Hewlett-Packard Company
(
HPQ
) or H-P recently announced that it has been awarded a service
deal by a Poland-based government healthcare unit, National
Centre for Health Information Systems (CSIOZ) for a sum of $25.0
million. Per the contract, H-P will support the Polish health
entity to build up e-health environment (or electronic health
record system) across Poland.
According to the Euro Health Consumer Index published in May
2012, Poland has been ranked below the index. Low spending,
strict regulations and inadequate insurance structure has made
the Polish healthcare system one of the worst systems within
Europe. This has prompted the government to upgrade its
healthcare system with technical expertise.
Electronic Health Record (EHR) helps doctors and hospitals
organize medical records of patients in a manner that makes
tracking their clinical history more convenient from anywhere in
the world by eliminating hard copies.
For the development of the e-health system, H-P will set up a
portal for collecting, analyzing, storing and sharing patient
health records. Simultaneously, the tech giant will combine
forces with CSIOZ to develop certain web applications especially
for healthcare providers and health insurance companies.
The implementation of the EHR system will help the Polish
government to take stock of various health issues and formulate
respective programs. Also, the system is expected to help meet
patient claims promptly. This will help the government to provide
better healthcare facilities to its citizens.
H-P has years of experience in serving the healthcare industry.
Poland's eventual success in implementing the e-health system
will create more business options for H-P.
Despite H-P's continuous service deal wins, we are concerned
about its PC business, which has been under pressure for a long
time. Recently, IT research firm IDC claimed that holiday season
PC sales fell 3.2% in 2012. The decline is for the second time,
the first being long back in 2001.
Similar to its computing peers
Dell
(
DELL
) and
Apple
(
AAPL
), H-P has a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You could instead consider
investment in
Cisco Systems
(
CSCO
) or
NetApp
(
NTAP
) that offer exposure to more attractive technology segments and
also carry a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).
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