Lots of Misys news to report as announcements are made in London:
- The so-called Diagnostic Information Business, i.e. Sunquest, is being sold to Vista Equity Partners for $382 million. That includes pharmacy, lab, and radiology systems.
- The Misys CPR hospital clinical system is being sold to QuadraMed for $33 million.
- Rumors are that Misys will introduce an open source, EMR-related product (along with other open source products in its banking divisions).
- Vista will try to market Misys EMR as part of the deal.
- Both new owners have agreed to support the Misys Connect strategy.
- UK rules require Misys shareholders to approve the transaction.
Thoughts
- From QuadraMed’s announcement of the CPR purchase, it appears that Quadramed’s motivation was known weaknesses in its own Affinity clinical offferings, particularly for larger hospitals: integration and CPOE.
- Misys bought CPR from Per-Se (as Patient1) for $30 million in mid-2003 and spent a lot of money ($20 million?) tinkering with its technology underpinnings. So, QuadraMed gets an even better fire-sale price than Misys got originally, although with a few more layers of accumulated tarnish. It’s now nearly 20 years old with few installations.
- Misys CPR was once a great product, but it has languished for many years under two unfocused owners.
- Current KLAS rankings: CPR # 6, but notably one notch ahead of Cerner Millennium and two above GE Centricity Enterprise (Affinity had much higher numbers, but too few installs.) Lab: a strong #2 (good job, Sunquest.) Pharmacy: mid-pack, but too few customers to score officially. Radiology: #3 of a four-horse race, but once again the last-placer was Cerner. In other words, if you believe KLAS, QuadraMed gets an instantly competitive clinical product line for $33 million.
- QuadraMed CEO Keith Hagen is familiar with both products: before becoming CEO, he was with QuadraMed and left for Misys (although he was involved in their transaction services, not software).
- One rumor is that the old Sunquest name will be revived. I like that idea.
- Misys took on 200 Per-Se employees when it bought CPR. I can’t imagine very many are left. Ramping up staff isn’t something QuadraMed has done a lot of, so that will be a challenge (as will trying to move the office from Tucson if that’s part of the plan – QuadraMed struggled with that in moving everyone to Reston a few years back.)
- Vista is the same private equity company that bought Surgical Information Systems in February 2006.
Reader Comments
“Affinity was not designed for larger, multi-facility organizations and lacked technical infrastructure to support needed enhancements. Their interfaced, acquired pharmacy product was never going to work. CPR has an excellent integrated pharmacy system and an OK lab solution. Much deeper nursing and CPOE capability. However, CPR is hard to install and most of the knowledgable staff are long gone. It needs to be configured for out-of-the-box installation.”
“I need some help, as a business-ignorant techie. Misys just sold of PLX (Pharm, Lab, Xray) to an investment firm. CPR is probably going to QuadraMed based on another rumor. What I don’t get is this: Verne keeps telling us that Hospital Systems is making money and keeping areas like Physician Systems (that he said is bleeding) afloat. Why sell off the very unit that is keeping the other units afloat? I just don’t get it.” Misys Myopia is an interesting phenomenon caused by bringing over a bunch of Medic people who never bought into the inpatient thing and just assumed their gravy train had endless track in front of it. The old, unprofitable product line wasn’t Sunquest or CPR, it was the ambulatory business, but they couldn’t see that. The cash cow has been sold for a low price to try to plug a few of many lifeboat holes. While this strategy isn’t a bad idea, they need to show far more brilliance and vision in trying to save the only remaining business than they did deciding to sell this one off.
Mr. HIStalk’s Cheap Seat, Hastily Thought Out Conclusions
- CPR was always a better product than the market acknowledged. The problem was the incompetent vendors selling, installing, and supporting it (Health Data Sciences, then Medaphis/Per-Se, then Misys). Several years ago, when I last looked side by side (casually) at all the available products (except Epic), I ranked it #1. Very nice user interface, great for physicians and nurses.
- Affinity Clinicals are pretty good and, despite technology criticisms (MUMPS and Cache’, not much different than the original CPR technology). Epic is obviously a poster child to prove it’s sellable despite the nuts and bolts. Still, QuadraMed’s purchase of Australia’s Detente Systems never really worked out – nobody does real integration via that route and McKesson is much better at convincing a gullible market to the contrary than QuadraMed ever was.
