From Jane Grierson: "Re: Whitwell Middle School’s paper clip site. This noteworthy school project has been in existence for a few years. However, the recent magnanimous contributions of MEDSEEK, a healthcare IT company with (as far as I know) little to no ties to public schools, etc., yet great Web products, deserves the biggest THANK YOU at this most appropriate time of year. If Peter Kuhn (last I heard, President) and Jay Drake (last I heard, CEO), representing all MEDSEEK staff, are still around — or whomever — the 11 million named and nameless souls will not be forgotten." Link to the school’s Children’s Holocaust Memorial site (the paper clip connection: they were invented by Norwegians and worn by them in national unity to protest Nazism in World War II, for which occupying Nazi forces would sometimes arrest them). The comment above comes from someone in the industry (phony name substituted by me) who isn’t from MEDSEEK.

From Matt Montini: "Re: insurance companies charging providers for appeals. This example is one of many that makes it clear that this nation does NOT need ‘healthcare reform.’ What it badly needs is ‘healthcare insurance / reimbursement / payment (or whatever synonym one wants to use) reform.’ By correcting the terminology, only then will we be able to change a hideous, broken system that is the root of all access problems, transparency issues, the un-insured, the under-insured, etc."

From Billy Kilmer: "Re: IT initiatives. I really liked the article about IT initiatives under $25,000. How about a request for the ONE coolest hospital gadget/process that is REALLY improving care from the patient’s point of view? And everybody’s best IT-implemented idea that made the patient experience better?" Great idea. Let’s hear from the hospital IT people (just e-mail me). I’ll keep the responses anonymous unless told otherwise since I know that worries people.

Did you have a good holiday? Hope so.

Listening: The Distillers, melodic and creative punk with a quite talented and pretty but foul-mouthed female lead singer. I’m also listening to AC/DC, but only indirectly since it is apparently an NCAA requirement that every college football game have gratuitous, testosterone-eliciting background music in a fixed ratio of 80% AC/DC to 20% Metallica.

Fujitsu Siemens launches its ESPRIMO MA tablet PC for healthcare, based on the Intel Mobile Clinical Assistant spec. In less rosy news, Siemens is selling its 50% stake in the company to Fujitsu for $567 million and it’s cutting 700 jobs in Germany due to poor market conditions.

Charge master software vendor Craneware is named Scottish software company of the year.

A bizarre use of technology: a rifle’s scope attached to a video monitor lets the spotter of a blind hunter direct his gun so he can kill animals for sport.

St. John’s Hospital (IL) will go live on MEDITECH Monday, an event written up in the local newspaper. It noted that early cost estimates were $20 to $30 million, which seems like a lot for a one-hospital MEDITECH implementation other than it’s 734 beds, which would surely be one of the biggest MEDITECH hospitals.

Another vendor "good news" item: MedVentive just finished a Thanksgiving drive for the local food bank. The company says it also tripled its sales force and launched two new products.

Inga says she was having a bad day when she mentioned the "good news" thing and enjoyed mentioning a couple of items, but please don’t send more. It was fun when CEOs were writing, but now the PR people have been mobilized just to get their companies mentioned.

Raymond James is doing a two-minute survey on healthcare IT spending for 2009. You can participate here.

Students at Taiwan’s Ming Chuan University develop a prize-winning hospital software package that includes a real-time doctor advice system, patient monitoring, and a staff locating system.

Cerner opens an office in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Online health and wellness vendor Aperture Health announces that Kevin Moley has joined its board. He’s a former HHS deputy secretary and US ambassador as well as former CEO of Integrated Medical Systems. The company’s business model is to run targeted ads with health information and share the revenue with members.

George Washington University Hospital increases employee satisfaction with hospital communication by 33% by using solutions from Netpresenter: "broadcasting" to individual PCs via interactive PC screensavers, digital signage, and emergency alerting.

A Microsoft study finds that lay people screwing around on the Web trying to self-diagnose often mistake their common symptoms for rare diseases, a situation the authors call "cyberchondria."

The Nashville paper writes up the use of RFID-based patient tracking system systems in hospitals, not really saying anything new, but providing a glossy and short overview for lay people.

