By now you’ve likely heard that Allscripts and Misys Healthcare are combining to create a new industry leader, with a client base of nearly one out of three practicing physicians in the United States. It’s a change that we believe brings our dream of an interoperable, connected healthcare system one big step closer to reality – and with it, the promise of improved care at lower cost for millions of Americans.

Given how much discussion the announcement has generated, I thought I would weigh in with my perspective on how this opportunity came together, and where we’ll head from here.

When I first met Mike Lawrie, CEO of Misys plc, the parent company of Misys Healthcare, we quickly realized that we had the same passion for improving healthcare and the same view of how it could be accomplished. What’s needed, we believe, is to bring the power of technology, which has improved quality and reduced costs in every other industry, to healthcare.

Our view is that healthcare is fundamentally an information business and that the challenge is how to deliver real-time information to physicians and caregivers to improve clinical care, gain efficiencies and take out cost. Both of us had done this in other industries and felt it needed to happen in healthcare.  Not in the future but right now.

We also understood that to make this a reality, it would take consolidation and scale to drive the required investments. Why? Think about the market as a whole. Today, more than 150 vendors are vying to sell electronic health records to physicians. That’s a different EHR for every 3,500 physicians – the equivalent of having more than 85,000 different breakfast cereals lining shelves at the grocery store. By almost any measure, this is a fragmented market. And, while competition is good, fragmentation is not.