From Up to You: "Re: Scott Wallace. From a magazine: Wallace said he will continue to work in the area of healthcare IT at, ’something really exciting, but I’m not quite ready to announce it yet. I’ve got another six weeks of really intensive work before I can announce it.’" NAHIT seems to want to reinvent itself following (and may related to) his departure. So, where’s he going?
From Tree Adams: "Re: RHIOs in Europe. Points worth mentioning: (1) Taxpayer money and government are the only available sources of funding and administration in a cradle-to-grave welfare state; (2) Might it be easier to introduce a single, electronic solution within an existing nationalized bureaucracy when compared to our disparate, private organizations?; (3) Is it theoretically easier to finance and implement technology when the populations in question are so small (less than 10 million)? But go ahead and keep comparing them to our model."
From The PACS Designer: "Re: Philips acquisitions. TPD is impressed by the recent acquisitions of Emergin, Visicu, Respironics, and Tomcat With the addition of these four, it appears a move by Philips toward the center of the IT process in the enterprise. The mini-EMR mentioned in my HIStalk interview may have to be revised to a main player in the EMR competition!"
Listening: new B52s, the first album with all four members in 16 years. If you liked Cosmic Thing, this is for you – the always-cute, beehived Kate and Cindy still sound young when they soar on the harmonies. Bet they’d play a mean HIStalk party next HIMSS.
A reader pointed out that the Rumor Report button wasn’t working all of a sudden, so I made a new one and moved the form to a new page. It now loads instantly and takes you back to the "new" HIStalk page. So, send me a rumor.
Why Epic is so expensive: take a virtual drive through its new campus Google Street View (the car-mounted 3D camera thing). Nice buildings surrounded by endless muddy fields, but it probably looks better now (or will by summer).
Cool booklet: Steve Bennett, VP of Snelling Executive Search and Chuck Christian, CIO of Good Samaritan Hospital have published 101 Healthcare IT Marketing Ideas and sent me a copy (I had mentioned their quest for reader ideas, although I don’t know if they received any). Item #38: "Station the Help Desk in the cafeteria for a day." Fun. Some of my smarter IT management ideas have involved internal marketing, so I can vouch for these 101 as useful for ensuring IT department visibility and CIO job security. I don’t know how you can get your copy, but I expect the Snelling folks can hook you up.
Execs may like the Allscripts-Misys merger idea, but the sales natives are apparently restless. Resumes from both companies are hitting the street in great numbers, a recruiter tells me.
Your federal tax dollars at waste: a for-profit hospital in New Jersey gets $500K for PACS upgrades. The hospital won’t peg a completion date until it can take another lap around the trough for more federal money. A real estate development company bought the bankrupt hospital in October. Maybe New Jersey has hospitals that aren’t bankrupt, under investigation, or both, but those aren’t making the papers.
A bunch of New York RHIOs gets $105 million in grants.
I mentioned that AT&T’s booth at HIMSS was busy, with a lot of potential partners sidling up as well. If you wonder what the company’s healthcare strategy is, check out my HIStech Report interview (just posted).
A demonstration project says its "best practices" processes reduced medication administration errors by 56%, but of course leaves off the most important stat: how many of those would have caused patient harm? Most people miss the point that a "medication error" is usually something as benign as not being given your daily 8 a.m. laxative until 8:30. Fixing that doesn’t do … well, you know.
More jobs: Account Executive (NC), Revenue Cycle and Operations (MA), Healthcare IT Project Manager (FL), RVP Sales (Western US), Information Security Manager (CA), MUMPS/Cache’ Software engineer (VA), Epic/Bridges Senior Integration Analyst (MA).
Deborah Moore, a former RN and CEO of Accustat EMR of of Myrtle Beach, SC, is named as state Small Business Person of the Year (I assume it’s the business that’s small and not her).
LSU wants a $250 per semester tuition increase on top of $43 million extra it’s getting from the state. They plan to spend $20 million for a new hospital EMR system.
I was looking for a lesser-known EMR vendor and found them on the list of 321 covered by EHR Scope. I didn’t realize there were so many.
Strange hospital lawsuit: Dongwoo Chang, a UC Davis neurosurgeon, accuses his supervisor Jan Paul Muizelaar of incompetence and practicing illegally. UCD suspends Chang citing his high complication rate and being a general pain in the ass. Chang is suing UCD’s top physician officers, saying he was fired in retaliation and that his own death rate and number of malpractice suits is zero, compared to Muizelaar’s high numbers of each. Makes you feel real good about needing trauma work done there.
