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Billian's HealthDATA recently had the good fortune to sit down with several colleagues and customers from a variety of industries within healthcare - IT recruitment, hospital purchasing, and consulting - for a rare tete-à-tete regarding the evolution of the healthcare IT industry, and the corresponding evolution of the Billian's HealthDATA line of products.

Healthcare's incentivized move from paper to digital closely mirrors that of Billian's HealthDATA's. The Hospital Blue Book, once considered to be the sales bible of many in the healthcare vendor market, has transitioned from a 1,500-page resource published annually, to a dot com, and is now transitioning into the latest iteration of the Billian's HealthDATA Portal - the robust healthcare database that offers 3,000 data points across 40,000 facilities in the United States.

Explaining this evolution and its incumbent benefits to customers old, new and potential must be quite similar to the back-and-forth between providers, vendors and the government as to why the move to digital records is not only necessary, but far more beneficial in the long-run to all involved.

Features of the new Portal that generated the most excitement include:

• 10 times the amount of data as previously found in the Hospital Blue Book
• Daily updates
• Expanded quality data
• Historical financial data going back 10 years on a per-facility basis
• Healthcare IT utilization/plans for system upgrades
• Optimized layout/design for mobile access via phone or tablet
• Facility radius feature for sales reps on the go looking to hit one last facility while in a certain area
• Salesforce.com integration
• in-depth employee contact details, including (where applicable) links to individual's social media accounts

It's always nice to see a customer get excited about a new product, especially when, like an electronic medical record (EMR), it was designed to help them work more efficiently. Communicating with customers about new products often leads to a genuine desire on their part to help lead developers in the right direction. Customer feedback has been integral to the development of the Portal's latest features, and will continue to play an integral role in its evolution.

As with anything in the digital age - especially right now in the healthcare space - the pace of change will only get faster. The recent announcement of David Blumenthal's impending departure from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology is just one example of how change is constant. Providers, vendors, customers - even the government - will sometimes struggle to keep up. But if the lines of communication are kept open between all parties, feedback can be gained that will benefit everyone.

Sourse: Billian's HealthDATA