Manage for EMR-Link.  “As leaders in this space, it is important for Liaison Healthcare to spend time networking with lab leaders so that we can ensure our solutions address their needs in the perpetually changing laboratory marketplace.” 

Jim and Pat both agree that the key learning objectives for this year’s event include:

• Understanding the landscape of mergers and acquisitions taking place within the lab and pathology industry
• Obtaining a better understanding of how labs and pathology organizations are supporting ACO’s
• Advancing our knowledge of key lab management and operational challenges that EMR-Link could solve.

I personally think that Pat and Jim and the many labs represented at the conference are going to learn a great deal throughout the next few days.  It will be exciting to learn about the takeaways from each session and the many networking opportunities.  I know our blog will be rich with ideas, educational experiences and provide insight into the challenges that lab and pathology organizations will be experiencing throughout the remainder of 2013.

Shannan Vance 
Marketing Director
Liaison Healthcare Informatics

CMS and ONC recently released a joint fact sheet that describes progress made as part of HITECH act. According to the fact sheet, eligible hospitals and physicians have participated in the EHR incentive programs in record numbers. As of now, 75% of eligible hospitals and 44 percent of all eligible physicians have EHR incentive payment for meaningfully using certified EHR technology. There are now 941 vendors providing more than 1,700 unique certified EHR products indicating a diverse number of systems in use. All these systems pose the challenge of seamless exchange of information between different venues of cares.

That is why now CMS and ONC are making this their next key focus area. As part of this push, they are planning to leverage existing programs and resources to promote interoperability. One of them is through Stage 2 Meaningful Use requirements regarding health information exchange between providers. There are others in the industry that are also rushing to solve this challenge like the recently formed Common Well Alliance.

We believe this challenge can be solved by establishing cloud-based networks that connect all the care venues utilizing the standards that are available today, whether it is Direct or HL7 messaging.  We have created networks in other industries (Global CRO integration hub in support of clinical trials, Exchange Network in support of supply chain transactions etc.) to support flow of information between different trading partners and similarly in healthcare we have created a lab information hub. We will see a growing number of these cloud-based networks that support different flows of information in healthcare as well.  

What do you think?

Naveen

When companies look for a Master Data Management (MDM) solution, traditionally, they think of an on-premise software solution. However, this is changing as the amount of data that needs to be managed is exploding in terms of velocity, volume, and complexity (think semi-structure/unstructured data). As more companies begin to leverage cloud-based solutions to take advantage of a cost-model that has scale and elasticity built-in, software vendors are trying to follow suit and move into this space in terms of solution offerings. The net effect of this is a reduced customer experience, in what I like to term “MDM-Lite”. I’ve seen it time and time again in terms of data integration and data management. Companies scramble to retrofit their on-premise offering to fit a cloud-based or SaaS model, and in doing so, the customer is left with only a subset of the product capabilities.

Liaison is different. Our MDM solution is celebrating its 11^th year as a fully cloud-grown MDM service. In fact, it predates the socially excepted coined term “cloud” which was adopted in 2006 in a speech by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt at an industry conference. (Though the term cloud computing dates back as far as 1992.)

It also predates the term “SaaS” (Software-as-a-Service) by 4 years, which was first termed by John Koenig for the SDForum Software as a Service Conference in March of 2005.

So as Liaison’s MDM solution offering (known as Content Director) gets ready to launch its revolutionary 12.0 release in May, there’s no “MDM-Lite” here. Liaison continues to innovate as the true first Cloud-based MDM solution born solely in the cloud. First-rate web-based data stewardship, combined with Liaison’s expertise and capabilities to implement the most complex of data models, workflows, and business rules. Liaison combines all of its disciplines around data integration, transformation, and management to create a truly unique multi-domain MDM solution offering.

Phillip Rossum from TDWI recently published an article entitled “The Top Ten Priorities for Next Generation MDM”. (The blog version can be read here). Liaison is proud to announce that our MDM solution meets all 10 of these.

Stay tuned as we get ready to launch our next generation MDM solution – born and raised in the cloud.

As technology and business trends continue to converge, companies are beginning to rethink their IT infrastructure and how best to integrate on-premise with cloud-based services and enterprise applications.

