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Entering 2005 and the third full year of Healthcare First Look publications, I thought you would like to know two things. First, we appreciate your time and interest. With your email bursting at the seams, it's great that you take the time to read our latest research. Second, you have joined a community of more than 13,000 subscribers interested in the intersection of IT and healthcare. From the Forrester healthcare team to you, thanks and have a prosperous 2005.

Health Plans' HSA Headache
The market mandate for HSAs is here, ushered in by the Medicare Modernization Act and rising enrollment in consumer-directed health plans (CDHPs). Health plans are scrambling to administer complex requirements around HSAs like year-to-year rollover, portability, and multi-account layering. Banks of all sizes, HSA administrators, and debit card vendors will vie for the opportunity to help plans deliver HSA functionality to their members.

Plans have their HSA work cut out for them over the coming years. 2005 will be about configuring back-end systems and forging partnerships to provide the basics. Then in 2006 plans can tackle challenges of coordinating HSAs with FSAs and HRAs. In 2007, real-time adjudication at the point of service will become the gold standard of HSA administration.

diCarta/TriZetto Automate Plans' Provider Contracts
Forrester foresees success for the diCarta/TriZetto partnership that will help plans create, analyze, and manage their provider contracts. Despite the fact that contract management isn't on most plan CIOs' agendas, tools that automate paper-based contracting and bring the power to analyze complex provider contracts will win early adopters.

Healthcare: How Did We Score In 2004?
Last December, Forrester's Healthcare team made 10 predictions about how healthcare IT trends would play out in 2004. Our predictions for 2004 ranged from pharma IT staffing changes to consumers' online prescription purchasing habits to doctors' technology adoption in their practices. This month, we revisited these predictions to see if 2004 turned out the way we anticipated. Turns out we were off the mark on some, but spot on with most of our predictions.

We also went on the record with our predictions for 2005. Laura Ramos and Liz Boehm will talk about the healthcare trends the team is tracking, and how we think they will play out in 2005 in their January 27 ForrTel.

Choosing Rx Compliance Marketing Opportunities
Compliance marketing makes sense for pharma: It's smart business to keep the customers who are already taking your medications. And there are plenty of prescription drug-takers who could use some support to stick to their medication regimens. Forrester has developed a decision-support framework to help pharma make informed decisions about which drugs are good candidates for compliance marketing.

Once the product is selected, use breakeven analysis to select compliance programs to pilot and ROI projections to choose which among the pilots should go to market.

Drop Us A Line
We are very interested in your feedback on our research. Do you have topics to recommend, data you would like to have, or technologies you want assessed? Drop me a line at bradholmes@forrester.com so we can connect.


Brad Holmes
VP and Research Director,
Healthcare & Life Sciences

Research Referenced In This Issue Choosing Rx Compliance Marketing Opportunities (35809) diCarta/TriZetto Automate Plans' Provider Contracts (36191) FDA Pushes RFID Agenda On Pharma (36079) Forrester's Top 10 Healthcare Predictions For 2004 (33444) Forrester's Top 10 Healthcare Predictions For 2005 (35266) Health Plans' HSA Headache (35808) Healthcare: How Did We Score In 2004? (35810) Justifying Rx Compliance Marketing (34300) Online Rx Buying Takes A Breather (36049) Parametric Search Boosts Cancer Clinical Trials (35272) Trends 2005: Contract Life-Cycle Management (35693) Trends 2005: Health Plans (35659)

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