Mike Webb, 55, IT director at Central Peninsula General Hospital (AK), was killed on the job Wednesday by a distraught former employee. A PACS administrator who was fired Tuesday returned Wednesday morning with a semi-automatic rifle and opened fire on his co-supervisors, Webb and hospital radiology director Margaret Stroup, who was critically injured. Webb had been on the job less than a year, moving to Alaska from Southern Tennessee Medical Center. The suspect, Joseph Marchetti, formerly managed cardiac databases at Nebraska Medical Center. He was shot dead on the scene by Alaska state troopers when he fired on them. Condolences.

An interesting healthcare information technology advocate: IntraHealth International, a Chapel Hill, NC non-profit that works with software developers in Africa to deploy open source healthcare applications to African practitioners (among its other healthcare projects in developing countries). It apparently has a subsidiary site for IntraHealth Informatics and is looking for volunteer designers, developers, and documenters.

Four University of South Florida physicians want an investigation into the firing of a colleague by the Bay Pines VA Healthcare System, claiming the hospital singled him out because of his 2003 complaints about computer system flaws that threatened patient safety. The doctor, a USF professor and founder of the hospital’s nephrology department, admits he was frustrated with network problems that kept doctors from getting critical patient information and protested by dumping his computer into a trash can in a public hallway. The VA fired him on November 7 for refusing to sign a memo from the new dialysis unit chief about unit changes.

Indian IT services company Tata Consultancy Services will commercialize its WebHealthCentre patient portal, originally developed as a social project to help deliver rural patient services such as health information, telemedicine, personal health records, and medical consultations.

A Harvard psychiatrist whose endorsement of antipsychotic drugs for children led to a 4,000% increase increase in the diagnosis of pediatric bipolar disorder is found by Congressional investigators to have been profiting handsomely from drug companies selling products used to treat it. Joseph Biederman violated Harvard’s policy on reporting outside income by failing to acknowledge drug company payments of up to $1.4 million. He twisted J&J’s arm to fund his research center at Mass General, listing three goals in its annual report that included "move forward the commercial goals of J&J." One executive from the drug company urged prompt payment of a $3,000 honorarium to Biederman, warning his superiors that Biederman has "a very short fuse … not someone to jerk around." Parents who are suing drug companies over harm caused by the expensive drugs want to depose him. Also exposed: an NIH-funded radio psychiatrist who extolled the virtues of such drugs without disclosing his $1.3 million payments from drug companies for giving marketing lectures. And: the chair of Emory University’s psychiatry department, who earned $2.8 million from drug companies over seven years and failed to report nearly half of it to the university. Kudos to Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) for outing the scumbags, of which there is apparently ample supply.

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From Jupiter Jones: "Re: insurance companies and Susanne Madden interview. Boy, the ice is going to get thinner and thinner under the insurance apologists as Verden’s predictions start to ring true. BC of NC and LA (and maybe others) just published a new rule: providers must now PAY for any APPEALS. That’s right – the insurance company mis-pays a claim, which happens every single day, and the doctor has to pay at least $50+% of the claim to appeal it. I’m not kidding. If that doesn’t look like the result of ‘…they all sit in a room and think of creative ways to simultaneously drive up prices and reduce the attractiveness of the product, even if it means scaring off a bunch of their customers…’ then I don’t know what does!"

From Todd: "Re: virtual HIMSS. I filled out my virtual HIMSS satisfaction survey with these remarks. 1) Presentations could have been more substantive. A major health system talks about clinical transformation in a greenfield exercise in Australia? Interesting, but comparatively easy. How about someone who has been through the trenches of clin tran in a large, established health system? If a presenter is doing an ‘all happy story of IT implementation,’ you can guess it’s not reflective of your audience’s reality. I understand there are dozen or hundreds of applications for these speaking positions to choose from. 2) All the Web 2.0 stuff was unnecessary and confusing and some of it froze. There were only a handful of Webinars to manage. This wasn’t Orlando with 27,000 people. One page with all the presentation links would have done it. 3) Weak vendor turnout. Would have really liked to see some online demos of various new business and clinical apps (OR, bed management, ICU, med rec, etc.)  Premise and others, what made you decide not to participate? 4) If it were free, cherry picking a presentation or two would have been a nice diversion for the day, but of course it’s not free if you don’t work for a hospital."

From Wompa1: "Re: demand. Not exactly IT related, but it certainly could affect hospital revenue and spending." Link. Since I’m a big fan of economic theories, this Keynesian one is fun: when consumer demand drops, businesses decrease production rather than lower their prices. HSA guru John Goodman says that’s true in healthcare, where patients defer self-pay elective surgeries in tough times, leaving hospitals with less profitable insurance and charity cases.

