From Anonymouse: “Re: Cerner. Unsubstantiated rumor from a third party vendor: Cardinal to acquire Cerner. Have you heard any of these whispers?” I haven’t. Anyone?
Thanks very much to old HIStalk friend eScription, an early-on sponsor. The company is now the exclusive sponsor of HIStalk Discussion as well, while continuing as a Gold Sponsor. I was cruising around their newly redesigned site and I notice they’re hiring: software engineers, account managers, Java developer, and other technical positions. I can’t imagine that working for super-cool Paul Egerman is anything but great (not to mention they provide over 400 pounds of free fruit each month for employees to munch on!) Continuing my cruising, I see that my sponsor contact Lauren Richman has a Penn undergrad and Columbia MBA, which is impressive even among the educational credentials of her peers: Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth, Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, and MIT. Smart company, nice people, kicking butt and taking names in their market. That’s how it ought to work.
Speaking of Penn, UPHS awards CSC a five-year, $67 million contract for IT infrastructure services.
And speaking of old friends of HIStalk, my first-ever sponsor Medicity sent over their electronic newsletter this week. The company has taken over two new floors in the Medicity building, employment will increase 50% this year, they demonstrated at MUSE last month, and several new sales were finalized in the past few weeks. All due to their sponsorship, at least when I’m telling the story.
Wisconsin State Journal is running a fancy series on medical errors, including an online game where you try to staff a nursing unit given ever-changing conditions. From a reader who wishes to remain anonymous: “Interestingly, they don’t mention EMRs at all, or CPOE. They talk about pharmacy robotics and barcoded med administration, but that’s pretty much it. They included some ‘patient safety’ tips, such as writing down your allergies, writing down what meds you’re on and what you take them for, and taking these lists with you to clinics, hospitals, etc. Isn’t that sort of the point of an EMR, so you don’t have to remember? Clearly technology doesn’t solve everything, but I would have thought it worth mentioning in their ‘technology improvements’ article.” It is somewhat surprising, although they seem to focus on the sharp end of the stick, right down to the patients themselves.
Cerner gets 510(k) clearance for its new transfusion and specimen collection system that will be marketed under the Cerner Bridge Medical name. The party must be on: Cerner gets North Kansas City approval for a big blowout, including a barbeque contest, at their headquarters on July 20. I’m positive I’ll be invited so I can report to you live.
Former HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy and former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman became former free men after being sentenced to seven years in prison for bribery and corruption yesterday. The judge wasn’t impressed by the chorus line of character witnesses the defense paraded in, with Scrushy even dragging his nine children in to meet the judge (triggering a Groucho Marx thought: “Hey, I like my cigar, too, but I take it out now and then.”) Anyway, the judge sent him straight to jail.
CPSI is named to the FSB100, a fast-growing small company list compiled by Fortune Small Business.
This 29-year-old newly graduated Canadian doctor (Melissa) has gotten a doctor job, written a diet book, and helped design a Web-based EMR system that may be ad-supported later.
Akron Children’s Hospital sues its former foundation director, claiming she downloaded donor information to start her own business.
Imaging vendor Emageon has cut 10% of its workforce so far this year.
Bizarre, only-in-California lawsuits: an LA fire department captain gets $3.75 million, much of it for pain and suffering, because his supervisors retaliated against him for not giving women firefighters easier training. In another case, the city offered a firefighter who was fed dog food by colleagues $2.7 million.
News is slow. If this were a HIT magazine, I’d keep writing crappy stuff just to fill up space. Since I value your time instead of my need to pad out the ads, we’re done here. Have a good July 4th (and fly your flag, please).
News, rumors, my own private Idaho: e-mail me.
Discuss today’s HIStalk.
From The PACS Designer: “Re: Internet tools. TPD has noticed that the number of new tools for implementing an Internet strategy is expanding at a rapid rate. This expansion of tool options is attracting more inquiries about how to best deploy information over the web. Since healthcare has been slow to adapt an Internet strategy, it might be the time to give web solutions another look since funding new purchases could be difficult with the current declining revenue base. Since web strategies can be cheaper than thick client applications, it deserves consideration by procurement planners.”