- QuadraMed paid $4 million for Detente in 2004. It paid $14 million to get Tempus Software the same year, a much better investment.
- Affinity Clinicals are best suited for small- to mid-sized hospitals, while CPR’s few customers seemed to indicate a big-hospital preference. Keith Hagen’s video statement about the announcement clearly says they’ll offer both products. That’s been tough for those who’ve tried it before – trying to merge cultures, technology, and sales is a lot harder than just hanging a new name on it.
- I don’t know how many good clinical product people are left at QuadraMed since Affinity Clinicals were doing pretty much nothing. Ditto CPR. Who’ll be involved? It had better be folks with clinical backgrounds who can come up to speed quickly.
- Misys management seemed almost openly contemptuous of the Diagnostic Information Business, but the sales announcement painted a far rosier picture, with margins of nearly 30%. Need proof they didn’t get it? How about this from the press release: “The Diagnostic Systems business has been run largely as a stand-alone operation, and therefore will experience minimal impact in day-to-day operations.” In other words, Misys was adding no value whatsoever and, most probably, actually hampering that division from succeeding due to its own corporate- and division-level bungling. And even then, it was bringing home big profit margins.
- Misys is selling the former Sunquest for slightly less than it paid: $404 million in 2001. Not much value-added there.
- Misys Connect never amounted to much and will be irrelevantly straddled across three companies. The only remaining assets of Misys Healthcare, i.e. the physician systems, will have to make it on their own with fierce competition. Divesting the other businesses will let them focus on trying to salvage that struggling product line.
- Misys finally acknowledges that, grand proclamations about its vision aside, it lacked the execution and vision to play in the hospital market. It’s first and foremost a banking software company that happens to own a troubled physician practice software division hanging on for the ride. It has finally gotten ride of one of its two unaligned albatrosses.
- QuadraMed has had its share of rough rides, too: wildly faulty acquisitions, survival without vision under Larry English, the slow and painful demise of Affinity, and what looked like a wise retrenchment into the company’s only strength: the HIM product and service market. Will the market accept their re-emergence into acute care clinical systems?
- The industry needs another strong clinical systems player, with the odds going down by the minute that a GE-retooled Carecast will be it.
- Tucson employees of Misys, as Gerald Ford said, your long national nightmare is over. Your were already an abused step-child, so it can’t get much worse. The announcements proved what everyone suspected: Misys Healthcare didn’t respect its only successful product lines and the people producing them.
Post Your Thoughts on HIStalk Discussion
Since I have to work for a living on Monday, I won’t necessarily be able to post HIStalk updates as any news breaks and to get your comments online quickly. Post here! You can bet that Misys, QuadraMed, Vista, investment analysts, and everybody else in the industry wants to know what you think.
From Hamrick: “Re: Misys. Misys will announce the sale of Misys CPR to QuadraMed on Monday, July 23.” QuadraMed already has a clinical product that nobody’s buying, so I’m not sure why they’d want another one. However, since Misys was making big changes Friday (supposedly), maybe the timing was intentional if this is true.
From Wompa1: “Re: CHI. Christopher MacManus, Sr. VP of IS at Catholic Health Initiatives, has moved on.”
From Duuude: “Re: Mayo and Cerner. I’m wondering if Mayo feels left out of with Intermountain being the development partner. They used to hold IDX by the gonads when they were truly a development partner. In my experience with Mayo, even though they can be a big pain in the derriere, they did know their stuff. Even with all of that holding and pain caused by Mayo, they are worth keeping, even just for the perks of having them as a named client. When will GE take notice and stop the bleeding? If I was GE, I would be trotting out Hogan, the executive GE Healthcare board, and whatever is left of Seattle management to keep Mayo.”
From The PACS Designer: “Re: iPhone clones. TPD wants HIStalk readers to know that the iPhone is not the only choice when it comes to ‘combo phones’. The iPhone is getting all the attention, but there are other all-in-one phones to consider. There’s the RIMM Curve, the Motorola Q9, and the Helio Queen. They aren’t truly clones, but they offer more traditional functionality. I’m sure we’ll be hearing about more companies jumping on the bandwagon.”
