Countering advanced HIS marketing tactics.

An explosion of technological advances and system developments in the information systems industry pushes the envelope in both hardware and software design. Equipment breakthroughs--reduced instruction set computing chips, or RISC, and DEC's 64-bit Alpha chip--herald an exciting new era in price-performance computing. And object-oriented programming systems, or OOPS, and computer-assisted software engineering, or CASE tools, both promise a golden age in programming productivity. At the same time however, marketing mavens at healthcare information system, or HIS, vendors keep pace with their cohorts in Research and Development by blazing new trails in the science of sales and marketing. To help healthcare executives keep pace with new developments in selling, let's review a few infamous breakthroughs in marketing. They put a new twist on the old saw: "caveat emptor." Following each marketing "advance" are counters to new marketing tricks, each recommended to keep savvy CIOs a step ahead.