As I discussed in my article, Best Approach to Data Integration in the Cloud: A Revealing Look at Two iPaaS Options, enterprises and midmarket organizations are increasingly looking to the cloud for data integration. A cloud-based approach enables businesses to reduce infrastructure costs and easily scale their capabilities without the capital outlay.

Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) is a platform for building and deploying integrations within the cloud and between the cloud and enterprise. With iPaaS, users can develop integration flows that connect applications residing in the cloud or on-premises and then deploy them without installing or managing any hardware or middleware.

iPaaS also makes it easier for companies to connect and interact with services via well-defined RESTful APIs.

The article describes two variations of the iPaaS model:

• Customer-driven iPaaS: The user is responsible for defining and managing the integration in a hosted Software-as-a-Service environment.
•  iPaaS managed service: The iPaaS vendor not only hosts the integration platform but also handles the Integration-as-a-Service.

Pulling the camera back and identifying that the integration platform is now bedrock to a broader, and more pervasive layer – the Data Management Platform, a third model must be added to my list. The Data Management Platform (DMP) utilizes data integration, transformation, and security as the basis for a much richer set of services around data management itself. A revisit to the two iPaaS methodologies must be looked at and refined.

The term “hybrid cloud” has been the means to describe the stitching together of services to connect two entities together to determine where the actual data integration takes place. When we look at data management in the cloud, a third option must be added to the list, which I am coining as the “Customer Collaboration Model”. This model is the hybridization (so-to-speak) within the cloud to differentiate what is managed, and what is customer driven, pitting itself in the middle.

This model is growing rapidly within the industry around the data integration space, and is rapidly growing to blur the lines of the traditional “hybrid model”. What is now taking place is the need to draw customers more directly into the platform in terms of data management, whether it be for analytics, governance, audit, reporting, etc.

Liaison is working feverishly to create this new cloud-based data management experience which is rolling out quite rapidly. We are layering this experience over the foundational bedrock of a best-in-breed managed integration platform and inviting you, the customer, to participate in the new data management model – the customer collaboration model. Stay Tuned!

John Halamka, M.D., MS, CIO, with Beth Deaconess Medical Center kicked off the keynote session by providing a "Top 5 List" for CIOs, which includes:

1. Healthcare Information Exchange
2. Security/Privacy
3. Clinical Decision Support
4. Patient and Family Engagement and Analytics
5. Business Intelligence and Quality Measures

That is quite a large "To-Do" list with already one quarter behind us!  

While overwhelming, the truth is all five are required to comply with regulatory requirements and to accelerate the move to the new, outcome-based payment models. There isn’t a silver bullet that can accomplish all of these, while most will require multiple vendors to implement.

Lonny Reisman, M.D., Senior Vice President and CMO of Aetna took the stage next to present the payer’s perspective.  

Reisman provided insights into how Aetna is working on predictive analytics to determine patterns of expected medical issues based on a patient’s current symptoms. To make these predictions, they collect and analyse massive amounts of patient symptom data. And while the data exists, the ability to aggregate and interpret it has proven tougher than they expected. This analysis provides a means for cutting costs, but with new research breakthroughs, should we only be analyzing big data just for the sake of trimming expenses?

A question posed by Graham Hughes, M.D., CMO, SAS was:“Is Healthcare Reform really just another Payment Reform? In other words, are we really trying to improve patient care at a reduced cost, or are we just trying to lower healthcare costs altogether?

Personally, I think they go hand-in-hand. In order to reduce costs the opportunity for drastically changing healthcare becomes the driving force of Healthcare Reform. Both will be painful throughout the healthcare ecosystem, so we might as well try to tackle both at the same time. We should strive to make it worthwhile enough to overhaul and improve healthcare systems, so that we do not end up with just a new payment model. 

Change is not easy for anyone, but we need to work together to ensure that we all can capitalize on the benefits that come from these changes. What are your top healthcare initiatives? Are they just cost-cutting efforts, or are you helping to improve patient outcomes as well?

