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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