I was reading over something on HIStalk the other day that talked about how many major healthcare IT and EHR companies have come out of small cities. In fact, when you think about the EHR world, there are only a handful of EHR companies that have come out of the tech hub of the world, Silicon Valley, and they’ve all been started within the past 10 years.
In the article HIStalk mentioned the town Malvern, Pennsylvania. I hadn’t even heard of the town, but a look at Wikipedia has Siemens Healthcare, Ricoh Americas, and Cerner as among the companies based in Malvern. I think the Cerner mention in the list must be because Cerner just purchases Siemens Healthcare, so they are now claiming them. However, Cerner is definitely a Kansas City based company. Either way though, Kansas City is not a HUGE city either and certainly hasn’t been the hub of technology (although, I know they have some cool tech things happening now, like most cities).
The healthcare IT behemoth, Epic was founded in Madison, Wisconsin and now has headquarters in Verona, Wisconsin. If you aren’t in healthcare IT, my guess is that you’ve probably never even heard of Verona.
Those are just a few examples and I’m sure there are many more. Why is it that so many of the large healthcare IT companies have come from small cities? Will that trend continue or will large cities like San Francisco, Boston, New York, and LA start to dominate?
I’m a bit of a young buck in this regard. So, I don’t have the answer. Hopefully some of my readers do. I look forward to hearing your thoughts. Is there an advantage to being from a small town when going into healthcare? It’s exciting to me that healthcare innovation can come from anywhere. I hope that trend continues.