Home » News » Currently Reading:

Monday Morning Update 9/17/07

September 15, 2007 News 3 Comments

From Dusty Wong: “Re: Quovadx. How in the world it THAT pronounced? Is this the company where Superman’s impish pest, Mr. Mxyzptlk, works?” Kwo-VAD-ix. Guess they didn’t have to worry about taking a name somebody else already owned.

From An HHC Employee: “Re: CPR. As a Misys CPR user (NYC HHC), I am stunned to see Quadramed’s optimism about the product, especially being tied up in Cache’. Misys has been promising the Cache’ transition for many years, but never came through with it. Is Quadramed lacking in due diligence, or just talking up the same game Misys was? The CPR product is good for integration, but is years behind in other features – not Web-enabled, no way to easily integrate decision support, the list goes on.”

From Lester Golub: “Re: Isabel. I’ve never seen a product with such a huge popular press vs. biomedical literature imbalance. I’ve never seen a peer-reviewed article on Isabel and the stuff on their website, though positive regarding the product, doesn’t appear to have made it to anything indexed in PubMed.”

From John Winger: “Re: Misys/West Michigan Physicians Network. From the hospital side, it’s largely a Cerner/McKesson town. I seem to remember hearing recently that there’s a collective effort underway to subsidize physician technology adoption, but I thought that was a Cerner-based effort. Curious how Misys will do. I do know they had already lost one big account in that area.”

Investors are supposedly excited about next week’s athenahealth IPO, mostly because of the company’s recurring revenue model that’s based on a percentage of physician collections. We’ll know for sure soon.

Those same investors are also supposedly bullish on WebMD, speculating (no pun intended) that Adam Bosworth’s departure from Google means the company will shift its strategy to buying market share (i.e, WebMD) instead of building its own healthcare products.

HIMSS announces the 2007 Davies Award winners: Allina Hospitals & Clinics, Minneapolis, MN (organizational), Valdez Family Clinic, San Antonio, TX and Village Health Partners, Plano, TX (ambulatory), Illinois-National Electronic Disease Surveillance System, Springfield, IL and Institute for Family Health, New York, NY (public health). Kim Pederson of Allina talked about their Epic implementation in this HIStalk interview.

West Penn Allegheny Health System (PA) chooses Allscripts for its 165 physicians.

Revenue cycle vendor MedSynergies names John Payne CIO, coming over from Perot.

Jobs:

CIO, Bethesda Healthcare (FL)
VP, UPMC (PA)
Sales Executive, PM/EMR
Senior Implementation Project Manager (PA)
McKesson Horizon Clinicals Consultants (AL)
Patient Care Informatics Officer, Methodist Healthcare (TN)

Philips consolidates into three organizations, one of them being healthcare, and sells its stake in Nuance Communications.

This physician’s practice was at a loss when its PM/EMR system went offline because of a server problem, “.. going back to the dark ages. Paper receipts. Paper-only records. Vestiges of a bygone era.” That would be a great, feel-good EMR testimonial showing that not all docs are paper-bound. Except that he’s a veterinarian.

GE Healthcare gloms off the questionable US News & World Report‘s Best Hospitals issue, or actually the Honor Roll subset of it. It says GE is “humbled”, although that’s a bit of a stretch since that claim was made in an entirely self-serving press release. Does anyone believe that Centricity had anything to do their success? What’s the percentage of the also-rans using Centricity?

A CNN article on hospital infections and TheraDoc’s infection and antibiotic software contains a buried fact I hadn’t heard: TheraDoc customer UPMC has bought 22% of the company.

IT workers with server virtualization experience are in high demand.

Visicu falls off Inc.’s list of the 500 fastest growing businesses.

I didn’t know it was even still being sold: Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children buys Siemens MedSeries 4. I assume it’s still running on an AS/400.

Loma Linda University Health Care will use open source OLAP business intelligence software from Pentaho, replacing Access and Excel for that purpose. I’d never heard of the Orlando company, but I liked them instantly because of the founder’s two-sentence intro that includes: “you can usually find him near an empty Captain Morgan bottle or wandering around in the woods with his GPS receiver.” Ditto the title of one founder: “chief geek”. Or, this FAQ snip: “What do the Dodo, Hispaniolan Edible Rat, and the Syrian Wild Ass have in common? They are extinct. Like the Dodo, Hispaniolan Edible Rat, and Syrian Wild Rat; competition, innovation and choice will become extinct if Microsoft Corporation hit their goal of attaining 100% of the Business Intelligence market.”

E-mail me.

Inga’s Update

Thank you, Big Nurse, for forwarding me this note: “Not sure if this is of interest to you, but here’s some information on a recent report from the University of Rochester that appears to provide evidence of ROI associated with an Allscripts (Touchworks) EMR implementation. I hadn’t seen this information mentioned elsewhere (maybe I missed it), but it seems to offer valid evidence, though I am only able to read the abstract. It was cited in an article in Crain’s Health Pulse as a rationale for North General Hospital in NYC to go forward with its plans to implement an EMR, even though they are nearly bankrupt.” I found the original study, apparently first published in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons. The study involved 28 physicians across five offices and looked at the capital investment, plus various administrative tasks (chart pulls, support staff salary, and transcription costs) and efficiency aspects (days in A/R, etc.). The bottom line: the system paid for itself in 16 months and provided an ongoing annual savings of $9,983 per provider with a neutral impact on efficiency and billing.

First Consulting Group, Inc. completes the sale of its FirstGateways product business to MedPlus. FCG is selling off this segment that has been losing money and expects to realize approximately $8 million of after-tax cash proceeds from the transaction.

Nigerian officials are ordering their banks to stop using attractive women to persuade customers to open accounts. Apparently the unacceptable practices include employing beautiful ladies and giving them targets to meet. I wonder what would happen if HIMSS banned vendors from hiring beautiful women to increase booth traffic? Would there be a revolt from all those techy types?

Make Inga happy.



HIStalk Featured Sponsors

     

Currently there are "3 comments" on this Article:

  1. MedSeries 4 still runs on the old stalwart AS/400. A platform that was ahead of its time in the day. Sutter Health was the last organization I heard making a big MedSeries investment across 27 or more inpatient facilities. They are also Epic clients on the medical record side of the house.

  2. Inga,
    Pretty ladies, selling software for big vendors is only one of many excesses at HIMSS. How much of our healthcare dollar is indirectly going to fund million dollar booths, expensive giveaways, and extravagant events? These costs ultimately pass on to the healthcare providers, continuing the squeeze on their bottom line, and therefore shrinking dollars available to provide uncompensated care. So ultimately, all this flash is at the expense of our mission.

    It’s never made sense to me.







Text Ads


RECENT COMMENTS

  1. I think Disingenuous is confused (or simply not aware of how it has been architected). How control of Epic is…

  2. It seems that every innovation in the past 50 years has claimed that it would save money and lives. There…

  3. Well, this is predicting the future, and my crystal ball is cloudy and cracked. But my basic thesis about Meditech?…

  4. RE Judy Faulkner's foundation wishes: Different area, but read up on the Barnes Foundation to see how things work out…

  5. Meditech certainly benefited from Cerner and Allscripts stumbles and before that the failures of ECW and Athena’s inpatient expansions. I…

Founding Sponsors


 

Platinum Sponsors


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gold Sponsors


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

RSS Webinars

  • An error has occurred, which probably means the feed is down. Try again later.