From Rolly NC: “Re: Misys. In addition to the departure of Jim Brady at PayerPath, Betty Feth, another 20-plus year SVP at Misys, has left her job in implementation and service. Kelly Ross, the former sales SVP for Hospital Systems who was recently named by Vern Davenport as sales VP for community sales, resigned two days later and was asked to leave immediately. Paul Lewis, hired by Mike Lawrie to run all of sales and service, no longer has sales and only half the services side. Sales VPs and directors are reporting to Vern until someone new is named.” Partially confirmed so far.
From CCHIT and Die: “Re: 2007 certification. NextGen and Greenway are the first two vendors announced to have earned 2007 CCHIT ambulatory compliance. Those standards are supposed to be harder to pass than the 2006 ones, where it appeared that they were handing them out to anything that could remotely labeled an EMR. It will be interesting to see which 2006 products don’t pass 2007 muster, although at $30,000 a pop, it’s in CCHIT’s best interest to certify everyone.”
From Jim the Waco Kid: “Re: HFMA. Have been at the HFMA-ANI show and heard HMS and SSI are now partners.” True – announced this week. HMS will enhance its revenue cycle products with SSI’s EDI offerings.
From Nasty Parts: “Re: Sage. Rumor of Sage layoffs is true. A non-visionary bean counter is trying to cut his way to profitability. Operational regions have been cut from four to two. Layoffs were senior leaders of the consolidated regions and special project staff. The company had two decent quarters of revenue because of inside sales slamming NPI upgrades. It’s a shame – Intergy is a well-built system.”
From Hedley Lamarr: “Re: Dairyland Healthcare Solutions. Heard it from a solid source that DHS was bought out by Francisco Partners. Big changes to come…” Confirmed. The private equity firm has acquired Dairyland, a community hospital systems vendor, and changes are already underway. CEO Alan Grundei is gone. FP has brought in John Trzeciak to replace him (he was a co-founder of Health Systems International and was installed as interim CEO of LYNX Medical when FP bought that company.) I’ll have to talk to Jon Philips again – I’m intrigued that, other than athenahealth’s impending IPO, all the action is all private equity instead of the public market.
Check your web address above. If it’s http://histalk.blog-city.com, here’s what I recommend: go to www.histalk.com, which will take you to the new HIStalk page. Put your e-mail and name in the Subscribe to Updates box to your right there and click Subscribe. That will get you on the new update list.
Welcome and thanks to brand new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor EHRConsultant, a free EMR consulting service for medical groups ranging from one to 1000 physicians. EHRConsultant follows over 200 EHR products and provides free assistance to practices trying to narrow down those they should consider. They offer several resources, including an EHR discussion board, the EHR Scope magazine and resource guide, and physician speech recognition expertise. Cool offering: one- and two-physician practices looking for an EHR system for under $5,000 can use their Self-Serve function, which will lead them to suggested systems in less than 30 seconds. Thanks to EHRConsultant for supporting HIStalk.
And speaking of sponsors, let’s pay our regular tribute to those brave companies that invest their marketing dollars with a flaky blog. It takes guts to splash your ad on a page that, at any given moment, could contain any sort of irreverent mayhem. Most of them at least claim to love my work, although they may want me only for my 75,000+ monthly page views (or the chance to exchange telephonic pleasantries with the lovely Inga, a benefit that I craftily dangle to get their attention):
Design Clinicals, LLC
EHRConsultant
EnovateIT
eScription
Hayes Management Consulting
Healthcare Growth Partners
Healthia Consulting
Inside Healthcare Computing
Intellect Resources
InterSystems
John Muir Health
Lucida Healthcare IT Group
Medicity
Noteworthy Medical Systems
Novo Innovations
Picis
R. Gaines Baty Associates
SCI Solutions
SolCom
Pitt County Memorial Hospital (NC) gets a $3 million Duke Endowment grant for HealthSpan, a clinical system spanning both the hospital and Eastern Carolina University’s school of medicine.
