Readers that have been with us for a few years may recall that February is a very special month for our family. It is our Founder and Managing Director, John Moore Jr’s birthday on the 11^th, my birthday on the 15^th, and my sisters’ birthdays on the 22^nd and 28^th. Not to mention all the cousins, uncles, and other family members that happen to celebrate their birth this month as well – and least we forget, just a few U.S., presidents.

In appreciation of our subscribers, Twitter and LinkedIn followers, and this wonderful month that has brought so many people we love into the world, we offer a reverse-birthday present every year: Free February! And this year is a double whammy, as we will be opening up two reports for your reading pleasure.

The first is our first market trends report that got Chilmark Research started and still one of the only of its kind, our iPHR Market Report from 2008. This report brought much needed clarity to an immature iPHR market in 2008, one that is still struggling to find its true place in the grand HIT ecosystem – though as of late there seems to be resurgence of interest in the topic as providers prepare for stage 2 meaningful use attestation.

Despite its age, the iPHR report still has many relevant insights regarding adoption challenges that need to be overcome and where the market needed (and still needs) to go to provide real value to patients and HCOs. We initially offered this up for our Free February in 2012, but this time it will be free forever after today.

The second free report we have is an extremely timely one.

The market is abuzz with all things analytics, which gives me an idea: We should have a contest – guess how many vendors at HIMSS will have “Big Data” displayed on some placard somewhere in their booth?

Ah but I digress…

Seriously, every HCO we speak to is trying to get a handle on analytics – to highly varying degrees of success. We see our job here at Chilmark as helping to educate the market on the successful adoption and deployment of HIT so last Spring we published for our CAS clients the much-lauded Infrastructure for Analytics Insight Report. The report digs into what healthcare organizations need to think through when planning the deployment of analytics technologies, the numerous approaches to healthcare analytics tools, and how to build a business case to justify the costs inherent in adopting these solutions – these are all issues that every HCO should pay close attention to. So now we are offering this report for free as well. But this is not a free forever report – you have till the end of February to get a copy so jump to it.

Thanks so much for your continuing to be a loyal reader and please introduce yourself at HIMSS should you be going – we’ll have the entire Chilmark team there.