Misys gets Patient1: more of the same

PerSe's former Patient1 product has been around for years, going back to its development days under Health Data Sciences and Ralph Korpman. It's a nice looking product, and despite having pitiful sales over its long life, is well used by clinicians in some high-profile sites.

Patient1 desperately needed new parents. PerSe' has always been a trainwreck going back to its less-than-wonderful days as Medaphis. PerSe' makes most of its money from claims processing, so Patient1 was an ignored stepchild, with virtually no sales in the last handful of years. Its technical underpinnings are shaky, with a self-developed databases and other oddities under the hood.

All that aside, Patient1 might be the best-looking product on the market today. However they did it, PerSe' put a beautiful face on this old girl, and nurses love it. It isn't as strong in the pharmacy and CPOE areas, but then again most of its competitors aren't either. Selling it off isn't much of a shock, although Misys's promise to build a product line around it (as Misys CPR and Misys CPOE) was surprising to me. Given the poor installed base, the not-in-my-hospital technology, and its well-funded competitors, I expected it to be pillaged just for its customer base.

Only in healthcare would this tired old warrior be reborn. Misys will have a big job trying to integrate Patient1 with their Sunquest lab, radiology, pharmacy, and events manager. Lucky for them most of their competitors also bought up creaky old systems and bolted them up (usually poorly) to completely separate offerings from some other company they acquired.

Misys is a pretty good vendor. They've been a benign steward to Sunquest and Medic, with reasonably satisfied customers. They'll have their hands full trying to convince the market that their "new" integrated clinical system is a winner. In their favor is that the competitors are hardly no-brainers either, being divided into these groups:

• Companies with newly developed products not yet proven in large enterprises
• Vendors who did what Misys did: purchased some weak competitors and gave them snazzy new names
• Vendors whose flagship products run on old technology, expensive hardware, and with major code quality issues

I like the new Misys products. They're stuck with the underlying technology, but the products work as advertised. If Misys can figure out how to integrate the CPOE function with pharmacy (good luck to them!) they can probably be competitive.