Two DoD medical agencies are trying to stifle military use of the Joint Patient Tracking Application so they can spend millions building their own, this article claims. The system’s developer criticized the agencies in front of a House committee, after which he was transferred from Washington to “bureacratic Siberia.” “At stake are billions of dollars. Through fiscal 2006, AHLTA alone cost Defense $775 million to develop and deploy. The system’s fiscal 2007 budget is $392 million. By comparison, the Joint Patient Tracking Application system cost less than $1 million to develop and $2 million a year to maintain. In addition, the Web-based patient-tracking systems are more useful to doctors, according to a paper prepared by a team of combat clinicians serving in Iraq. The system ‘is the only record that has visibility throughout the evacuation chain,’ according to the paper. ‘It is easy to access anywhere that we have Internet, it is easy to enter key progress [notes, X-rays, lab and operation] report data in a quick read stream that answers most coordination of care issues at a glance.’”
Companion Technologies will acquire Smart Document Solutions of Alpharetta, GA.
Two medical practices are suing Bond Medical Group and Bond Technologies for a refund and damages. They say Bond Clinician didn’t live up to the company’s claims that it could reduce paper and improve billing accuracy.
CCHIT’s inpatient EMR certification criteria have been approved. Applications for certification will be accepted starting August 1. Information and detailed criteria documents are here.
News, rumors, scandals: e-mail me.
Discuss today’s HIStalk.
From SpiderMan: “Re: Payerpath. The recent Misys announcement highlighted Payerpath as an area of success. Apparently not successful enough, as it was announced to the staff last week that Payerpath will cease to run as a stand-alone unit. In addition, founder and president Jim Brady will be leaving Misys.” Consider this to be conjecture until I receive confirmation, as usual.
From Roy: “Re: Mirth Project. We’ve been looking at Mirth closely for several months and are about to deploy it in some projects. If you want to use it without paying for support, you’d better be pretty technically astute. But it works, is pretty powerful, and is adding features fast. I’m impressed, and I think we’ll likely standardize on it, if things continue to go well. I always felt like interface engines were overpriced, so these guys have correctly spotted an opening in the market, IMHO.”
From Art Vandelay: “Re: open source installations. Having worked with OpenVistA, your depiction is accurate. Very few open source applications have straightforward installations. If a for-profit third party cannot create an single-step installation executable (i.e. Medsphere), you know you are in for a fun time. Even Oracle can’t seem to get a clean application installation without having to read at least three technical bulletins and a few tech support forum posts. Microsoft and IBM do a great job of offering usually pain-free installations. You won’t get adoption without a straightforward installation.”
From Hatchet Guy: “Re: Cerner. Paul Black will go when they announce Q2 earnings in late July. His recent exercising of options is one more sign.”
From Grizzled Veteran: “Re: Sage. Layoff at Sage last Thursday. Various departments, big losses in Professional Services (training). Laying off trainers can only mean lack of new business.” Not yet confirmed here. Anyone?
Vince Kuraitis has well thought out speculation on what Google Health will be and what impact it will have. Some quotes: “The personal health URL and the supporting infrastructure is the cornerstone of the GH offering … Google likely will use a combination of carrots and sticks to encourage and cajole various parties to help PHI flow freely into and from Google’s repository that feeds the patient’s personal health URL … GH will make the CCR standard the MP3 of Personal Health Information.” Even if it turns out he’s wrong, this is a fun and compelling article. One thing to remember about Google: they’re in the eyeballs business. Whatever they develop has to attract lots of well-targeted eyeballs attached to folks willing to respond to online advertising. To a marketer, the information in your PHR might be the most valuable information about you because it (a) targets you as a customer; (b) allows identifying customer groups not easily reached until now because of privacy issues; (c) provides endless opportunities for fine-tuning targeting and messaging; and (d) involves high-priced products and services, with a correspondingly high value to the companies selling them.
