Report: Allscripts Shares Fall as Frontrunner Buyer Emerges

Allscripts dug a hole with its lack of support services and adequate training programs. In turn, it bled into the actual quality of the product being able to stay up-to-date with competitors. Everything today is not a "Webinar" - this business is still requires a lot of face to face, as in a doctors seeing a patient, not just chatting on-line. Training a busy, overworked support staff of nurses, assistants, medical records people,and administrative people takes more time and expense then the vendors want to quote when trying to make a sell. Allscripts grew to fast to have good follow-up support for updating and training - plain and simple. It costs a lot of money in the Health Info-Tech business and at the rapid rate of technology change, your product becomes aged before you can get a good return on the investment. Giving bogus "return on investment" stories to clients, instead of hard tangible proven dollars, won't fly anymore. This mirrors a problem that goes across the whole Health Tech business. The tech business is heading for a serious train wreck. If your product does not have the legs to survive the pace needed for good returns - you are tossing money into the grand porcelain bowl in the sky. It is attracting investors by it's front-end numbers, top-line gross sales, not by a sustainable bottom-line. Profits are always - next year.

How do I know anything more then just another opinion - my world - administrator in a small medical group practice. Look what's happening to small private practice. The cost of medical school, the fast-paced technical changes in disease management and other medical procedures, accelerating high-tech tools and system for diagnosis - same thing. You have to build a sustainable model into your business strategy that is radically different from "old-line thinking" while improving access, patient satisfaction, and costs of delivery. We can produce a bottom line with a false sense of profitability, looking at an annual picture - but are we really covering debt and costs from just the few things I mentioned? We have set about thinking radically on how to change the medical practice that we all still want to work in, and it really does require going "out of the box". At first, just the thought was traumatic - but now, inch by inch we are getting there. And the most unreliable sources of help have been the Feds, big hospital systems, miss-guided tech vendors, and medical institutions that want quick fixes and control - all big, and all overnight. It isn't going to happen that way, but it is achievable.