From TwoDogMom: “Re: Mediware. What does anyone out there know about the Mediware vs IHC lawsuit?” They’re suing each other, it appears. Intermountain bought Mediware’s blood blank system in 2004 with a three-year support agreement ending June 30, 2007, with rights reverting back to Mediware on expiration. Mediware told Intermountain it wouldn’t renew the agreement, so Intermountain is arguing it should be able to keep using the system. Intermountain had already sued Mediware in April for breach of contract. An unhappy, high-profile customer is just the icing Mediware’s cake needs.
Rumor: physician practice vendor AcerMED has abruptly ceased operations.
Jon Philips of Healthcare Growth Partners asked me to clarify that the number of deals I quoted the other day was of the principals, not the company itself. They’re doing great, of course, but he didn’t want anyone to think they were trying to mislead.
iSoft couldn’t even get a date a few weeks ago, now it has two marriage proposals: Germany’s CompuGroup trumps IBA’s bid with a $329 million cash offer of its own, a 19% premium to IBA’s offer that iSoft’s management is urging shareholders to accept. Part of their offer: CompuGroup will sell off the NPfIT business to CSC and both companies will own the Lorenzo product line.
Mediware shuts down its OR business line and fires 20 employees under the new COO. They announce their focus on so-called closed loop systems. Well, good luck with that. That’s bad news for GE: Mediware’s exit frees up the dead-last KLAS surgery spot for Centricity Perioperative. Doh!
I didn’t hear first-hand about the scheduled Misys bloodletting on Friday. Did it happen? Maybe you’ll be offered another position, like this one: Misys needs a PR specialist. Desperately, some might say. Guess the layoffs freed up some salary dollars.
CPSI announces Q2 results: revenue down 3.5%, EPS $0.31 vs. $0.38, falling short of expectations.
Emergin sent over their latest newsletter. It includes an Emory neuroscience CCU case study on alarm integration.
My editorial this week in Inside Healthcare Computing: “‘Best’, ‘Most Wired’, and Other Hospital Surveys: Good for Selling Stuff and Not Much Else.” I won’t spoil the suspense by revealing my opinion.
Speaking of the Most Wired BS, even H&HN had to punt when it came to the obvious: “The analysis shows an association between IT adoption and key quality measures, but association is not causality.” That wasn’t on the cover, of course. Those paying for the survey: the magazine, Accenture, AHA, CHIME, and McKesson. All but AHA have a vested interested in encouraging the “buy more stuff” bandwagon. Just another meaningless award given to customers by their vendors.
eScription announces the release of a new version of its speech recognition software, AutoScript. They casually mention in the second paragraph that it’s twice as fast at processing dictation as the prior version. I’m thinking there was little debate about whether that justified a new version number.
El Camino Hospital creates a CMIO position and recruites Eric Pifer from the University of Pennsylvania Health System.
Charles Wagner leaves IBM/Healthlink to become SVP of professional services for Eclipsys.
Discuss today’s news here. Lots of you have registered for HIStalk Discussion, so why not use it? I rented the hall and brought the band, but I can’t make you dance.
E-mail me. But only if you want to.
From Joey Cheesesteak: “Re: CHOP. Regarding your 7/13 item: their outage was due to loss of power in the Primary Data Center. Operations did not shift to the remote data center because the SAN was not configured to cooperate. This outage was not an Epic problem (not to say that the Epic implementation is going smoothly). Also, three of the four CIO direct reports have left recently. One moved to a different department within the hospital and the other two have found other employment. The CIO will hit a five-year anniversary in January 2008. What’s the average tenure of a CIO after an Epic implementation?”
From Dr. Mark Bellows: “Re: Cerner. Look for Cerner and Mayo to make a huge ‘Kaiser-like’ announcement soon. Also, Clarian is looking for an out in their Cerner contract (it’s not looking good AT ALL over there …) I have always enjoyed reading your blog and have laughed at times when rumors are stated about Cerner well before they have made them public. You and your readers have been on the nose 90% of the time with most things.” Unverified, but, from what seems to be a good source.