From Eliza Cummings: "Re: jobs. Is there a way we can have a forum to look for software sales jobs? There is a boat load of great sales people and this is such a small industry that we really need to focus on who are the vendors that are looking." Absolutely. You can post jobs or resumes in the Jobs Offered/Positions Wanted section of HIStalk Discussion. You have to register, but it’s free (e-mail me first if you’re using a generic Hotmail or Gmail account since I usually delete those otherwise because of spammers). Any other ideas on how I can help?

Informatics Corporation of America wins two of five innovation award categories at the Healthcare IT Summit: greatest market potential and most innovative presentation. The company was also nominated for best new technology and best value. All were for its clinical interoperability products, which were originally developed at Vanderbilt.

Nova Scotia wins a public sector technology award for its EMR linked with lab and rad results. Nightingale Informatix is its partner on the project.

Ochsner CIO Lynn Witherspoon credits SIS with increasing virtual capacity of the hospitals ORs after Hurricane Katrina.

Dr. Deborah Peel posts this critique of Google Flu Trends on the Patient Privacy Rights site, along with Google’s response to her inquiries. I have to say that, of all the healthcare privacy issues to fight, this one seems pretty inconsequential, but that’s just my opinion.

Emageon acquirer Health Systems Solutions gets a CEO interview on Fox Business. He says they have the interest and the financial backing to make more acquisitions and will be doing so.

RTLS vendor Awarepoint gets $13.3 million in Series D financing.

Here’s a way to cut your IT costs: arrest the CIO who’s robbing you blind. The New Zealand health district that I mentioned previously saw its IT spending drop from $8 million a year to $2 million the year after it fired the CIO who is accused of stealing $17 million over six years by submitting fake invoices. A board analyst says he asked the CIO about budget-busting server maintenance costs and was told, "What to you want me to do – turn the f…… things off?"

HIMSS "applauds" (does it have little hands somewhere?) Tom Daschle’s appointment as HHS secretary, apparently joining every other industry in hoping for some Uncle Sam handouts. HIMSS says it’s looking forward to "working closely" with Daschle, Obama, and every citizen of Washington, DC and its suburbs to make sure the feds help pay for technology that supposedly already pays for itself. HIMSS calls itself both a membership society and a vendor trade association in its press release, which is the first time I recall hearing anyone there publicly admit the latter. Does that mean we all belong to a vendor trade association?

Jobs: ANSOS Consultant (MA), Program and Project Manager (CO), Senior Product Manager (UT). Gwen at Healthcare IT Jobs is feeling expansive for the holidays and will give a free job listing for each one bought before December 31 if they mention HIStalk. You know it’s hard to get people relocated and working over the holidays, but that’s a great time to recruit and interview to be ready for January.

The folks at Nuance confirm that eScription co-founders and co-CEOs Ben Chigier and Paul Egerman are giving up day-to-day responsibilities, serving as advisors going forward. Nuance announced its $363 million eScription acquisition in April.

Lawmakers in Indonesia support a bill that requires HIV/AIDS patients in its remote Papua province to be implanted with microchips to allow them to be tracked and punished if they deliberately infect others. Strangely enough, the guy with that bright idea is a doctor and member of parliament. "Seeing that the number and spread of HIV in Papua is so high, I’ve been researching it and found online that microchips can be used in humans, so I am convinced that this can help us detect signals related to the spread of HIV in society." Well, at least he used the Internet to come up with his bizarre recommendation. What the hell is he thinking when he talks about "signals?"

IBM launches a cloud computing validation service, with the first customer being Allscripts and its online backup and recovery service that will move to IBM’s technology in the spring.

Francisco Partners closes its acquisition of labor management systems vendor API Software, also naming its new board members, all of whom have deep healthcare IT experience.

Medical University of South Carolina will require 1,200 employees to take four days off without pay starting in January. It will also lay off a dozen others.

Odd lawsuit: a woman in labor in the hospital is started on an epidural, but a physician’s assistant sneaks into her room and steals her fentanyl. He is arrested, claims the narcotic was for his dying dog, and pleads guilty and serves probation. The woman and her husband are suing the hospital and the PA two years later, claiming the hospital was negligent in hiring him, took too long to get her another dose, and seemed more worried about apprehending the PA than taking care of her labor.

An official in India asks people to not trash hospitals after patients die, even if the doctor involved was negligent.

