Mr. Wieland: A lot of discussions on this. My opinion is that it's a tremendous tailwind for adoption of electronic health records. The survey that we just had completed suggests that right now, even with the uncertainties around meaningful use, 36% of physicians plan to purchase a new electronic health record and 80% of those plan to do so within 18 months. Of those that say that they are waiting, they are waiting for the details on what is going to be meaningful use. Just taking a look at that 36%, that's about a 2.6 billion market opportunity for the sale of electronic health records, which is an acceleration that this industry has never seen in its several decade history.
TWST: What types of companies do you predict will benefit from this trend and why?
Mr. Wieland: The thing about investing in health care IT is about a half a dozen or so relatively small-cap, thinly traded stock, they stand to benefit from this accelerating adoption trend. If you don't have a product actively marketed in the field today, you are too late to take advantage of this adoption trend that we are seeing come up. So you have companies that scale anything from, on the hospital side, you have about a half a dozen pure-play companies, such as Cerner, and Eclipsys and CPSI on the hospital side; Allscripts, Quality Systems and athena on the physician side. Across those names, there is GE, and there is Siemens and there is McKesson certainly doing businesses here, but you are not going to be finding those large-cap names specifically for leverage on ARRA. But you can buy these small-cap names that are pure-plays.
Tickers included in this excerpt: ATHN, CERN, CPSI, ECLP, GE, MCK, MDRX, QSII, SI
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