HHS launches a hospital comparison site that includes process of care measures and patient survey results (when available). I doubt most patients would understand the clinical measures (although they can review bathroom cleanliness and noise), but providers might find competitive bragging rights therein. Unmotivated newspaper reporters are already crafting stories around how the local hospitals did, I’ve noticed.
Sad: a man whose mother died at Doctors Hospital (GA) in 2004 after what he believed was substandard care returns to the ICU armed to the teeth, killing a nurse, a secretary, and a bystander. I’m scared to say it out loud, but I’m surprised that it doesn’t happen more often with all the wackos that pass through hospital doors.
The charitable foundation started by IDX co-founder Bob Hoehl donates $1 million to a Vermont literacy organization.
Vermont Information Technology Leaders changes its mind – it now backs a surcharge on medical claims to pay for physician EMRs. Getting doctors to use them wasn’t mentioned.
Oracle’s Larry Ellison is bonkers, but smart: he successfully challenges the tax valuation of his $200 million Japanese-themed estate, arguing that Larryland is so bizarre that it’s worth a lot less than he paid. Result: he’ll pay taxes on only $65 million, earning him a $3 million refund.
ZDNet says Janet Dillione, CEO of Siemens Medical Solutions,was the smartest person at HIMSS, apparently because the reporter thought she looked a little like Hillary Clinton and because of her daringly insightful predictions such as "PHRs will be popular" and "Healthcare IT needs to change." ZDNet fawns over Soarian, apparently unaware that nobody’s buying it.
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Thoughts from the HIStalk 2008 Reader Survey
Thanks to those to responded. Inga and I pored over your survey submissions endlessly, so your time was well spent.
Not surprising: about 4% of readers are CEOs and 4% are CIOs, not much different than last year. As to the degree that HIStalk influences your perception of products and companies, 8.7% said none, 68.6% said some, 22.7% said a lot. The most popular HIStalk elements (in order) are news, rumors, and humor.
Surprising: to the true/false question of whether reading about a company in HIStalk raises interest or appreciation for those companies, 80.3% said yes (that’s a lot). Best of all, to the question of whether reading HIStalk helped you do your job better in the past year, 75.4% said yes (a 10% jump from last year). I don’t know of any organizations or publications that can claim that strong of an endorsement, so that’s pretty darned cool.
The comments were nearly universally complimentary (thanks for that). Some specific themes I teased out: you would like to see more interviews with non-CEO/CIO types, such as clinicians and non-hospital IT leaders (we’ll work on that). You’d like to see more activity in HIStalk Discussion (so would I.) You suggested a raffle or other incentive for readers who recommend new HIStalk readers (good idea). You suggested changing the sponsor ads (smaller, simpler, different layout) which we will review with the sponsors since they’re the ones keeping the virtual presses running. You asked me to highlight small, innovative vendors who might not make your radar otherwise, another good idea (if you know one or are one, check in).
You also gave us a couple of great ideas for major, separate offerings that we may do if I can figure out how create extra hours in the day. Since I work full time, I’m close to maxing out at maybe 90 hours a week, so maybe it’s time to hire more helpers or something. The ideas were good and have been suggested before, so I’m confident they would be successful.
Inga’s Update
Cerner is participating in a community outreach program that will bring in 45 Kansas City area high school students for half their school day. The curriculum will focus on teaching students the skills necessary to succeed in the workforce, particularly team work and problem solving. Good stuff.
The chairman, CEO, and CFO of Misys show enough confidence in the company’s direction to pull out their checkbooks and make substantial purchases of additional shares.
The chief of neurosurgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital is accused of sexual discrimination in a lawsuit filed by a female surgeon who believes she was denied promotions in favor of male colleagues with less experience. Whether true or not, the chief definitely has odd taste in office decor and at a minimum has been accused of having a pretty annoying sense of humor. (I will leave my “men are pigs” comments to myself.)
MD Anderson is implementing MedAptus’s Facility Charge Capture and Infusion Services modules. Eight infusion centers will initially use the programs for reconciling the charge review, approval, and transmission processes.
