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Comment by jaegerpicker | Hacker News Reader

I still believe that a lot of people are missing a strategic move from Apple here. IBM is probably the largest player in Healthcare IT. Apple has recently made a large push into collecting Healthcare data and I strongly believe that if wearables are to take off, collecting/monitoring health info will be a huge part of it. I think this partnership is about Apple taking that new healthcare data and make it easy to share with hospitals. Health care is this GIANT market that seems to be often ignored from an IT/startup area, I worked at a mobile healthcare startup for a while and if Apple can use IBM to force their way into that market it could be a HUGE win.

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I don't see IBM as a big player in Health IT. I think they desire to be a big player which is why there's all sorts of noise about Watson and healthcare. It's marketing aimed at the C-suite.

Epic systems is probably the IBM or Microsoft equivalent in health IT. McKesson, Siemens, and Cerner are also no slouches.

Hmm, it's possible that my contacts and friends in health IT have led to selection bias on my part. A quick google seemed to confirm my original train of thought but lacked any real numbers so it's entirely convincing that it's all marketing fluff like you say. My personal heath IT experience was aimed at individual doctors office level systems and the test users tended to tie back to Watson and IBM cloud services. That said I know A LOT of heath is still woefully bad at having e-records so it was likely a tiny slice of the market that we targeted.

Isn't the biggest player Epic Systems? At least for the expensive, profitable stuff?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Systems

Epic is everywhere in hospitals, but at $1.7B in revenue, they're only a fraction of the size compared to McKesson ($140B in annual revenue). Cerner, Cardinal Health, AmerisourceBergen, Pyxis, and others are all big players throughout the value chain.

I don't think ignored. It's just way easier to build snapchat than fight with HIPAA compliance and all the regulations against rapid innovation in health care.

That's a very interesting observation and almost certainly something that will have been considered at some point.

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