Until next time,
Gary

In an Experian study, “Securing Outsourced Consumer Data” produced by the Ponemon Institute it was revealed that 46% of organizations do not evaluate the security and privacy practices of vendors before sharing sensitive or confidential information.
 
The survey of almost 750 individuals in organizations that transfer consumer data to third-party vendors was undertaken to increase understanding of data breach frequency when consumer data is outsourced, to determine what steps are taken to ensure vendor's data stewardship, and to evaluate privacy and security practices between companies and outsource vendors.
 
"Many companies have higher standards for their in-house data security practices than they have for vendors that they enlist to hold customer information,” said Michael Bruemmer, vice president at Experian Data Breach Resolution. “The standards should be consistent, because not adhering to the same policies leaves companies vulnerable."
 
When sharing sensitive and confidential consumer information, 49% said that they do not monitor or are unsure whether their organization monitors vendor security and privacy practices.
 

Additional key findings from the survey include:

•56% of respondents acknowledged incidents when their organizations did not act on a vendor’s data breach
•Outsourcing consumer information demands oversight survey results indicate that organizations that transfer or share consumer data with vendors experience data breaches more often than not
•65% of respondents said their organization had a data breach involving the loss or theft of their organization’s information
•64% of respondents reported their organization has experienced more than one data breach
•Training is essential to protect against data breaches. Causes for data breaches can be reduced significantly through enforcement of policies and effective training
•45% of respondents reported negligence as the root cause of third-party data breaches
•40% of data breaches were the result of lost or stolen devices
•Security and control procedures need improvement
•56% said their organization learned about a data breach accidentally
•Only 27% said the organization’s security and control procedures uncovered the incident
•23% said the vendor’s security and control procedures alerted the organization to a breach
 
“It is imperative that businesses and organizations place a priority on evaluating a vendor’s ability to secure sensitive data” said Dr. Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute.

In recent years the IT industry has been confronted with the convergence of several highly disruptive trends that are irrevocably changing the technology landscape. Mobility and the rise of consumer-owned devices entering the business IT environment, social media, and the commoditization of information assets have all played a role in the transformation of the industry. But perhaps no shift has been more seismic than the ascendance of cloud and SaaS based applications in the enterprise, and that expansion has, in turn, created unprecedented demand for solutions that can help streamline the integration of these new solutions. Indeed, according to a recent report by analyst firm MarketsandMarkets, the global Cloud Brokerage Services (CSB) market is on track to grow from $1.57 billion in 2013 to $10.5 billion by 2018, a compound annual growth rate of more than 45% over the five year period.

As the complexity of integrating a growing number of cloud services with other SaaS applications and on-premise systems continues to increase, we’ve expanded our SaaS Partner Program to offer the most comprehensive integration between our customers’ proprietary on-premise systems and our partners in-demand cloud solutions.

These efforts were recently recognized by CRN when the publication included Liaison in their 2013 Partner Program Guide, the second consecutive year our company has been named to the list which recognizes the top partner programs enabling the streamlined evolution of IT. We couldn't have done this without the support of our partner eco-system, and would like to thank each and every one of our partners for contributing to this success.

For more information, visit: http://www.crn.com/partner-program-guide/ppg2013.htm

Industry analysts predict that in 2013 mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide and that by 2015 media tablet shipments will reach around 50 percent of laptop shipments. A new era of development is on the horizon, particularly in the area of data integration. As the consumerization of IT fully dominates the enterprise IT landscape, many CIOs are concerned with how device proliferation will impact data integration and cloud-based enterprise apps.

Read more at Sandhill.com.

Information is becoming a critical asset for organizations across the globe. As it increases in value, so too do the number of threats, as well as the number of protocols and regulations from regulatory authorities designed to ensure that businesses adopt the solutions necessary to ensure that information is protected. While a comprehensive, compliant information security initiative does not come cheaply, there are solutions that will help keep costs down even as the challenges associated with protecting this critical business asset continue to grow.

According to the Aberdeen Group, organizations with encryption initiatives involving enterprise key management achieved an annual cost savings of nearly $100 per end-user compared to those that had no key management capabilities. The same report found that key management systems significantly improved an organization’s ability to support encryption in greater diversity and at higher scale.