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From Cherry Rojas: “Re: PHR fiasco. The State of Washington issued a $2 million dollar RFP for a demonstration project to link the EMS system in four counties to PHRs last fall. An out of state vendor won it December 12 using smart cards to verify patient ID and to hold their critical patient information, readable by portable reader. Two in-state consultants who wanted to sell the state proprietary software and (and who sat on the Health Information Infrastructure Advisory Board) got their legislators to cancel the RFP before the contract could be signed in February. SMART Association, the apparently successful vendor, had no idea it was an inside game. All references to the RFP have been pulled down from the DIS web site (but we have copies). How will we ever change healthcare if it’s just another inside game? Some DIS staffers were so upset that they were ready to quit.”
From Bruce: “Ars Technica, a popular tech news web site, has posted an interesting article on EHRs and PHR. Very high level, but it’s interesting to see this hit the mainstream tech community.” Link.
From Up to You: “Re: Scott Wallace stepping down as NAHIT CEO. This was WAY overdue.”
From Dutch Treat: “Re: PHR/EHR. EMC and InterSystems are testing the PHR/EHR waters in Northern Europe. IBM runs Denmark. Who’s next? Case in point: unlike RHIOs in in the USA, governance and funds make a difference in Euroland.” Link 1, Link 2.
From Art Vandelay: “Re: dumb EMRs. Many specialists using Epic find the EMR dumb until more configuration is done. This is always a tough position for hospitals or medical groups rolling out Epic. In the typical Epic EMR implementation, the first step is to focus on primary care in the ambulatory setting and hospitalists in the hospital setting. To make it more usable by the specialty physicians, a second round of tailoring then occurs. It is much easier for the implementation team to initially go with SmartText macros for notes and a few order sets for specialists. The team comes back again later with more focused templates for specialists. This causes many headaches in organizations without strong leadership, a large team, and good content management capabilities. By now, a couple of years have gone by and it is time for an upgrade, so progress may stall while the upgrade is tested. Still later comes the health maintenance reminders with the specialists saying, ‘WOW, you mean I get to use some of the discrete data I entered?’ Next, comes the focus on making sense of the order set and template proliferation. Few places take content management seriously and later have clean-up to do. It may or may not be time for another upgrade or the roll out of more specialty models. At last, many places then get to publishing queries in Clarity (data warehouse) for more advanced users to use in delivering care where some reminders may not exist. As with larger clinical systems, it is a toolkit. If the organization doesn’t have the right size team to match the hospital or clinic’s desire to implement and strong sponsorship to focus attention on the goals of the implementation, it is a rough uphill climb. It takes time, money, super-users, technology resources and a strong infrastructure to deliver the product. A place implementing an EMR can learn from Allina and Kaiser. Allina seems to have had great super user involvement. Kaiser has a content management discipline and content teams to quickly go area-by-area.”
I got an e-mail from Bryan Walser, MD, JD, CEO of Perlegen Sciences, Inc. about the company’s activities with the unnamed EMR vendor. Actually, it was the same “letter to the editor” sent to other publications, so I don’t see much point in running it here. I asked him for an interview and he declined. I’m mostly interested in the EMR vendor, of course, and I’m still trying to find out who it is.Design Clinicals has a new web site, I noticed.
Philips will buy Irish cardiology software vendor TOMCAT Systems. Lots of informatics activity in Ireland, it seems (field trip!)
Information Week digs around the Gnutella file-sharing network using LimeWire peer-to-peer software to see if business documents might actually be found there. Downloaded: banking passwords, credit card numbers, credit reports, tax returns, cell phone numbers of senators, meeting notes, and medical documents listing patient names with HIV status. The default setup of those P2P clients is often confusing about which PC folders you’ll be sharing with the world, so it’s likely that employees were so anxious to start downloading that they were sloppy in its setup.
Jobs: EMR Developer, Clinical Improvement Analyst, Meditech Clinical Consultants, Physician Liaison. There’s a ton of new jobs listed, I see, so take a look and sign up to get Gwen’s weekly job listing.
A few folks missed the HISsies cartoon, so I’m listing the winners below.
HIStalk readership will break another record this month. It’s nearly there already with four days left in March. Sitemeter projects 66,796 visits and 101,700 page views. Thanks to those who read, sponsor, e-mail me stuff, and spread the word among colleagues. It means a lot. I’ll have an update on the broad themes from the reader survey in a couple of days. One of them: everybody loves Inga (and rightly so).
New text ad to your right: InteGREAT Healthcare, which offers consulting services in the areas of application integration and interoperability.