Good quote, too from a reader’s comment to Vince’s article: “… all of us who have been around this industry and have seen numerous failures of ‘the next great thing’ delivered by the non-healthcare IT world that promises to finally bring healthcare into this century. Nonetheless, we will root for the effort. While institional resistance to change will be a huge barrier to the GOOG, we may find that consumer apathy and fear (of loss of privacy) may be even more important. GOOGLE’s business success has been founded on fast consumer uptake and that source of energy will not drive this effort. GH will indeed have to demonstrate persistence until payors mandate electronically accessible records as a condition of participation and payment, and then the world will change.”
Frankly, I thought Vince’s stuff was more interesting than the report by California HealthCare Foundation called “Perspectives on the Future of Personal Health Records.” It’s a collection of six “what do you think about PHRs” write-ups provided by experts. I expected something more collectively insightful, intellectually challenging, and predictive. There’s nothing wrong with it, but a quick skim seemed ample.
Mediware will delist itself from the NYSE Arca stock exchange, citing “regulatory and administrative burdens,” but will continue on Nasdaq.
Michael W. Carelton is the new CIO for HHS, reporting to Mike Leavitt and coming over from GSA.
The HIMSS Summit is over. If you went, tell us about it.
“Millennium Research Group (MRG) has conducted a detailed and thorough analysis of the acute care clinical information systems (CIS) market and finds that a major driver in the US is the demand for improvement in patient safety.” If you find that sentence to be loaded with insight and startling revelation, you’ll no doubt want the full report for just $5,000.
TheraDoc will offer multi-hospital IDN capability for its Expert System Platform in September.
Accuro says it sold BI and revenue management software (cost of care estimator, denials management, contract management, and coding and compliance) to 239 hospitals in the first half of 2007.
Managed care company Molina Healthcare announces the resignation of its CIO. I don’t care about that, but his name made it interesting: Rick Click.
Smart: IntelliDOT announces a barcode solution to make sure NICU babies get breast milk from their own mothers, not someone else’s (although in our odd world, adult humans drinking milk from another species of animal … cows … doesn’t seem weird until you spend five seconds thinking about it.)
Bravo: GE Healthcare is urging its employees to stop screwing around with their electronic toys when someone is trying to hold a meeting. I think meeting rooms should have a designated box for BlackBerries and the like, with the occasional TSA-like inspector patting attendees down to find those idiots whose limited attention span lures them into reading routine e-mails instead of paying attention.
LA Times editorial headline: “Close King-Harbor. After years of warnings and last chances, it’s time to shut the hospital down.” And comments: “Certainly a hospital can be fixed, can’t it? If there is inadequate funding, get more money. But, as The Times reported three years ago, the medical center is flush, with more money per patient than other county hospitals. If the problem is poor management, bring in management consultants to shape up the place. But the county spent more than $17 million on a firm to do just that, and the problems remain. Fire the employees? Done. They interviewed, and nearly three-quarters of them were rehired. Turn it over to a successful hospital, like Harbor-UCLA? Tried that. It turns out that, when Harbor-UCLA was supposedly running the place, the same personnel were still in charge.”
A big healthcare accomplishment for Barack Obama: he brings home $350k of your federal tax dollars to help a Kankakee, IL hospital pay for CPOE.
Healthcare Growth Partners will help Optio Software review strategic alternatives for its healthcare division, including its potential sale.
News, rumors, bon mots: e-mail me.
Discuss today’s HIStalk.
Inga’s Update
Gateway
is now offering PC solutions that include MedicWare® Electronic Medical Record software. I am surprised that more software and hardware vendors haven’t partnered to provide pre-packaged solutions. Sure, the MedicWare and similar low-end charting systems aren’t going to work for the majority of practices out there, but there are definitely opportunities at the low end where money is tight and high product sophistication isn’t a requirement.
GE Healthcare will provide more than $30 million in equipment and services to a new hospital and cancer center in British Columbia.
The Healthcare Solutions business of JPMorgan Chase and RelayHealth, the connectivity services company of McKesson Corporation, announced today that they have formed a strategic relationship to offer an integrated set of claim and payment processing solutions. This relationship will transform the way that insurers, healthcare providers and consumers interact to settle claim payments, moving to a fully electronic model. The revenue processing cycle will become electronic and develop a single portal that can be accessed online by all key constituents along the revenue cycle. Anyone care to comment about this? Ultimately who benefits by this – the patient? Provider? Insurance companies?