As security challenges continue to emerge, Liaison is committed to evolving our offerings to create flexible, scalable, and agnostic key management solutions based on the latest industry standards.  To that end, we just announced several critical enhancements to our Key Manager, including support for OASIS KMIP, which significantly improves client interoperability and configuration usability. Other new features include Key Life Cycle, which adheres to the standards issued by the National Institute of Standards and Technologies, and Quorum-based administration, designed to reduce corporate risk associated with malicious administrators and satisfy the Payment Card Industry’s compliance requirement 3.6.6 for stored data protection.

To learn more about Liaison’s Protect Key Manager please click here.

Integrating and managing data in enterprises requires people with different skills, knowledge, and vested interests to work together. People build things, not tools; and people make decisions, even if data guides the decision. At Liaison Technologies, as our name implies, we realize how essential the human is for managing and integrating data.

Integrating and managing data means using applications and data in new ways.  Meaning that words like “research,” “locate,” and “discover” often get used. Automation to discover new things, and tooling to help people ask and answer new questions are extremely useful. Just as “Big Data” is a new and exciting area, “integration data” helps people make better decisions.

Enterprise data integration requires that many people be able to locate information about applications and previous integrations. If this available information doesn’t help the masses of people make good decisions, the information is not worth much. Same with information that has lots of errors. After all, implicit in SOA and cloud services is the idea of letting the many make decisions with confidence and independence. Again, “integration data” helps people.

SOA and cloud services, however, have clear boundaries. Users use the services without being able to see inside the implementation. Enterprise data integration and management often doesn’t have those clear boundaries. Thus things can spiral out of control. Thus tooling for governance and guidance provides management and data architects the confidence to let the masses use data. “Integration governance” also helps.

Without good data and sufficient decision-making power for the masses in an enterprise, integration and data management bogs down. Without leadership and governance, enterprise integration can become anarchy. Organizing large numbers of people towards a common end is part of why we have enterprises in the first place. That’s where we believe we help with data integration and management. We are proud of some very important ways we are pushing the state of the art. To learn more about the latest enhancements to the Contivo solution, please visit: http://liaison.com/products/transform/contivo

Data integration is becoming increasingly challenging for enterprises. While cloud solutions are opening up new opportunities and efficiencies across all segments of the enterprise, integrating data across cloud applications, and between cloud and on-premise applications, must become a priority for enterprises if they hope to leverage the efficiencies of cloud and keep data secure. 

Many enterprises are beginning to realize the importance of onboarding information management initiatives. According to Gartner,  “Beginning in 2014, markets aligned to big data and other information management initiatives, such as enterprise content management, data integration tools, and data quality tools will begin to see increased levels of investment.”* 

Although complexity continues to evolve around data management and integration, at Liaison, we’re committed to investing in the ongoing development of our solutions and services so that they remain flexible and scalable to the evolving demands of our customers and partners. To that end, we recently made a number of upgrades to our flagship data management and integration tool, Contivo. For instance, we added support for JSON documents and enhanced support for UTF-8 and Asian flat file formats.

Complexity and simplicity go hand in hand in data integration and data management.  Using data in new ways (much of the reason for doing data integration and management) can mean working with a bewildering variety of data and data formats.  Being able to make that simple is much of the reason for using tools in the first place.  We are proud that we’ve made many difficult things simple.  To learn more about the latest enhancements to the Contivo solution, please visit: http://liaison.com/products/transform/contivo

 

*Gartner Says Worldwide IT Spending Forecast to Reach $3.7 Trillion in 2013: Analysts to Discuss Latest IT Spending Outlook During Complimentary Gartner Webinar; January, 2013

Data integration, including Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), is becoming more and more important to SMBs and enterprises when it comes to developing a successful e-commerce strategy, a key area that these businesses are focusing on in hopes to match up with the big name enterprises like Amazon.

According to SMB Group, integration jumped from number four to number one on the list of priorities for medium size businesses over the past year, demonstrating the growing need in the industry for a tool that works for both SMBs and enterprises without a high cost and complexity.