From Lance Le Gault: “Re: Cerner. The funny talk around here is that Cerner would take any temp, put ‘em in a suit, and say, ‘We are sending you a VP.’ Cerner losing 20 of those VPs means very little.”
From Nancy Greenly: “Re: Cerner. It’s obvious that Neal is putting the company up for sale with all the cost-cutting and moving everything to centrally-based KC for an easier transition. Sales are slow, but the stock price keeps going up. The Indian outsourcing is in place and a European presence makes them a ‘global’ company. I’d bet a non-current player picks them up within three years.”
From Sean Murphy: “Re: non-competes. That was nice of Mike Etue to ride out his non-compete from the other folks in Malvern on someone else’s dime and then jump ship a few months after it expired. Wow, that Epic document is brutal. Too bad the federal government says that you can’t prevent someone from earning a living. It would never stand up a real court. Do we have any legal readers that could lend an opinion of the language?” I asked a non-compete attorney I ran across to chime in, but he hasn’t replied so far. The bottom line is that non-competes are almost always unenforceable, but unless you take the company to court to obtain a summary judgment (kind of like a class action suit), each employee has to spend their own money fighting retainer lawyers in court. That’s assuming you can even get a job offer, that is. You’d be proven right, but not before you went broke. The threat alone is enough to tilt the landscape to the company’s side.
If you’ve had problems accessing HIStalk recently, my apologies. It’s hard to believe, but even after my big upgrade in May, the site’s server red-lined on memory this week and killed the Apache service several times (that causes “Page Not Found” errors). Inga tells me some of the notification e-mails may not have gone out either, although they looked OK on the server. I thought the May upgrade was overkill that would guarantee enough horsepower for years. Well, two months later, a punishing number of HIStalk hits maxed it out again, so I’ve doubled the memory and had extra bandwidth allocated. I’m not complaining – it’s a great problem to have.
The LA Times writes up Prem Reddy MD, a cardiologist turned for-profit hospital entrepreneur who claims to be worth $300 million. He tools around in a $1.4 million helicopter and has a 15,000 square foot mansion with gold-plated toilets formerly owned by Roy Rogers. How he does it: he buys struggling community hospitals, cancels their insurance contracts, dumps services that don’t have a big profit, (allegedly) turns away patients without insurance, and (allegedly) lets quality slip. He does that Bob Dole thing in referring to himself in the worshipful third person: “There isn’t anybody like Prem Reddy that can face so many challenges in the medical field.” I mentioned him two years ago, when his brother, a CEO of one of his hospitals, fired the CNO and HR director after they claimed he (Prem) was drinking while working in the ED and using a triage system based on insurance coverage.
Reminder: use the sign-up to your right to get e-mail updates when I write something new. I notice that list is up to 527 subscribers in a very short time, plus the 1,843 on the “old” e-mail list.
Jason Baker has joined Healthcare Growth Partners as Managing Director. He comes from Cerner, where he was head of corporate development (high-level strategic stuff like investments and acquisitions, not programming-type development.) I didn’t realize that Healthcare Growth Partners has been involved with over 100 deals worth over $1.5 billion in just two years. Nice.
Some Misys folks have been asking about severance (wonder why?) Typical for the company is supposedly one week per year of service. They also don’t go after non-competes too hard, rumor has it, which is to their credit when folks leave under something other than their own volition.
Off-hours teleradiology provider NightHawk Radiology buys Midwest Physician Services, a radiology business process company, and another off-hours teleradiology company. Total price: $62.5 million cash. They’re creating NightHawk Business Services, which will offer services for revenue cycle, HR, transcription, and other back-office stuff for radiology practices.
Someone who should know tells me that Cerner is indeed slimming down implementation teams as Bedrock gets built out, running implementations from the KC Accelerated Solutions Center. Apparently it really does work and they won’t need virtual implementation staff any more. Another tidbit: supposedly Paul Black left because he didn’t like how the customer-facing employees are being treated (accessibility to client, work-life balance, etc.). Unverified, of course.
Comanche County Memorial Hospital (OK) signs a $13 million deal with McKesson for Horizon Clinicals.
