Mr. Halper: If you look at the ARRA plan, the legislation calls for incentive payments to hospitals and physician groups that adopt electronic medical records and then meet certain criteria about how they use those applications. The goal, and this was originally set forth in the Bush administration, was to increase the use of electronic medical records and ultimately increase the overall efficiency of the health care system, while at the same time providing higher-quality care. We believe that the potential incentive payments that are going to be available for hospitals and physician groups are accelerating purchase decisions for EMR technology, especially in the hospital market, where hospitals that have already made significant investments in IT are going to be making more investments in IT in order to make sure that they qualify for the incentive payments. So we are pretty positive on the impact of ARRA on the hospital IT vendors. We are a little more cautious towards physician office software vendors. The large groups will make these investments, but the smaller physician groups will probably drag their feet a little bit more and we might not see the acceleration in demand from that segment right away. But the overall trend is that the health care industry is getting pushed or incentivized to adopt electronic medical records. Those incentives will be in place for the next five years and then penalties will be accessed if they are not meeting the criteria as outlined by the government.
TWST: Are there any companies in particular that are well situated to benefit from ARRA?
Mr. Halper: Sure. I think that Cerner is probably the best-positioned publicly traded company to benefit from increased hospital demand for software products. The company has been around since the mid-1980s, and they've really designed a suite of applications and built in a great deal of functionality around their core products to support the ultimate goal of having electronic health records not just within hospitals, but within a total community setting. So Cerner has invested in this area for a very, very long time, and we think that they have a good shot of virtually every large purchase decision that's being made in the United States. They are also building out their infrastructure to attack the opportunity outside of the United States.
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