The growing need for an affordable EDI offering is not new to Liaison. When we began developing a tool for our internal EDI, we started to recognize the struggles that our customers and other SMBs and enterprises were faced with, including the complexity that came with managing EDI implementations. It was through this recognition that our EDI Notepad was developed and why Liaison has continued to bring new enhancements to the offering, including our recent announcement of SmartTotal™ and XML view, to take on the growing issues and new complexities that businesses are challenged with. The tool has already been downloaded over 100,000 times since it first became available to the public in 2009.

To learn more about the new EDI Notepad features and enhancements, please visit: http://liaison.com/about-liaison/in-the-news/news/2013/03/04/liaison-technologies-strengthens-edi-notepad-tool-with-one-click-conversion-to-xml 

To download EDI Notepad for free, go here: http://eservice.liaison.com/software/edinotepad/request/default.asp.

The G2 Volume to Value Conference is where laboratory managers meet to share best practices in running a lab test business. You’ll see pathology labs, hospital labs, and reference labs represented there. The G2 theme for Spring 2013 was “Redefining Lab Services in a Changing Market” and indeed their market is changing. As with any industry, lab managers must provide a competitive service, with high operational efficiency, and at a profit (one hopes). Two industry trends that make particularly interesting to labs are the proliferation of EHRs in the out-patient physician office, and an ever decreasing reimbursement rate (led by Medicare) for the tests they perform. 

The Wednesday morning keynote by Paul Epner, M.E.d , MBA, struck a chord.  His paper,“Changing the Mission: Becoming Patient Centric” tells the labs to go beyond the traditional delivery of timely and accurate test results, and to instead provide greater value at the end points where the tests are ordered and results are interpreted. A lab will provide greater value when it is easy for a practice to order the correct battery of tests according to evidence based medicine, and sends lab results to the care team (including the patient) that are easier to understand and actionable.  

Mr. Epner’s proposal is spot on. Just about every lab outreach program can perform the right test and provide “timely and accurate test results” which are then sent to the practice’s EHR. But a lab will provide even greater value when they work with the practice’s EHR vendor to make it easy for a practice to place clean and complete orders, return lab results in a way that are easy to interpret and act upon, and provide patient-friendly lab reports that are easy-to-understand and actionable by the patients. It’s great to have an industry stalwart like Mr. Epner help lead that charge.

Does your solution make it easy to place lab orders electronically? 

Pat

With an optimistic outlook for merger/acquisition (M&A) activity in 2013, dealmakers are looking for ways to expedite successful transaction outcomes and reduce risk. Data integration and master data management (MDM) should not be underestimated as an enabler for success at every juncture in the M&A process — from the preservation of business continuity to a driver for post-transaction innovation. A successful MDM strategy can even lower the barrier on future M&A activity.

Read more at Sandhill.com.

No doubt about it, the complexity of integrating IT systems is proliferating. More regulations, diversification and federation of data, and growing security considerations, coupled with the diaspora of on-premise and hosted software, infrastructure, and platform offerings have made efficient integration a challenge. As businesses  come to the realization that the challenges of integration may be beyond the ken of in-house IT, they are increasingly looking to managed service providers (MSPs) that can offer a combination of technology, people, and processes designed to expertly streamline integration and data management for enterprises. When paired with purpose built technology solutions, the human element offered by many MSPs can be the secret sauce that delivers lower costs, simplicity, and better security for enterprise customers.

I am proud to share the Liaison has been ranked among the top ten elite MSPs in Nine Live Media’s MSPmentor 501 Global Edition (#9) and the MSPmentor 200 North America Edition (#8). Recognized for our comprehensive service offerings, including data management, cloud and on-premise integration, data and application security solutions, as well as our professional services, this recognition from Nine Lives Media affirms the success of our efforts to streamline the increasingly complex integration challenges that our customers face on a day to day basis.

Just a few years ago, “Cloud” was the hottest buzz word around, but if you asked many people – even those who touted themselves as Cloud providers – what “the Cloud” was, they had a hard time coming up with a clear, concise answer. As we move into 2013, however, the Cloud is increasingly approaching maturity in the market as enterprises understand how these services can streamline their IT infrastructure and applications when integrated strategically with on-premise solutions.