California will delay for two years its plan to track prescription drugs to prevent counterfeiting, moving it back to January 1, 2011. Everybody in the drug supply chain said they wouldn’t be ready and would have to stop selling drugs in California (riiiiight). How about that nimble pharma industry, of which Pfizer says it will need 5-7 years just to put serial numbers on its products, even though it’s already doing that for some of its high-profit drugs like Viagra?
Allscripts files a new 8-K that describes the mechanics of its proposed merger with Misys Healthcare. It says the per-share value to MDRX shareholders is $14.30 to $16.20, an 85% premium to the share price the day before the announcement. Shares closed today at $9.06 if you want in.
Cerner shares hit a 52-week low today. Share in athenahealth are dropping, too, and PSS sold some of its pre-IPO stake Wednesday. Nothing’s going to do consistently well in this market, of course.
Former Harvard Vanguard CIO Tom Congoran will fill in as CFO of Massachusetts practice group Atrius Health, which has cleaned house on its executive team after parting ways with former CEO Debra Geihsler.
Harvey Picker, founder of the Picker Institute that promotes measurement of the way patients experience healthcare, has died at 92.
Cambridge Consultants says its Vena single-chip platform can allow medical devices to transmit data wirelessly for less than $10.
RemedyMD will integrate the disease models and biospecimen management system of GulfStream Bioinformatics Corp. into its Investigate research software.
The all-lower-case api software (annoying, yes?) acquires EPEPCS, a tool that estimates required nursing hours and skill mix.
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Inga’s Update
Dr. Deborah Peel’s Patient Privacy Rights organization has posted a summary outlining each remaining presidential candidate’s stand on patient privacy. It’s worth a read if the topic concerns you.
Mediware announces that its blood management software systems are ready to accommodate ISBT 128 labeling.
Oshsner Health System is implementing new DocuSys technology for pre and post surgical care. The solutions will be used across Oschner’s 28 operating room and 15 other anesthetizing locations.
Some not-so-good news for McKesson. A US District court certifies a $7 billion nationwide class-action lawsuit against McKesson on behalf of consumers and third-party payers. It has the potential to be the third largest class action suit in the US. It charges McKesson engaged in a scheme to fraudulently inflate the price of more than 400 prescription drugs.
While it’s unlikely to cover the extra $7 billion, McKesson is partnering with Clorox to develop and promote disinfection protocols for mobile equipment and handheld devices.
Nebraska’s Great Plains Regional Medical Center selects Eclipsys Sunrise Clinical Essential for EMR and medication management. They’ll add additional Sunrise products after Essentials is deployed.
Thank you Wheaties Gal for sending me this link for an inspiring new bingo game. “This does not have to do with big mergers or company layoffs- has to do more with passing time in those boring IT meetings where they think nothing of rattling off acronyms and trying to put together sentences around the latest business buzzwords. Here is a site that you can print out ‘B-S Bingo’ cards. I think you would have to be careful not to yell out (like the girl in the TV commercial). Some meetings I have been in lately, I could get a cover-all in 30 minutes- or less.” I am on the same page as you on this, Wheaties Gal. Going forward, for all mission critical enterprises Mr. H and I will simply set our goals, leverage our resources, and just get it done.
Speaking of getting it done, I was making up some pretty charts for Mr. H showing the growth in readers over the last 18 months. The number of monthly visits has doubled during that time period, which is pretty darned impressive. So keep telling your friends because it sure seems to make Mr. H happy!
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HISsies 2008 Winners
Smartest vendor strategic move
athenahealth, for its initial public offering (IPO)
Stupidest vendor strategic move
Medseek, for laying off employees right before Christmas
Most impressive vendor sales deal
Epic, Cedars-Sinai
Best healthcare IT vendor
athenahealth
Worst healthcare IT vendor
Cerner
Best provider healthcare IT organization
MD Anderson
Vendor most likely to be acquired in 2008
Allscripts
HIS-related company in which you’d love to be given $100,000 in stock options that can’t be cashed in for 10 years
athenahealth
Most promising technology development
Software as a Service/Service Oriented Architecture
Most overrated technology
RHIOs
Biggest HIS-related news story of the year
athenahealth’s IPO
Best speaker you heard at a conference in 2007
Jonathan Bush
Most impressive vendor at the HIMSS Annual Conference in 2007
athenahealth
Most overused buzzword
Interoperability
Most effective CIO in a healthcare provider organization
Judy Middleton, William Osler Health Centre
HIS industry figure with whom you’d most like to have a few beers
Jonathan Bush, athenahealth
HIS industry figure in whose face you’d most like to throw a pie
Neal Patterson, Cerner
HIStalk Healthcare IT Industry Figure of the Year
Jonathan Bush, athenahealth
Inside Healthcare Computing has graciously agreed to make previous Mr. HIStalk editorials available from its newsletter as a weekly "Best Of" series for HIStalk. This editorial originally appeared in the newsletter in September 2006. Inside Healthcare Computing subscribers receive a new editorial every week in their Electronic Update.