From CIOShawn: “Re: Mirth Project. Searched your site for any post on the Mirth Project, an HL7 open source interface engine, but found none. Interesting concept, just can’t find much independent info. You always seem to get the scoop. Any interest in getting info on this project and whether anyone has used it successfully?” I hadn’t heard of it. It’s sponsored by WebReach, which offers services and even a Mirth Appliance. And this teaser: “If you think Mirth is cool, wait until you see Azzyzix.” Sounds awfully close to Azyxxi, doesn’t it? (lawsuit news to follow, no doubt.) That company’s site says little about the company. I’ll see what I can find out. If anyone knows, chime right in.
From The PACS Designer: “Re: more 2.0. The 2.0 trend is growing in leaps and bounds. Scott Shreeve, MD is calling the trend a ‘Bandwagon,’ while TPD likes to call it ‘The 2.0 Train’. Whatever you want to call it, the genie is already out of the bottle! TPD was in a bookstore last week and right near the front door was a book with 2.0 tacked on the end of the title. It was the second edition for the book and what better way to attract the readers attention? Since mainstream media is jumping on this Bandwagon/Train, are we going to see movies with the 2.0 extension?” We almost did in 2003, when the working title of the sequel to The Matrix was The Matrix 2.0, later changed to The Matrix Reloaded. Since some of the worst movies ever made have been Roman numeral-bearing sequels, maybe a 2.0-type naming convention would fool potential moviegoers for about five minutes. In fact, is Health 2.0 just a badly planned sequel to what we have now?
New Kaiser Permanente CIO Philip Fasano is interviewed. Nuggets: (1) Kaiser will be developing home care monitoring tools; (2) HealthConnect availability was 99.57% last quarter and the new goal is 99.999%; (3) the IT department will reorganize yet again, swing the never-stopping pendulum back to regionalization vs. centralization; (4) the annual IT budget is $1.7 billion. Justen Deal is critical: “Lastly, the article says that Carol Rizzo, who specializes in ‘establishing offshore business processing operations and IT development,’ has (apparently) replaced poor David Watson as chief technology officer. Indeed, Ms. Rizzo, like Mr. Fasano, has a nifty LinkedIn profile. Like Fasano, she also has held a bunch of quick jobs over the past few years, and she also comes from the financial sector.”
athenahealth announces IPO plans. Big name companies are taking them out, with a maximum share offering of $86 million. Mentioned: the company lost $9.2 million last year on revenue of $75.8 million.
Reminder: sign up for the new mailing list in the box to your right (on HIStalk2). The old one’s being phased out, so that will assure your getting e-mail updates when I write something new. It seems inevitable that HIStalk2 will become the primary site, so consider reading there (another reason to get on the new list: the link from the new e-mail will point to the new site.) Also, the new site has capabilities the old one doesn’t, so I admit that I read only there these days (but appreciate having the original site as a backup in case something goes wrong.) Type www.histalk.com into your browser and you’ll end up there.
McKesson and JPMorgan will work together on a fully electronic claims and payment system.
Based on stock price, the market doesn’t like Nuance’s $265 million acquisition of a developer of embedded software for mobile devices, the latest in a handful of similar acquisitions.
Interesting, free newsletter: VistA & Open Healthcare News (warning: PDF).
Unfortunate hospital lawsuit in the making: a hospital agrees to perform a $100,000 brain surgery for free on a Russian teen, warning of possible complications. He died. The family has hired a lawyer. They claim the hospital offered the free surgery only because they wanted to use him in a commercial. The doctor says the teen was dying already and he did the best he could.
NHS IT contractor Atos Origin launches a healthcare consulting business.
Medsphere announces OpenVista Appliance, a preconfigured demo package. Great idea, although from the instructions, you’d still need to borrow a geek to get it running. That always seems to be an open source limitation: it’s never a Windows-like straightforward installation. 95% of casual tire-kickers will move on.
News, rumors, blasphemy: e-mail me.
Discuss today’s HIStalk.
