News 9/14/07

From The PACS Designer: “Re: Oracle Database 11g. It takes quite a bit of innovation to get TPD excited when it comes to healthcare IT. Oracle has just done that by releasing a new database solution called Oracle Database 11g. It appears to be just what the doctor ordered (no pun intended) when it comes to bringing healthcare some new exciting solutions for its diverse population of databases. One key feature is the ability to store DICOM image files along with other data parameters, such as XML, 3-D spatial data, and any other multimedia data to give users a central location for all of their data. TPD will be highlighting other new features in upcoming posts.”

From Health CIO: “Re: North Shore. I hear that North Shore Long Island Jewish Health System is looking for a new CIO. Anybody know who’s interested?”

Google’s main healthcare guy, VP Adam Bosworth, has left the company. It didn’t sound amicable, but you never know.

And speaking of Google, the company is working with Stanford and NASA to map the human body by scanning cadavers, with the possibility of an eventual Google Body that would be similar to Google Earth.

Sentillion announces its expreSSO single sign-on product for healthcare. Key points: “plug and go”, lower cost, graphical intelligent agent creation, support for graceful single sign-off, fast user switching on shared workstations, support for proximity authentication, password reset, and appliance-based deployment with five-nines uptime. I hope to get more info soon. Sounds pretty cool, especially if the price is good.

Rumor heard: Healthvision will announce the sale of the company in the next few days. I contacted CEO Scott Decker, who confirmed that Healthvision is in the final stages of negotiating a sale to a new investor. He couldn’t name that company, but I’ve heard it’s Quovadx, which went private in its own April sale to private equity firm Battery Ventures. Supposedly Verisign’s investment in Healthvision never panned out and employees have left in significant numbers after a June layoff. My February interview with Scott is here. I hope it works out for all involved.

When doing some vanity Googling, I ran across my own comments in Healthcare Informatics. I’d forgotten that I gave them permission to run some stuff I wrote awhile back called “Guide to RHIOs for CIOs in ten easy steps”. I appreciate the quote and the link.

Parkland’s use of ER kiosks from Galvanon makes MSNBC.

A Canadian company brings medical services to cell phones: dietitians who analyze meal snapshots sent in by users, on-demand conferencing with freelance nurses and doctors, and a baby application. Pulse and temperature can be transmitted and conversations are archived.

Scott L’Heureux, formerly of SIS, is named CEO of Jackson Therapy Partners, an Orlando-based therapy staffing firm. I didn’t realize until I looked at their site that they’re a sister company of throughput software vendor StatCom.

Rush-Copley Medical Group chooses athenahealth along with Eclipsys Sunrise Ambulatory Care.

Good Samaritan Hospital (CA) will use Medseek’s portal services.

Optio announces Q2 numbers: revenue down 2%, EPS -$0.05 vs. -$0.02.

Even newspapers can’t spell Misys. There’s just no excuse for spelling it “Mysis,” any more than there is for typing “gentamycin”.

Capgemini wants to profit from offering support services to enterprise users of Google Apps Premier Edition. That’s odd enough, but now Microsoft jumps into the fray, bashing the product and thereby instantly lending it credibility, like all competitors it tries to squash with trash talk. MSFT criticizes Google’s “perpetual beta,” which I would counter-argue is at least labeled as such, unlike Microsoft’s far-from-free trial balloons labeled as production-ready software instead of a series of desperately scheduled service packs. Actually, the version that Cap is pitching isn’t free; it’s $50 a year. Overall, I’d buy (or keep) Office instead unless I had rock-solid and limitless bandwidth (who wants to be called with the Internet is slow?) and didn’t have any Excel or Access power users. You could probably buy Office for what that $50 a year adds up to, although you’d still have to support its local installation. That doesn’t count Cap’s charges, either.

Midwest Medical Insurance Company will offer a premium credit to physician policyholders who use electronic medical records. Requirements for the 2-5% credit: the EMR must be CCHIT-certified, software updates must be current, 75% of docs in the practice must use it, it has to have been running for at least a year, and at least two of six listed EMR functions must be used.

A UK hospital is embarrassed when a hard drive containing patient information is sold on eBay. And speaking of breaches, here’s a first-person description of how a bored hospital visitor did some innocent hacking.

Miss Nebraska is a senior in bioinformatics at University of Nebraska-Omaha, which I thought was noteworthy enough to warrant a pic from her site. Some enterprising vendor could sponsor an appearance in their HIMSS booth, you know.

Inga’s Update

I feel I have arrived because I received my first email from Matthew Holt. Unfortunately, he was making fun of the fact that I am just now discovering Sermo, a company that he claims he practically made famous through his multiple mentions in THCB (he is making it hard to feel like a diva).

On the other hand, Mike H. was very appreciative of my “insights” on Sermo (Mike seems to understand that divas need appreciation). He also said: “Just read your post about Sermo.  I’ve been reading about them a bit lately and also think their business model is intriguing.  I ran across what appears to be a similar site that makes a similar claim about size (we’re the biggest …) You might be interested in looking at their site as well. It’s www.within3.com.” I did check out www.within3.com (I like the name) and it reminds me a bit of LinkedIn, but for physicians (and those in related fields.) It will be interesting to see in time to see if either of these models (or other similar ones) is sustaining.

eClinicalWorks is selected by the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth Health System (SCLHS) to provide their EMR/PM solution, as well as their Patient Portal as part of the Ambulatory EHR initiative. The ECW system will be made available on a voluntary basis to its 200 employed physicians and the 5,000 physicians on staff. The ECW solution will interface with SCLHS’s existing GE Centricity hospital system. The ECW press release doesn’t really say if there is any dollar commitment involved or if the health system is providing the software to any of the physicians for free and/or a reduced cost.

In another vague press release, Misys announces that West Michigan Physicians Network (WMPN) in Grand Rapids has endorsed Misys EMR, Tiger, and Connect for their 450 member physicians. WMPN will be eligible for “pre-negotiated contract terms and favorable product pricing” for the solutions. No mention if the endorsement is exclusive.

And, in less vague EMR selection news, HealthPort announces that Biloxi, MS based Coastal Family Health Center and the Mississippi HealthSafeNet High Impact EHR project have selected HealthPort EMR for its regional EMR system. HealthPort is the company that was formed after Companion Technologies and SDS merged. The Mississippi project is made up of seven organizations and recently was granted $1.4 million by the Health Resources and Services Administration to fund the EHR and related projects.

Zotec Partners and EmPhysis Medical Management announce a merger. Both are in the practice management and billing fields, primarily focused on hospital-based physicians. As others have mentioned recently, the billing side of healthcare IT is not dead!

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