Hammergren: I think winning is going to be on the same dimensions that we've always won or lost, in the application space, at least from our perspective. To think that you can win by having a data strategy that is not ubiquitous, and not "everyone in" is, from my perspective, shortsighted. We provide technology to retail pharmacies and health plans ... everybody and their brother. All of those people will be better off if we can move information between them. That's not what we've done as an industry. I don't think we as a company – or any company – would ever have a complete data set on a patient. So this is not something that strategy officers in the IT industry sit back and say to their CEOs, "We should not do this, and here are the following competitive reasons why. There may be some people who make money on the movement of data, who say, "This is also moving data, and so it's competing with me." But it won't be the typical application vendors that will have that point of view.

McCallie: The other thing is that the market has really changed around where this data needs to go. A lot of it is because of Obamacare and the focus on accountable care organizations. When IDNs were trying to consolidate all the information within the walls of the IDN, there wasn't really a push for interoperability at this kind of scale. But nobody can survive if that's all they do now. Because they don't have enough people. All of a sudden, every conversation starts with, "We gotta have the data." We wanna get the plumbing discussion off the table so we can talk about the applications.

Hammergren: And the analytics tools and the population health tools. Even the more sophisticated systems that have had this closed environment kind of view are beginning to recognize when they take risks, "Oh, that patient is in Florida two months out of the year, and I don't have that data in the Mayo Clinic system." And if they don't get it, they have a real problem.