The Most Wired list is out. I don’t care, so I won’t mention it or the winners. It’s meaningless, was created by vendors solely to encourage the “buy more IT” bandwagon effect, and keeps going only because the “winners” pretend it shows how excellent they are. I’ve worked for winners and all those I spoke to laughed about it behind closed doors, but it’s better to win than not, they always figured (harmless CIO resume expansion and hospital chest-puffing).
Bizarre lawsuit: a nurse changing clothes in a Kentucky hospital’s anesthesia office finds a hidden camera in the ceiling tiles. She says the hospital then tried to throw her and her surgeon husband off the property for trashing the camera, also threatening to revoke their privileges. Another nurse was fired. The hospital says the camera was there to monitor controlled substances that are kept in the office and that the women should have used unmonitored areas set aside for changing. The nurses are suing for voyeurism.
News, rumors, changing room video: e-mail me.
From Inside Outsider: “Re: heart images on iPhone. TPD will be happy to see this.” Web-based image management company Heart Imaging Technologies is offering iPhone access to their browser-based imaging application. Sample images here. Looks cool.
From Malvern: “Re: Misys. Mike Etue is the new Senior VP of Sales for Misys. Mike Etue resigned five days before the Eclipsys ‘announcement’”. Deady convinced Mike to hold off for a week, then claimed he fired Mike.”
From Hatchet Guy: “Re: Cerner and Paul Black. Now Mike Valentine has nobody to blame. Pay close to the number of employees in KC. Compare the number they announce on the earnings call to the annual report. It is shrinking fast. Instead of severance, negative press, and stock reaction, they told a large group of implementation folks they have to move to or stay in KC, knowing that will cause turnover. That’s the plan – that Bedrock will install Cerner’s app without implementation resources needed. In the last 45 days, more than 20 VPs have left the company. One more thing to watch in the coming days in KC: the FDA.” Unverified, as I always add, so if you can verify or contradict, e-mail me.
From Wayne Frake: “Re: Lawson. Is Lawson looking for something new to buy and/or merge with? I saw an email from Debes to Messing. Messing’s response was no interest.”
Epic Escapee sent me a copy of the non-compete agreement he or she signed a few years back. It is quite broad, probably not enforcable legally. Some terms: (a) you will “neither accept nor conduct any other business or professional activities while employed by Epic”; (b) for two years after leaving, you can’t contact any Epic customer in a sales capacity; (c) you can’t have anything to do with companies it has defined as competitors: Allscripts, Cerner, Eclipsys, GE Medical, Healthvision, IDX, McKesson, Misys, NextGen, Per Se, SMS, or WebMD for two years after you leave; (d) you can’t join a business or start your own during that two years if it competes with Epic; (e) for two years, you won’t try to convince any Epic employee to quit; (e) for three years after employment or six months after leaving, whichever comes first, you won’t work for any Epic customer or prospect, except in a role not involving software. It’s pretty smothering, but on the other hand, you don’t have to sign it. You won’t get the job, but maybe that’s best if you’re thinking about your post-Epic career.
From Roscoe Dexter: “Re: Epic. I’m waiting out my non-compete. I’ve heard a rumor that Epic once called customers who were courting a recently fired implementer to tell them not to hire them. I’ve studied non-competes and I know they’re essentially unenforceable, but I’ve heard of Epic blacklisting people from Epic certification who circumvented the clauses. I’ll call these rumors since I didn’t hear them directly from the people involved.”
By the way, if you’ve ever wanted to send me something anonymously like Epic Escapee did, remember that the new Rumor Report form (link to your right) allows attachments. I keep forgetting to mention that.
For you Misys folks, especially those in sales, reliable sources tell me that major changes will happen late this week. The new guard is taking over and much of the old one will be dismissed, including many dozen who will be offered severance to leave quietly. Nearly that many will be marched out, I’m told. I have names of a few high-ranking employees who will be affected (good and bad), but I don’t see any point in plastering them here since it’s unavoidable at this point. Condolences to those about to be negatively affected and tepid congratulations to those who’ll be sliding into the still-warm chairs, at least temporarily.
McKesson will buy Birmingham-based patient throughput software vendor Awarix Inc. St. Vincent’s of Birmingham was their development partner, as I recall, and much of the management team came from Emageon.
