News 8/1/07

From INVISIONforever: “Re: Soarian. I checked the Siemens website to see what it was saying about Soarian. Soarian Financials is no longer being touted as a solution for hospital and MD billing. Is this an error or a reflection of a diminished goal? Also, I was surprised to see Soarian Scheduling listed as a revenue cycle solution — it doesn’t even have an insurance master. Under Soarian Departmental Systems, only Cardiology is listed. If you compare this with their promises four years ago, the disparity is huge.” Speaking of Soarian financials, guess who’s just signed for them: Partners (!) They’ll implement scheduling, decision support, document management, community access, and payor connectivity. John Glaser had mentioned in an Inside Healthcare Computing interview that he had a big Siemens revenue cycle project upcoming and some SOA initiatives, but this caught me off guard. Certainly it’s a much-needed boost for Siemens, assuming that their stuff works, anyway.

From Hrundi V. Bakshi: “Re: Lawson. The Lawson project at Mayo was overrun and under functional. Many physicians are complaining. They can’t tell a consult/revisit/new patient from one encounter to another, much less from one facility charge to another. They can’t reconcile medicare patients from one facility to another. It’s often taking physicians 12-25 minutes per encounter to do documentation. The non-MD in charge doesn’t seem to ask doctors what makes sense. Mayo’s IT/Finance strategy needs some serious updating in personnel, vision, and education. They’re aptly set to be the laggard of adoption and questionable due diligence.”

From Molly Clutterbuck: “Re: Cisco and AHA. It’s not objective based on performance, so what’s it based on? Cisco is getting their clocks cleaned in healthcare by better performing vendors. First they bought a HIMSS user group, now they’ve paid for AHA’s ‘recommendation’. Those involved need to get off the speakers’ tour long enough to look at what’s happening with Cisco in wireless. I never knew the AHA to be all that interested in IT. Where have they been all these years?”

From Venny: “Re: Craig Barrett’s horses. Damn the EMR. To boost Intel, he needs to market chips to his four-legged friends. Who knew horses could read e-mails? Are cow chips next?”

From Bernard Stein: “Re: Misys. You are slow on the Misys news. More high level departures.” Maybe my former sources aren’t there any more since nobody’s spreading a little rumor love HIStalk’s way. I’ve not heard anything about exodi. But, Vern Davenport is hinting at acquisitions and says the realignment is 85% done. He agrees with boss Mike Lawrie (always a good idea) that the company’s healthcare “performance remains poor”.

July will be another record HIStalk month. So far: 51,416 visits, 88,156 page views (that doesn’t count RSS readers). Both measures doubled in the past year and trended highly up later in the month. And for that, I thank you and HIStalk’s sponsors.

I should also mention Brev+IT, the weekly e-mail newsletter that starts this weekend. Now about the name: I’m merciless when somebody makes a lame pun involving the letters IT, but it fit so well in this case that I’m willing to humbly accept the inevitable scorn. The main message I wanted to get across is that it will be highly concise, covering only the five most important stories of the week, and with background information and opinion to put it into context (thus the name, which I hope you’ll pronounce “brevity.” Get it? Or is that “Get IT”?) HIStalk is for industry lifers who love the insider stuff, while Brev+IT will get executives up to speed in minutes. See the sample. You’ll notice one tiny spot for a sponsor text ad, which I’ll most likely offer to existing Platinum sponsors at no extra charge. There’s a sign-up form to your right (on HIStalk2 only for now until my HTML guy gets it prettied up). Lots of folks are signing up already, so maybe it’s redundant for me to invite you to do the same.

The Wall Street Journal quotes Microsoft as saying it’s expanding its healthcare efforts: 20 new employees stateside (doctors and other clinicians) and 30 in China (developers). The healthcare group is supposedly given free rein as one of a handful of areas in which MSFT sees big potential.

A long-time reader is in need of a job description for Manager of Cardiovascular Informatics. If you have one, please shoot it to me. Thanks.

Bankrupt Bayonne Medical Center (NJ) finds a Santa Claus willing to pay for a new EMR system: you. Or more specifically, your Federal tax dollars.

Stanford University will offer AMIA’s 10×10 informatics program.

Rhode Island will create a statewide Health Information Exchange, with EDS as the primary contractor and InterSystems providing its HealthShare platform.

Talk to me.

TPD or Mr. HIStalk – any chance you can interview someone at UPMC about their lessons learned from virtualization? The early information is hitting the usual magazines, but it is a little sanitized for my taste. [Inga is working on that, Art. Good idea.]

Virtualization is the only way to get close to the necessary efficiency with the limitations of most of our cottage industry’s vendors. Even getting them to accept virtualization is a tough sell. But, even if you use it only for development purposes, it is cost effective. Less hardware, you use it only when you need it, and you have fewer physical server instances to patch.

For those of you who can’t do or sell anything without a maturity model, here is a first cut we can iterate as an industry. Who says we are not innovative?

Level 1
Can you help me spell that? I could heat a homeless shelter in Alaska from the number of servers (mostly Windows and Intel) I have in the data center.

Level 2
I am running VMWare for my developers on the PCs to test the five different versions of Windows clients on eight different PC hardware configurations we have out there. AND I approached my 300 vendors, of which 20 knew what I was talking about, five said they’d consider it if we upgraded to a current version from the one we run that’s four releases out-of-date, three said OK and they’d have their top tech guru contact me (that was seven months ago), two said they’d have to report me to their manager for using bad language, and one said they’d do it if we’d pay a higher maintenance fee.

Level 3
Just doing it without vendor blessing for all those fine two-tier, Windows server-based development servers. AND virtualizing tape back-up and storage (damn, TPD – you’re already to Level 3).

Level 4
After wasting five man-years of effort, outsourcing it to someone else and making it their problem, while paying too much for the service.

Level 5
Getting your ERP vendor to virtualize some of their 20 servers, storage, and tape devices. Come on now, you thought that we can even talk about a healthcare vendor doing this for another five years? The rest of the world has two years’ of experience on us right now.