Here is some vendor good news sent my way after I expressed fatigue with the other kind that has everyone in a funk:

• Sunquest is running a company program through the end of the year to support the World Vision humanitarian organization, encouraging employees to donate.
• Inpatient practice management system vendor Ingenious Med says it recently hired new employees in sales, marketing, development, account management, and implementation and is looking for more developers and implementers.
• Coding vendor CodeRyte will hire 25-30 people in 2009.
• Marc Winchester of Digital Healthcare, which offers the Retasure retinal imaging service, says revenue is up 75%, headcount is up 125%, space is up 100%, and patients served has increased 1,350%.

Have a great holiday. I will be eating turkey, watching football, and maybe writing a little HIStalk stuff if I can’t resist the siren song. If you need me for anything, now is a great time to e-mail me since I’m not in my usual frenzy to keep caught up.

E-mail me.

HERtalk by Inga

From Gatelynn: “Re: Mary Staley-Sirios. I so enjoy reading your info, especially the one noted below. Very inspiring. It makes you take a pause in all our hectic work lives to be successful for our companies and ourselves. I thought it was worth the time for me to say – THANK YOU!!! I hope you slip a few more of these in every once in awhile.” Gatelynn is referring to the post on former Baylor Healthcare System VP Mary Staley-Sirois leaving the corporate world to serve as VP of non-profit MediSend.

From Dr. Nick: “Re: Facebook. Are you and Mr HIStalk on Facebook?” Not yet, anyway. I kind of like that idea, actually. Maybe I’d learn secret details about our readers’ lives.

Intermountain Healthcare (UT) is adding additional Agfa Healthcare technology, including integrating IMPAX PACS systems for its 21 hospital facilities and 150+ clinics.

MEDSEEK donates its web portal and content management system to Tennessee-based Whitwell Middle School. The website will facilitate communication between the school, students, and the community. MEDSEEK’s system will also host a separate site dedicated to the school’s Children’s Holocaust Memorial and Paper Clips. I hadn’t heard of this project before, but apparently Whitwell students collected 11 million paper clips, representing six million Jews and five million others killed by the Nazis. A German rail car once used to transport Jews to concentration camps was donated and then filled with the paper clips. The memorial now permanently resides on the school grounds.

Epic also has the good neighbor thing figured out. So far this year, the company has donated about $356,000 to local Verona, WI organizations. Recipients include the public library, the food pantry, the police and fire departments, and area schools. In addition, Epic has donated over 300 PCs and laptops to the school system over the last two years.

CareTech Solutions is one of 11 companies in Michigan awarded tax incentives aimed at creating additional jobs. The Michigan Economic Development Corp. approved a $38 million credit over 10 years to encourage Caretech to expand in Michigan instead of Ohio. If Caretech accepts the deal, the company will build a new data center in Troy and create 400 direct jobs.

The HIMSS folks say that attendance at their recent virtual conference and expo was up 65% from April. An estimated 2,800 attendees logged in during the two-day event.

The Louisville paper profiles local medical billing company Zirmed, which is building new office space to accommodate its growth. Between 2003 and 2007, the company’s revenues have grown 465% and are expected to hit $35 million this year.

The AMA would like at least another year before enforcing a new Joint Commission policy that denounces disruptive, intimidating, or abusive physician behavior. It’s not that the AMA wants to allow its doctors another year to be bad; rather, they’d like clearer definitions for what constitutes bad behavior. Sounds like an opportunity for Miss Manners.

The Michigan State Medical Society is establishing the first state-sponsored physician network to connect 15,000 physicians. The service will be free to members; nonmembers will be charged a yet-to-be-determined fee.

I noticed in a recent post on Loftware’s blog that the Sisters of Mercy Health Systems’ supply chain division has added specific terms in contract language that require the use of GS1 standards in transactions and in production processing.

Nuance Communications announces a Q4 profit of $22 million ($.09/share,) which is much improved from its $3.41 million loss for the same quarter last year.

I am taking off to hang with family for the next few days and I can’t wait. I went to a friend’s funeral last week, which made me especially aware of my many blessings. It’s easy to take for granted so many things in life, such as health, financial and physical security, our loved ones, and our many freedoms. Life is short and uncertain, but I have a renewed commitment to living my dreams today. I hope everyone has time to give some thanks this week and perhaps make some time to reflect on how you can live your life’s passions — today. I am incredibly thankful to HIStalk, Mr. H, our sponsors, and our readers, because this is one fun job! Happy Thanksgiving all!