Stanford Hospital last week joined the growing number of academic medical centers that prohibit their physicians from accepting gifts from drug company salespeople. The reps aren’t even allowed on campus, except by appointment to conduct product inservices.
Bravo to Stanford. Physicians think they’re too savvy to be influenced by free lunches, rounds of golf, or drug samples, but drug companies know better – subtle bribery works. If it didn’t, they’d stop. A $100 staff lunch influences even a $500K a year doctor whose prescriptions for one medical condition might generate thousands of dollars a week of business for the drug company.
I’ve taken my share of IT vendor goodies: junkets, executive dinners, trips on private jets, and one memorable evening spent in an internationally known billionaire’s back yard. Having thereby flouted the rules of propriety myself, I’m qualified to issue my first-ever standards of conduct for CIOs and other provider-side executives.
The most important fact is this: it doesn’t matter whether your acceptance of vendor swag is improper; it matters only that it might appear improper to an outsider, like the attorney of a bid-losing vendor who’s suing you for tortuous interference or the 60 Minutes camera crew accosting you on your way to drop the kids off at school.
It’s obvious, but if your organization is sending out RFIs or RFPs or is otherwise involved in system selection, accepting anything is unwise. Even speaking to vendor reps is not smart. Don’t let vendors provide free lunches or giveaways for employees attending demos. Vendors shouldn’t pay for your site visits – if you can afford their product, you can spend your organization’s own money on flights and hotels. Besides, spurned vendors aren’t nearly as chummy afterwards, I’ve found.
Otherwise, lunches are always OK, whether one-on-one or group. Stuff for the IT department is OK, like shirts, food brought in, or sports tickets. This is the IT version of the unrestricted grants that drug companies offer, where you accept small items without reciprocating and the chance of undue influence is minimal. Corporate ethics people are usually OK with this, as long as the gifts aren’t for the specific benefit of an individual.
On the other hand, it’s never OK to solicit stuff from a vendor: free software from the Microsoft rep, donations for a pet cause, money for a department party, or entry fees for a fundraiser. Vendor strong-arming is tacky.
I also don’t like the idea that vendors buy access by sponsoring conferences and giveaways for HIMSS and CHIME, but that’s apparently a hopeless cause. It looks like Halloween, except the trick-or-treaters are wearing suits or conscientiously casual golf apparel.
Spouse trips are out. So are ridiculously transparent junkets, phony advisory board conferences, honoraria, or a visit to the German countryside to see your future PACS system being assembled. It’s tempting when all your cross-town colleagues are lining up at the feed trough, but it’s still wrong, don’t you think?
Having decision-making authority means vendor reps will try to soften you up like gangsters wooing supermodels: with flattery, rapt listening, and a shower of baubles. You know what they really want. Surely your integrity is worth enough that you won’t sell it that cheaply, especially knowing that they won’t respect you in the morning.
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Mr. HIStalk’s editorials appear each Thursday morning in the subscribers-only version of Inside Healthcare Computing’s E-News Update. To subscribe, please go to: https://insidehealth.com/ihcwebsite/subscribe.html or call 877-690-1871.
From Mitch Router: “Re: PatientsLikeMe. This really isn’t my bailiwick, but I thought your readers might be interested. It’s easy to see why doctors and researchers (in particular) would not like PatientsLikeMe.com. As a social network, great. But without scientific scrutiny collated anecdotal data may well be “interesting-in –> mathematical model + statistics –> garbage-out.” Link. An interesting New York Times article on PatientsLikeMe, where patients with a handful of specific conditions are posting detailed information about their treatments, right down to drug dosages correlated to their symptoms. It’s advertising-free, but hoping to sell information to drug companies (of course). The article has some interesting thoughts on the privacy implications of such a service and physician questions about having patients take actions based on what other patients report.