Speaking of McKesson, they’ve got offices in good places, according to Money’s new Best Places to Live list. #2: Louisville, CO. #3: Lake Mary, FL.
Since this isn’t an ad-packed magazine, I don’t have to waste your time writing unimportant stuff just to separate those ads. You are now current on the industry. Congratulations and see you next time. If you are so moved, e-mail me. How’s your summer going?
From Tommy Pischedda: “Re: Epic’s non-compete. Didn’t Carl Dvorak give an interview awhile back in Inside Healthcare Computing saying that those didn’t exist? They’re actually pretty nasty about it. Even if an employee is moving because of a spousal employment change, the clause is still enforced. There are some customers who don’t have that in their contracts. Epic has still gone after ex-employees trying to get jobs there.” He told the newsletter the agreement is basic, of limited timeframe, and involves only a few direct competitors (more specifics are in their October 16, 2006 issue).
From Mick Shrimpton: “Re: Epic. I heard that there is a lawyer in Madison that specifically works with ex-Epic employees and HR issues.” I’d enjoy speaking to that person if anyone has contact info. I also heard from a former Epic employee who broke the chains in going to work for a customer and offers help to those who need it, so I’ll forward your contact info to him if you like.
From John “Stumpy” Pepys: “Re: Illinois nurse staffing bill. I haven’t heard any word about Illinois Senate Bill 0867, Nurse Staffing by Patient Acuity. Any thoughts in the industry about this?” I’m not a fan of the article itself since it clearly favors the nurse’s union that supported the bill and refers to nurses as “her” (like male nurses don’t already have enough ’splainin to do). Its sponsors were Democrats, of course. It requires hospitals to use a patient acuity tool, an idea that’s come and gone at least ten times since the early 1980s. I’m not a fan of prescriptive lawmaking where the government gets involved with how businesses operate, but the sad thing is that hospitals were so lax on staffing that it came to this.
From Grapevine: “Re: Initiate Systems. Mark Battaglia, SVP of worldwide business development, is no longer with the company. Initiate is pursuing IPO and one has to wonder why a top executive would exit the company at this time.” Looks like he was nuked off their Web page sometime after May 14.
From The PACS Designer: “Re: best hospitals. TPD closely follows the annual release of America’s Best Hospitals by US News and World Report, which happened today.” The honor roll: Hopkins, Mayo, UCLA, Cleveland Clinic, MGH, NY Presbyterian, Duke, UCSF, Barnes-Jewish, and Brigham and Women’s, University of Washington, HUP, UPMC, University of Michigan, Stanford, Yale-New Havel, Cedars-Sinai, and University of Chicago. Hey, how come the Vandy informatics rock stars didn’t propel VUMC onto the A-list? Kidding. Just popped into my head because we were talking about it earlier.
From Ronnie Pudding: “Re: Andy Corbin. My theory as to why he left Sage was that he’s being indicted. After all, the Forbes article was an embarrassment to the Justice Department. Anyway, he wasn’t much of a leader and surrounded himself with people who don’t know the industry and who don’t listen to their subordinates who do. He also pushed the selling of Emdeon to Sage, so maybe Sage is feeling ripped off at this point.”
From Angela: “Re: Verisign. I read yesterday where the CFO of Verisign resigned. This and the recent departure of their CEO and the failed investment in Healthvision would lead one to believe that they have changed their minds regarding the health care space.” The CFO bailed after yet another options-dating scandal that will cost the company $160 million and force it to re-state earnings. The CEO high-tailed it in May. You have to expect them to retrench back to core business, which healthcare isn’t. How that will affect Healthvision is anyone’s guess.
From Viv Savage: “Re: Misys. Mike Etue is the new Senior VP of Sales for Misys.” Well, if so, then I’ll pat myself on the back for near-psychic ability for taking that wild guess strictly on the basis of timing. If it’s true, that would pretty much dismiss the implied claim by Eclipsys that they fired him, unless he was darned fast at lining up a new gig.
