Why Are So Many Big Health IT Companies from Small Cities?

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.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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