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An HIT Moment with ... is a quick interview with someone we find interesting. Steve Aylward is General Manager, Health & Life Sciences, at Microsoft.

With Medstory, HealthVault, and Amalga, Microsoft is dabbling in some seemingly disconnected technology areas that have different audiences, but without hitting the home care area that Steve Ballmer focused on in his HIMSS 2007 address. What is the company’s healthcare strategy?

Let’s address the last question first: Microsoft is committed to improving health around the world through software innovation. Our goal is to advance a vision of unifying health information. We’re working in collaboration with a wide range of health and IT leaders across provider, health plans, and life sciences organizations in both the public and commercial sectors.

In order to improve care, health, and quality of life, it’s critical that people across the healthcare system have access to the right information at the right time. Microsoft is in a unique position to accelerate that transformation through our tremendous reach, with a platform that spans from the consumer to the enterprise, and the ability to develop cost-effective technologies that others can use as a platform for further innovation.

HealthVault and Amalga are pivotal products in our efforts to unify health information and make it readily available to the people making decisions about health — whether a family health manager, chronic disease patient, emergency department physician, researcher, or anyone else in the health system. HealthVault enables individuals to collect, store and manage their personal health information and use it with a wide range of health and wellness applications or share it with physicians to better manage a condition. Industry leaders like Aetna, Cleveland Clinic, Kaiser, and Beth Israel Deaconness are turning to HealthVault with the goal of providing patients, employees, and health plan members with the tools to improve their interactions with clinicians and their overall health and wellness. These organizations share Microsoft’s belief that putting the individual in control of their health information, and enabling them to share it, opens up new and cost-effective opportunities for improving health.

Relative to what Steve Ballmer discussed at HIMSS, when you visit www.healthvault.com you’ll see a lot of partners who have connected their applications and medical devices — many of which are used in the home. HealthVault account users can automatically collect and store data from their glucometers, blood pressure cuffs, pedometers, weight scales, and more into their HealthVault accounts. The individual can then choose to share that data with their physician, family members, or as part of an inpatient admission. This hits toward the home care area that Steve touched on at HIMSS.

Amalga helps healthcare organizations address the challenge of continuously aggregating, managing and effectively utilizing a growing amount of data from disparate sources — regardless of how many different systems the data is stored in. This enables healthcare organizations to bring together their data in one single view. Once in that single view, they can make better, more informed decisions across their clinical, financial, and administrative areas.

The bottom line is that most healthcare organizations have a sleeping infrastructure that needs to be awakened (wish I’d thought of that line myself, but I have to credit a customer). Microsoft is a large part of that infrastructure, with everything from Microsoft Office to Microsoft BizTalk Server to Microsoft SQL Server to Windows. It may not be a model most would think of first when it comes to solving healthcare issues, but we’ve taken our role of adapting horizontal software to an incredibly complex market very seriously. There are plenty of examples we can share, but I recommend that your readers visit www.microsoft.com/health for a glimpse as to what we’re doing across Provider, Health Plans, Life Sciences, and Consumer Health sectors. The video that Steve showed at HIMSS is also posted in the lower left corner.

Bad economic conditions are sure to hit healthcare providers hard with more uncompensated care and tougher lending markets. When IT costs come under the microscope, how can technology, including that provided by Microsoft, prove that it’s paying its way?

Those tough economic conditions are already here. As an industry, we are approximately less than two months behind the tsunami that the financial services markets have already experienced. Many of our healthcare provider customers are turning to us to brainstorm how IT can help them navigate through this difficult time. Those customers are seeing their overhead costs skyrocket as a result of manual, paper-based processes and manual workflows, and it’s extremely difficult for physicians to avoid costly, acute situations without all of a patient’s information at their fingertips.

The bottom line is that our customers are looking for technology solutions that drive top-line revenue, reduce costs, as well as enhance patient safety and the overall patient experience. Each of our solution areas are being defined in one of these main categories. Look at Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center. They came to us wanting to reduce ER wait time and improve the overall experience for cardiac patients in the emergency department. They implemented Microsoft Visio (along with a solution from the Orlando Software Group) and were able to lower patient abandonment by three percent, reduce the average length of an ER visit by 22 percent, and lower the time to be seen for minor emergences into the 70 percent range.