From The PACS Designer: “Re: creating your PHR. TPD has been a member of the ASTM International Healthcare Informatics E31 Committee for some time and worked with others to create the Continuity of Care Record or CCR. Now, anyone can create their own PHR using the CCR format by using the Consumer Empowerment National Demonstration website called CEND PHR, sponsored by the American Academy of Family Physicians Center for Health Information Technology. After you creating an ID and password, you will find the following categories available for inputting your health information: Personal, Emergency contact, Insurance, Primary physician, Problems, Medications, Allergies, Family history, and Social history. After completing entries into the PHR, you can save the file and then access your PHR Portable Document File (PDF) for local printing and also save an XML file to a storage location.” Link.
From Mrs. Brown’s Lovely Daughter: “Re: McKesson Paragon. It’s cleaning Meditech’s clock in a number of regions. Key replacement announcement pending”
From Bearly Stern: “Re: Allscripts-Misys. The amazing thing about the Allscripts-Misys merger is that it could have happened years ago. John McConnell repeatedly pitched the idea to Goldberg and Skelton, but they were so focused on becoming a mini-Cerner or Epic that they squandered $500M and a huge lead in the ambulatory space. Was there any real growth or value added to Misys from year 2000 onward? Leadership’s main ideas were cutting cost as a growth strategy and making it prohibitive for existing practice management clients to buy a non-Misys (read: workable) EMR. This while touting ‘interoperability’ in a failed strategy to connect the products of three business units.”
From Esther: “Re: data mining. I CANNOT confirm the vendor, but I can tell you, as an ex-[company] employee, that [company] is very interested in data mining of patient information. Prior to the opening of the [company] employee clinic, we were told at a town hall meeting that any lab work done in our clinic could and would be used for a DNA project [company] was working on. Trust me – you could hear a pin drop during that announcement. There was a lot of uneasiness expressed after the meeting, but as far as I know, no one ever took them to task on it. Those of us who were truly concerned made sure that we didn’t get any blood work done on the premises!” I expunged the company name since it’s a bit of a hot topic right now and I don’t want to cast any unearned aspersions, but you can probably figure out who she’s talking about. Unconfirmed and still waiting on the smoking gun. Possible clue: four million patients? That’s a big footprint. Maybe it’s a clearinghouse owned by an EMR vendor – the Perlegen press release didn’t say it was EMR data, only an EMR vendor, and it refers to an “information warehouse” that would imply either hosted systems or a transaction database. Hmm.
From Dutch Treat: “Re: data mining. What about this company helping the pharma sector?” Link. IntrinsiQQ LLC, the company behind web-based chemotherapy dosing system IntelliDose, didn’t rack up enough paid monthly subscribers, so it started selling de-identified information about drug usage to drug companies. At least the drug companies don’t have plans to re-identify data or contact patients. Still, patients not only have to trust a company with which they have no legal relationship, they probably don’t even know their data is being bought and sold. Somebody could start a nice little company testing and certifying de-identification processes.
From Larry Lonesome: “Re: development. I would be interested in the perspective of users/purchasers of clinical applications, as well as developers of these applications, regarding AJAX application development versus smart client versus any other relevant methodology. Do hospitals have a preferred technology platform? Is AJAX development robust enough to handle the heavy lifting of clinical applications? Does a .NET smart client really solve deployment issues as neatly as a web application?”
Recommended: if you’re a Firefox user like me, upgrade now to the Beta 4 version. I don’t generally use beta releases, but this one’s a screamer (many times faster in Google Docs and other AJAX-type apps). Most plug-ins aren’t available yet for the Beta version, but all I really use is the Google toolbar and it already has a Google search box. Zero problems here.
Girish Kumar of eClinicalWorks passed along a short comment on the Mass BCBS conclusion that EMRs aren’t worth their cost to doctors. He says that eCW has a 95% adoption rate and that most of the physicians using their system would say they’re better off with it than before.
Reminder: if you’re not getting e-mail updates, put your e-mail address in the “Subscribe to Updates” box to your right, even if you’ve already subscribed from the old site (which is no longer being updated, thus not sending out e-mails). If you’re not sure, sign up anyway – it will tell you if your address is already on the list and you won’t get double e-mails.
Intercepted e-mail: Kaiser’s medical group will start a pilot this summer of a thumb drive-based Personal Electronic Medical Record for emergency use. Files are encrypted and read-only, printable to PDF. Contains a concise record of hospitalizations, allergies, doctors, visits, labs, problems, and demographics. Sounds pretty cool.
