Feds Raiding Siemens Medical

So it appears that the feds raided Siemens because of a DoD (Department of Defense) contract to sell medical imaging IT to the US military. You may have heard that Siemens has been accused of fraud and bribery scandals in recent years. Last year, Siemens agreed to pay $1.3 billion to settle bribery charges. Yikes!

Health IT and Political Generosity

There's an interesting article in BusinessWeek about Health IT (or HITECH if you prefer). There's a diagram that show the political generosity associated with some of the major companies that develop EHRs (electronic health records) and e-prescribing solutions. Specifically:

• Allscripts: 100% support to democrats
• Cerner: 35% support to democrats
• Epic: 98% support to democrats
• GE: 61% support to democrats
• McKesson: 44% support to democrats
• Siemens: 60% support to democrats

I don't like to get into politics in my blog, so I won't. However, I find this data to be fascinating. I was reading about how Glen Tullman, the CEO fo Allscripts, used to exercise and play basketball with Obama at the same gym.

The economic stimulus plan includes $19.6 billion towards health IT. How do you think hospitals and physicians will leverage this opportunity?

What's Going on at Siemens Medical Solutions?

According to the Associated Press, some government officials raided the U.S. headquarters of Siemens Medical Solutions in Malvern, Pennsylvania. Details remain unclear at this point, but we do know that the officials had a search warrant. The DCIS is the criminal investigative arm of the Office of the Inspector General for the Defense Department. Recently, Siemens Medical Solutions had received a Defense Department contract worth up to $267 million to sell medical-imaging equipment to the military. Could it be related to that?