I’d like to introduce you to The White Stone Group, Inc. of Knoxville, TN, an HIStalk Platinum Sponsor. They’ve been around since 1991, with over 400 hospital customers and three major products: TRACE (revenue cycle communication tracking, like precertification, to improve denials management); OptiVox (handoff reporting for shift changes and transfers, of obvious Joint Commission importance); and VoiCentral (automation of incoming telephone calls with information templates for pre-registration, scheduling, etc.) They offer lots of case studies and articles on their site. It’s pretty cool that they’ve found some unusual yet much-needed healthcare IT areas of focus. I always Google companies before I take them on as sponsors and I ran across this interesting article about White Stone’s struggle with providing employee health insurance. Back in 2004, the wife of one of the company’s 70 employees gave birth to quintuplets, racking up a $2 million hospital bill that increased the company’s premiums by $90,000 per year. “For a company with $8 million in revenue, that extra $90,000 was going to hurt. ‘Willem said he was sorry,’ says [CEO Guille] Cruze, who tried to reassure his employee. ‘I told him that it was okay, that we would live and die as a team.’” Welcome and thanks to The White Stone Group for supporting HIStalk.
A regular reader chimes in with some Mac comments that make me want to give it a run. “As a non-zealot who’s used both a Mac and a PC since 1992 (as well as a UNIX machine), I recommend an iMac. OS X is elegant, works very well, learning curve not high if you do Windows, and an iMac is an elegant piece of hardware, besides, that is quite a change from the usual ugly metal box. Kind of like a Camaro Z28/SS being the opposite of your neighbor’s minivan. And now that Macs use Intel inside, you can have your cake and eat it too.” They look cool, but I was most intrigued by the Mac mini. I don’t know anything at all about Apple (I lost interest 100 or so years ago with the Lisa flop) and their commercials seem to aim to a different demographic than mine, but maybe I’m missing out.
Cerner COO Paul Black will retire on August 31, the company announced Friday. Sorry for the redundancy for you regular readers: I said this would happen on February 28 (courtesy of Private Ryan), May 7 (PezMan), and again on June 27 (Hatchet Guy). Given their production cycles, the trade journals will have this scoop by Labor Day or so (if they run it at all, since it isn’t advertiser-friendly), so that means you read it here six months early. The COO position, which Paul assumed in February 2005, won’t be filled. Isn’t 48 a bit young for retirement?
Eclipsys announces KLAS results indicating that it has the highest nurse satisfaction rating of fully rated vendors and the highest positive commentary percentage. That last stat is beginning to annoy me: how valid is a comparison of percentages of positive commentary when all comments are voluntary, unattributed, and of wildly dissimilar relevance and importance? And, in the interest of fairness, I note that the “fully rated vendors” part was tacked on by Eclipsys because Epic annihilated them in the nurse satisfaction score, but with too few respondents to meet KLAS’s validity standard. They were also fifth in the eight-horse race for adoption scores. Still, I’d place it above most of what’s out there, with the very bright spot being Knowledge-Based Charting. Had they rolled out a pharmacy package earlier to gear up for medication dispensing and bedside barcoding, they’d be sitting pretty right now.
Sentillion announces nine new Q2 customers. I like their tagline (assuming it’s true): “The company that created healthcare single sign-on.”
The president of a corporation that ran nine San Francisco-area nursing homes gets 30 months in jail for failing to pay $10 million in payroll taxes. He also owned Skilled Logic Systems, a software company (without a web site, so I’m guessing tax dodge.) His genius attorney tried to keep him out of jail by citing Scooter Libby’s get out of jail free card. It didn’t work. “Easterday ran his business on the government’s tax dollars, buying a six-bedroom home now valued at $2 million, sending his children to private colleges, funding his mother’s monthly pension and buying a sailboat and jet skis, Assistant U.S Attorney Jay Weill wrote in a sentencing memorandum. ‘He used the withheld payroll taxes like an ATM machine for working capital for his business activities,’ Weill wrote.” I made up some amusing lyrics, sung to the tune of Yesterday, but that kind of humor is beneath me.
Modern Healthcare had a pretty good editorial going called Scrap the National IT Plan, at least until toward the end when it advocated smart cards for data sharing. Other than that one ill-conceived paragraph, I liked it.
University of Rochester claims that labor savings from reduced chart pulls gave them a 16-month payback on TouchWorks.
Bye. E-mail me.
