By Leo Sun | More Articles
September 3, 2013 | Comments (0)
When most people talk about the electronic health record, or EHR, market, they tend to speak in terms of forward projections. They focus on the projection that the North American health care IT market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 7.4% to $31.3 billion by 2017. They also point out that the U.S. government’s HITECH legislation, started in 2009, will continue funding these businesses as medical practices are offered incentives to make “meaningful use” of their EHR services.
Shrewd investors, however, should know that forward growth projections are often far rosier than they actually are. Therefore, in our zeal to discuss the latest mobile EHR apps, speech recognition software, and biometrics technology in health care IT, we shouldn’t neglect the basis of all solid, long-term investments — the fundamentals.
In this article, I’ll take a look at the fundamental growth of three leading EHR companies — Allscripts (NASDAQ: MDRX ) , Cerner (NASDAQ: CERN ) , and athenahealth (NASDAQ: ATHN ) — and how much scaffolding supports each one source
