Dell & Perot Team Up for Health Care IT, Services

Dell Inc. (Nasdaq: DELL) and Perot Systems Corp. (NYSE: PER) on Monday formed an alliance to provide technology and services for deploying electronic medical records in hospitals, doctors' offices, and other medical facilities.

The combined effort will deliver desktop, storage, and server hardware and medical information systems. The use of such technology is being heavily promoted by the Obama administration as a way to reduce health care costs through greater efficiency.

The combined technology can either be deployed and managed on-site or offered as a hosted service, the two companies said. The alliance was unveiled at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society conference in Chicago.

In addition, Dell said it would offer a packaged medical record and clinical practice management system for small health care facilities through Wal-Mart's Sam's Club stores. The system is meant to reduce costs by decreasing paperwork.

Dell and Perot join other tech companies in trying to take advantage of the expected rise in demand for medical information systems spurred by the $21 billion in the U.S. government's economic stimulus package dedicated to deploying such technology throughout the health care industry, so most Americans can have e-health records by 2014.Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC) and GE last week launched a partnership in which the companies pledged to spend $250 million over the next five years to develop and market technology for home-based monitoring and diagnosing of people with chronic illnesses.

Allowing patients to stay home while hospitals monitor their condition and diagnose and treat problems remotely will cut health care costs, company executives said.

Currently, only a small percentage of U.S. doctors' offices have adopted fully functional e-medical records and related systems. In hospitals, the use of health IT systems is estimated at less than 20%.

Though use of e-records is growing, the hardest trick -- data sharing -- has barely begun. InformationWeek has published an independent analysis of this topic. Download the report here