Tennessee Medicaid will pilot e-prescribing using Cerner software.
Donna Krause is named CIO at Truman Memorial Veterans’ Hospital, having worked her way up from pharmacy aide over a 25-year career there. Congratulations – darned impressive.
Financial Times says investors are skeptical of the proposed Allscripts-Misys merger, with investors passing on the new shares issued to fund it, leaving ValuAct Capital to eat them themselves. From the piece: “… suggesting US shareholders either don’t believe Misys Healthcare is worth this much, don’t believe the deal will go through, don’t understand it, or don’t trust a management that has presided over 64 per cent share price decline over the course of the year.” They missed one: that continued Misys involvement might actually be negative to the business Allscripts was already doing.
The CEO of MedAssets is team director of the US Olympic wrestling squad. Something else to wrestle with: its Q4 numbers, Revenue up 45.7%, EPS -$0.20 vs. -$0.16. Shares are down a third since the December IPO, with a market cap of $706 million.
Stolen, unencrypted, PHI-containing laptop #650 or so: NIH.
An Australian hospital is accused of hiring a nurse to manipulate the “time seen” ED triage data to make the hospital look better.
Robert Wiebe, formerly of the VA, is named SVP/CMO of Catholic Healthcare West.
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Inga’s Update
Lynn County Hospital District (TX) selects Opus Healthcare Solution’s OpusClinicalSuite for its patient information system. The three rural hospitals within the district will use OpusClinicalSuite ASP.
Design Clinicals adds a new client in Iowa. Myrtue Medical Center (IA) is implementing its MedsTracker medication management program.
Medinotes partners with Hawaii’s Akamai Practice Management to provide EMR to small, independent practices. Akamai is a practice management and reimbursement service provider.
digiChart’s OB-GYN Version 7.0 is the latest EMR ambulatory package to receive CCHIT certification.
I suppose because it is such an important use of our tax dollars, HHS just opened a second public comment period to define the following terms: EMR, EHR, PRH, HIE, and RHIO. Actually HIE has already been defined as “the process of electronic health information exchange, not a governing function or entity” so HHS now needs names for a sixth term that will describe “the function or entity that governs health information exchange beyond the confines of a specific regionally based community.” Personally I think Mr. H and I should have opened the blog up and gotten readers to define the terms and then pocketed the millions HHS is spending on this project.
Transcription system provider Healthcare Technologies is partnering with GSA vendor Network Federal. The agreement will facilitate the delivery of HTI’s medical transcription programs to federal, state and local government healthcare customers.
EMR Dude sent me a link to his blog “The Crabby Daddy,” where he provides some commentary on the Allscripts-Misys deal, noting his ties to both companies (he worked at Medic and A4 and now Allscripts.) His take is that the market was in need of consolidation and sends a reminder to the new management that “people enjoy working for a company where quality of life and a fun factor are present.” Probably a good reminder if Misys is involved. Remember this post from a few months back? “From Dan Panama: Re: Misys. Vern said at the business update yesterday that an overwhelming number employees in the employee survey said they are not having fun anymore. Vern’s response: ‘You have to earn the right to have fun.’”
And while I was on Crabby Daddy’s site, I noticed a post about the Common Ground Clinic going live on EMR. This is one of the New Orleans clinics that received funding from HIMSS (and Allscripts in this case) to fund EMRs in the Katrina aftermath. It’s led me to wonder how many other clinics have successfully gone live as part of the HIMSS Katrina Phoenix project and what applications they are using.
I sat in during part of HIMSS’s first virtual conference last year and found it interesting enough, especially for a person who lacks the discipline to listen to a webcast without checking e-mail and taking the occasional phone call in between things. I am almost positive that the first time around that you had to pay a fee if you wanted to participate in the education sessions for CME credits. However, for this third one coming up April 23-24, I notice the whole event is free. Plus there seems to be a strong list of speakers, including Jonathan Bush, Matthew Holt, and John Halamka. I have to assume the exhibitor packages (which start at $5,000) are selling like hotcakes or else HIMSS wouldn’t be offering the conference at no charge.
I am sad to report that I a clear loser in the basketball pool. I knew my selection of Duke was risky, but who would have guessed they wouldn’t make it past the second round. My sole consolation at this point is that I am ahead of Mr. H, but given North Carolina is his top choice he still has a good chance for a strong finish. I’m cheering for Davidson here on out.
E-mail Inga.
