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The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, as it is technically titled, has allocated roughly $19 billion for the deployment of electronic medical records. What exactly does that mean?Today, at most family practices and hospitals, the vast majority of medical records are a combination of paper and film. A patient’s health history and images from X-rays, CT scans and the like are stored in coded folders in a medical records storage room.That won’t be the case much longer.We are at the beginning of a paradigm shift to all-digital storage of patient medical records. A handful of institutions have taken…

Today’s commercial real estate market presents an extraordinary challenge but also an excellent opportunity for firms large and small to increase market share. Using an integrated marketing approach to communications will boost your firm’s visibility with buyers and sellers who will once again become active. And it doesn’t have to cost a lot of money to be successful. Integrated marketing communications is a process designed to assure that brand information received by customers and prospects for a product or service are relevant and consistent over time. It involves using online and offline marketing tools. Online marketing tools include e-marketing campaigns such…

With the mortgage industry still in a state of tumult, lenders and investors are on the lookout for new and innovative methods to increase profits and make every aspect of the mortgage process run as smoothly as possible. Such was the goal of Mortgage Solutions, a Knoxville, Tenn.-based lender, when the firm turned to Sthenia Solutions and its LoanMarq software program.     LoanMarq is a complete loan processing and customer service application that allows all parties in a mortgage loan transaction to communicate and collaborate in a Web-based community interface modeled after popular social networking systems like Facebook and MySpace….

Taking real estate expertise and combining it with technology has given birth to REonomy.com, a real estate information Web site designed to serve a range of professionals, from investors to brokers, by providing integrated parcel data, MLS and comprehensive property research tools in one location.The Web site, which launched earlier this month, targets both commercial and residential real estate professionals in New York City’s five boroughs and the majority of New Jersey. The goal of the site is to provide the most up-to-date property information and never-before-seen tools like 3-D bulk study renderings.Founders Charlie Oshman and Jonathan Arnold developed the…

Hospitality has been among the most hard-hit sectors during the commercial property industry’s current slump. But according to a pair of new reports, a bounce back is only a few years away.But for now, economic woes darken the doors of the hospitality industry, with RevPAR dropping from 2007 to 2008 in all but three of 25 markets surveyed by Marcus & Millichap Real Estate Investment Services. On the bright side, another report, this one from Jones Lang LaSalle Hotels, anticipated that RevPAR is expected to bottom out in 2010, an indicator of upward momentum on the horizon. JLL’s  five-year forecast…

As new demographic estimates become available, I make it a practice to review the similarities and differences between the new numbers and last year’s estimates. This time around, the significance that the role ethnic households will play in future growth struck me, specifically the Hispanic segment.As we all know, immigration has driven and will continue to drive the nation’s population growth. No single group has boosted growth more than the Hispanics segment. In 1990, the Hispanic population in the United States was 7.9 percent. Today, Nielsen Claritas estimates, Hispanics account for 15.5 percent. And if the segment continues to grow…

Signs of the times will be inescapable in Las Vegas next week, when the International Council of Shopping Centers raises the curtain on the 2009 edition of RECon. After astounding growth brought attendance to 50,000 two years ago, ICSC is expecting a considerably smaller crowd of 30,000 during this year’s show, which runs from Sunday through Wednesday. Smaller staffs, fewer exhibitors and even the conspicuous absence of a few giants will also mark the show.Yet some senior executives and veterans of the Las Vegas show suggest that the re-sizing from gigantic to merely very big may prove an advantage. “The…

There’s no doubt that our country is experiencing very difficult economic times, and hotel performance generally reflects the downturn. When it comes to evaluating how well a hotel has performed compared to prior forecasts and expectations, many hotel owners face the same reoccurring discussions month after month.Because rooms are booked and billed on a daily basis, hotels experience daily market volatility directly. In essence, inventory marks to market every day. For hospitality asset managers, this complicates performance forecasting and requires more flexibility in adjusting business plans to accommodate uncertainty and increased economic volatility.As owners face more challenges in achieving their…

The Middle Eastern Kingdom of Bahrain, an archipelago of 33 islands situated in the Persian Gulf wants to reduce its reliance on oil revenues and is looking at tourism as an important way to diversify its economy.According to a report from Catalan Cighi, associate in HVS International’s Dubai office, and Hala Matar Choufany, managing director in the same office, Bahrain wants to increase its tourism revenues to 10 percent of GDP by 2014. Improving the country’s access to the outside world is one way of accomplishing that goal, and it has undertaken significant infrastructure improvement projects to further that initiative.The…

Recently, I made a $10 bet with a Grubb & Ellis broker who thinks that only half the nation’s office space will be occupied within five years—a 50 percent vacancy rate! It’s not due to “The Great Depression Ahead” (if you are a fan of Harry Dent). The broker thinks that half of us will be working from our homes with the assistance of high-speed Internet connections and other communications technology, saving big bucks on office occupancy costs for our employers. This is not a new argument. In a Grubb & Ellis forecast report from the mid-1990s, I questioned whether…