Yesterday marked another important milestone in the 20-year history of MEDecision as we unveiled Alineo our completely re-architected collaborative health care management platform. As you might imagine, Alineo is the culmination of many months of very intense work by a lot of people and I can assure you that the result is a job very well done. Their efforts have produced a simply incredible, potentially game-changing technology for the health care industry, for which they should be extremely proud.

One of the many things about Alineo that really excites me is the fact that it represents the next generation of health information technology. We’re calling it a “simplified, smart and state-of-the-art” solution, and I don’t think there are three words that could more aptly describe it. I’m not going to get into the specifics of Alineo’s various features and functions. For that I suggest you go here. But I do think it’s important to emphasize that what we’ve come up with is, to our collective knowledge, unlike anything currently available in the market. I think we’ve succeeded in our goal to develop a technology that health insurers can implement for a comprehensive, long-term solution; one that doesn’t require an advanced degree in information systems to understand and operate and can grow and adapt as organizational needs and technology requirements evolve.

One of the most interesting aspects of Alineo and the thinking that led to its creation is how it reflects the changing health information technology market. Health plans are stepping up care management efforts as they get more pressure from employers to implement stronger programs and initiatives. Care management is thus becoming the battlefield of the future for health plans. That puts the onus on technology vendors like MEDecision to not only develop the systems and technologies that make payers better able to compete, but to expand their roles from simple technology vendors to legitimate, long-term strategic solutions partners. As with so many other MEDecision innovations over the past two decades, it’ll be very interesting for us to see how it impacts the rest of the industry.

Stay tuned.