The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), with its Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act provision, kicked-started a healthcare technology modernization wave. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. “ObamaCare”) ignited a national dialogue about healthcare. These and other initiatives have spawned new and disruptive business models , blurred lines between traditional providers, and opened a window for new players to enter an industry that historically has not welcomed outsiders. Concurrently, information technology has matured. Virtualization, for example, has gone from being an interesting cost-savings tool to becoming the very foundation for a new era in IT—cloud computing.
