Emdeon Inc (NYSE:EM), headquartered at Nashville, TN, is a provider of revenue and payment cycle management and clinical information exchange solutions, connecting payers, providers, and patients in the U.S. healthcare system. Founded in 2005, Emdeon has a market cap of $2.2 billion.

Latest technologies and amenities available are the acting forces behind stirring success, new opportunities and challenges in today's industrial landscape. Cloud, Mobile, Analytics and Social, to name a few, are the latest trends which have changed the paradigm of doing business effectively. Big Data is also a commendable tool for various industries because of its eminence in managing heaps of data. But this technological area is still in its nascent stages. The obligatory analytical tools lack the robustness that is required as they are expensive and incapable to demonstrate Return on investment (ROI) efficiently. These tools fall short in enabling healthcare companies to make real-time decisions as they are incompetent in delivering proficient insights, granularity and timeliness of data they work upon.

There is a need for technology vendors to create analytics products and tools that can overcome these challenges and allows running a cost-effective and patient-centric healthcare as these aforementioned trends are major sources of disruption in the healthcare industry too. At Emdeon, we are harnessing these trends for streamlining our services. They are aiding us in delivering our applications, formulating strategic partnerships for imminent future, and enhancing the scalability and agility of services we offer.

Discarding the Vintage Framework of IT

The key challenge our industry is facing today is working under the vintage framework of IT. It is of risk-averse, maintenance-oriented and manual services-driven practice. It has become imperative to refurbish our IT infrastructure. At Emdeon, we are transmuting the IT organization, and in fact the whole company, to a more risk-embracing, innovation-based and software oriented infrastructure. This task will require putting cultural change and skill-set change in motion in addition to having an open mind-set and addressing the team with programmatic training.

Acknowledging the Importance of
Innovation

Generation of new ideas can become a key differentiator between market leaders and their rivals. At our firm we acknowledge this notion and therefore implement and try various things to drive innovation within our team. We are employing Agile and DevOps development methodologies in every process involving our team to concrete the culture of the organization, making it more nimble and adaptive. For incepting the grass-root innovations and ideas without involving heavy management bureaucracy, we have embedded various social and community tools within our infrastructure to uphold broad communication and feedback links with our customers. It transpires transparency to the organization and democratizing the innovation process. In addition, hiring, developing and coupling the talents with major and national companies to facilitate upgrading of important tools such as Cloud platform is also an important task in the hands of company leaders.

We strive to gain rich experience by working in collaboration with leading industry partners like national institutes, laboratories, non-profits and think-tank's by providing them key technology research and development initiatives in return. (As told to Joe Philip)