With Cloud services moving out of the hype stage and becoming a must-have IT solution, demand is growing from enterprises across all market sectors. At Liaison, we know that meeting the needs of our customers means helping them integrate and deploy today’s leading SaaS and cloud applications with their on-premise systems. We also know that achieving this goal begins with fostering strong partner relationships with the most in-demand Cloud vendors that have a track record of strong, consistent application development and provisioning. 

This is why we’re so pleased to share that UBM Tech Channel has recognized the efforts of Megan Pulliam, our VP of Channel Sales, as a 2013 CRN Channel Chief.  This elite list recognizes the channel executives who have driven channel growth through innovative programs and IT channel evangelism.  This recognition follows closely on the heels of a similar accolade from Supply & Demand Chain Executive, which named Megan as “Pro to Know” in 2013. 

Since joining us through the acquisition of Hubspan in August 2012, Megan’s deep relationships in the channel have been a great asset to Liaison, and we look forward to watching as her vision and strategy for our partners and customers continues to evolve.  

Since I started Ignis Systems in 1999 as a one-person software consulting organization, I have tried periodically to look at “what comes next”, as difficult as that is when in the middle of running a business. Over the past couple of years it had become clear to me that we were approaching a major fork in the road: whether to continue to grow our business organically, or to create a partnership that would allow for the next stage of our growth. If the latter, the two big questions were (a) what form such a partnership might take, and (b) who would be the ideal partner.

We believe we have found the ideal partner in Liaison Healthcare, a division of Liaison Technologies. Their focus is on interoperability, cloud-based solutions, and being able to scale to meet the data management challenges emerging in healthcare. And that’s exactly what we have been doing, on a smaller scale.

As important as their business model is, we also were looking for someone with the agility and the focus on customer success to allow us to continue to grow and adapt in our segment of the market, and where there were strong synergies with their solutions and services offerings. And we had to like their people.

We have just started this journey together, but personally I am enthusiastic about this next stage of our business growth. I look forward to keeping you posted.

Liaison’s team was in sunny Orlando, Fla. for eHealth Initiative's 2013 Annual Conference- Leading IT Forward where “Big Data” was the term I heard most often in the many panel discussions on data exchange and analytics. One keynote speaker even challenged his audience by asking if all the talk about “Big Data” was a trend, hype or just a fad. My response:  it’s a trend.  If we’re going to perform analytics that lead to better clinical outcomes and reduce costs, then we have to consider all streams of available data in the process—and that’s Big Data. But successfully integrating and aggregating claims data and clinical data continues to be one of the most fascinating challenges in providing quality analytics. Right now, we’re still in the embryonic/infancy stage of dealing with these two disparate data pools. Yet with advances in technology, it’s possible to integrate both. So what’s the underlying reason for why we’re not further along? Is it because the pools are so diverse and complex, or because they reside in different silos/organizations that don’t want to share? My analysis is we haven’t seen this combination—so far, anyway—because the adoption of clinical IT systems like EHRs has been slow. But with meaningful use incentives, adoption is accelerating and most organizations are now at the cusp of leveraging the data they are collecting. What do you all think?   

Naveen

Whether you’re building a network of solution vendor partners to deliver streamlined data and systems integration to your customers, or working with upstream or downstream partners for successful manufacturing and production output, procurement, logistics, risk mitigation strategies, sourcing, financial operations, packaging and distribution, and transportation, understanding your channel and what it means for customers is critically important. The reality is that most businesses today rely on channel partnerships to help them deliver successful outcomes.

I’ve spent 15 years – four of them at Hubspan and now at Liaison – working to develop, hone, and deploy channel strategies that build new partnerships and foster engagement and loyalty among the existing partners.  This is why I’m particularly honored to have been recognized by Supply & Demand Chain Executive as a Provider “Pro to Know” in 2013. I join a host of other talented channel professionals, including my colleague, Jim Cantrell (who was named to the 2012 list), who recognize the value that deep channel relationships bring to businesses across diverse market sectors.  

To see the full list of Pros to Know, check out the March 2013 issue of Supply & Demand Chain Executive, or visit their website.

- Megan

Megan Pulliam is the VP of Channel Sales for Liaison