What Microsoft products or services should hospitals and other providers know about but probably don’t?

I can’t even begin to count the number of healthcare organizations who’ve deployed products that aren’t being used to their full advantage. Microsoft Office is a great example of this. Many real-world processes already are documented in Microsoft Office. The interface is familiar and what many healthcare providers use at home. So, we’ve turned Microsoft Office into an application development platform that brings the ease and familiarity of Office to more complex enterprise solutions, helping to drive adoption and acceptance. This is what we call an Office Business Application.

There are so many examples of innovative things being done with Office Business Applications or Microsoft Office, and I wish I could share them all. But here are three that might be of most interest to your readers:

The Patient Safety Screening Tool (PSST) is an Office Business Application developed by Accent on Integration (our partner) and Microsoft, and piloted at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) to reduce the rate of sepsis, an in-hospital acquired infection that is deadly if not caught early. The capability is designed around the Office tools (primarily Microsoft Office InfoPath, Microsoft SQL Server, and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server). For significantly less than they would have spent on professional services, VUMC has been able to prevent the deaths of several patients — in a matter of weeks rather than months or years. This tool has enormous potential to be used with other in-hospital acquired infections, such as those on Medicare’s “never events” list.

Secondly, we’ve worked to improve the patient experience by integrating Xbox and Windows Media Center with a clinical information system (CIS). This has enabled patients to use Xbox for the “fun stuff” like e-mail, IM, and gaming, but the CIS integration is key. It can enable the patient to understand more about their care team and what to expect during their stay. I know many of your readers have been skeptical of such technology uses in the past, but I think they were hung up on the inpatient e-mail capability (meaning “acute care patients, seniors, and the Luddites will never use it”). The real value of this is to better inform and educate the patient as to what to expect during their stay. It can also be of great value to family members who visit the patient and who confer with the care team.

The third example is something that we recently shared with the Microsoft Healthcare User Group involving Operational Excellence. One of the most prominent children’s hospitals in the U.S. (together with USC Consulting) has used our tools to improve the turnaround time on their lab results by 50 percent.

It’s important to note that with these applications, we’re doing similar work with Health Plans and Life Sciences organizations and moreover, we’re really taking a close look at how they connect with the entire healthcare ecosystem, including providers and patients.

Bill Gates scorned IBM back in the 90s, saying its demise was imminent because of IBM’s reliance on old, cash-cow products and outdated business methods. IBM pulled back from the brink and thrived. Now Microsoft is "the establishment" and gets that same kind of criticism from the next generation of upstarts such as Google, Apple, and open source vendors. Is there a sense of urgency to change the status quo, and if so, how?

I wasn’t at Microsoft in the 90s so it’s difficult for me to comment, but I will say this. We’ve grown now to more than 900 professionals who wake up every day focused on the need to improve healthcare around the world. That 900 includes physicians, researchers, scientists, developers, and sales and marketing professionals. We’ve put an incredible amount of energy into working with our partners and the community to create specific vertical applications on our platform for healthcare, as well as point solutions such as HealthVault and Amalga.

In my professional career, I’ve never been around people who carried such a sense of urgency to change the status quo. Probably Microsoft’s biggest strength that I’ve seen in my nearly three years here is our ability to be self-critical. We have the opportunity to take a step back and look at industry challenges, whether it’s patient safety, moving from paper to electronic records, or cutting costs that stem from inefficient processes. And we have the opportunity to really think about how our products can be used to solve these challenges. How can we work with partners to build an entirely new solution, such as the Patient Safety Screening Tool, on the Microsoft platform?

We try to be as hard on ourselves as many of your readers are. We’ll keep going after a problem or an issue until it’s solved. We want to be strategic partners to our customers. We understand their needs and we’ve brought people on board, such as physicians and researchers, who can work with us to provide even deeper insight.

Can consumerism in healthcare take hold in a down economy, and if so, how will Microsoft support it?

Even in a down economy, consumers are still demanding better care, a better patient experience, and more personal communication with their doctors. The “millenials” (those under 30) are changing the game very, very quickly. They’re coming out of school expecting technology to be there. Those same people are now entering the workforce and taking care of their parents’ health. They demand solutions that support IM, social networks, gaming, and instant access to information — from anywhere.

