IDC identifies top 10 health-care IT vendors for ’04

GE Medical Systems Information Technologies remained the largest provider of IT and IT-related services to the lucrative U.S. health-care provider market last year, according to an analysis from researcher IDC.

The top 10 vendors were mostly the same as in 2003, with a little shifting among the top five, IDC found. “While health care-specific vendors … remain dominant, health care is receiving renewed interest from all types of IT vendors,” IDC said in an opinion accompanying the analysis.

Hewlett-Packard (HP) and IBM made priorities of the health-care market last year, according to IDC. IBM has just begun to tap into that market, IDC said.

IDC forecasts that both of those top-tier IT vendors will continue to emphasize the health-care IT market and to assemble “fully realized” hardware, software and services for that vertical industry.

Hardware, software and services vendors were considered as were health-care industry specific companies such as GE Medical Systems.

These are IDC’s top 10 vendors and the revenue, in U.S. dollars, that each derived from health-care IT:

— GE Medical Systems Information Technologies, $1.224 billion;

— McKesson Information Systems, $1.083 billion;

— Siemens Medical Solution, $971 million;

— Philips Medical Systems, $936 million;

— Dell Inc., $838 million;

— Cerner Corp., $775 million;

— HP, $703 million;

— Electronic Data Systems Corp., $686 million;

— Microsoft Corp., $632 million;

— IBM, $572 million.

The total for the 10 came to $8.42 billion.

As for vendors that want to break into the top 10, IDC advises focusing on technology that makes disparate systems work together. Companies that provide such products “have an exceptionally attractive story for health-care IT groups that have the daunting task to pull stove-piped databases together in an attempt to improve health care for dispersed health-care providers,” the research group said.

IDC predicted that Cisco Systems Inc., Oracle Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc. will be among the vendors outside of the top 10 that will continue to derive significant revenue from health-care IT.

IDC interviewed vendors and asked them to provide industry-specific revenue figures for the analysis. Not all of those queried were able to provide that revenue break out, so IDC estimated figures. The researcher further analyzed vendor financial statements, annual reports, press releases, position statements, interviews, customer case studies and other publicly available information to gather its findings. Vendors were asked to review estimates for accuracy.

IDC, based in Framingham, is owned by International Data Group Inc., the parent company of the IDG News Service.