To stay competitive among peers, healthcare organizations need to meet these consumer demands. Microsoft is certainly playing a large role here with Windows Mobile, MSN and Messenger as examples. What we’re doing with HealthVault, for instance, is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of connecting consumers to their healthcare information. It’s the consumers’ data, and as an industry, we need to break down the barriers that have prevented them from accessing it. Everyone from vendors to providers, physicians, and payers need to come together and empower consumers to manage their data, engage with their health plans and physicians, and truly take control of their health.

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From Fourth Hansen Brother: "Re: big time Philips layoffs." Link. Philips will cut 1,600 jobs in its healthcare unit, along with raising prices and cutting other expenses. The North Andover, MA headquarters will get hit with100 layoffs.

From Aries Ram: "Re: Intel. Heard at the mid-year ATA show there was a small demo of Intel’s new home monitor. Comments were not endorsing, primarily based upon how data was displayed. Also, they had a slow booth at NAHC. Philips was busy … and picking up additional customers after Intel’s recall of acquired product.It isn’t always about the bells and whistles. Get the users to weigh in on the product."

From Alias Unknown: "Re: The MedicalPhone. The MedicalPhone website was down for a day or two earlier this week after they received press mentions. Glad to see it’s back up." Here’s the link again.

I’m tired of gloom and doom news. Let’s hear more about positive company developments and maybe something about the charitable causes companies will support during the holidays. On the business front, EnovateIT e-mailed over its list of 2008 accomplishments: gross sales up 35%, headcount doubled, square footage expanded eightfold, and new customers and products. Anyone else? 

The Wall Street Journal investigates questionable practices in UPMC’s liver transplant program and the shady transplant surgeon it brought in and later fired, but casts the net wider. "UPMC is a nonprofit hospital system whose income is largely exempt from taxes. Yet, it is increasingly run like a for-profit company, paying its executives high salaries, jumping into new activities and expanding abroad … Its chief executive, Jeffrey Romoff, earned $4 million in the fiscal year ended June 30, 2007, and 13 other employees earned in the roughly $1 million to $2 million range. For their transportation, UPMC leases a corporate jet. Earlier this year, UPMC relocated its headquarters into Pittsburgh’s tallest skyscraper, the 62-story U.S. Steel Tower."

Brigham and Women’s is using IVR/speech recognition technology from Vocantas to collect information from patients who have started new drug therapy. The company has developed applications for discharge follow-up, disease management, and running emergency call lists.

The Project Valour-IT fundraising challenge will wind down this week, ending on Thanksgiving Day. You can donate here to help cover the cost of a several wounded military member’s rehabilitative technology. The $54,532 raised so far is a long way from the $250,000 needed. Thanks.

I wrote Thursday about nurses in the UK using cell phone software to monitor data entered by chronic patients at home. The celebration was premature, as it turns out: the hospitals using the t+ Medical software have ditched it already, saying it was too cumbersome to put into practice.

Picis offers a free report on business intelligence tools.

I don’t have the courage to look at my 401K or IRA balances, but I figured it was time to check out HIT stock prices over the past six months since I don’t hold those:

• Google: down 58%
• Siemens: down 55%
• GE: down 54%
• QuadraMed: down 51%
• Allscripts: down 51%
• McKesson: down 46%
• Cardinal Health: down 45%
• NASDAQ Composite:  down 44%
• Dow Jones Industrial Average: down 36%
• Eclipsys: down 36%
• Cerner: down 30%
• Microsoft: down 30%
• Perot Systems: down 25%
• Athenahealth: down 23%
• HP: down 22%
• Quality Systems: down 9%
• CPSI: up 27%

Landmark Medical Center (RI) is operating under a court-ordered supervisor and seeking a buyer. Among other examples of bad healthcare conditions, the article mentions that 10 of New Jersey’s 80 hospitals have shut down in the last two years.

It appears that Oklahoma State University Medical Center is on the brink of closing or selling out to St. John Medical Center, with its Web site turned into a plea for state government help. It might be the only hospital Web site in existence that doesn’t say where the hospital is (Tulsa) or how to contact it.

The Social Security Administration wants to develop a system that can extract medical records information for disability claimants from EMR systems using the Continuity of Care Document format. It’s being piloted now at BIDMC and Cleveland Clinic.

An argument between Muskogee Regional Medical Center (OK) and local surgeons goes to the state’s Supreme Court. The hospital insists that two surgeons must be on ED call for 192 hours per month, based on its bylaws that require around-the-clock coverage. The doctors say the hospital gets federal money for ED coverage and should hire its own.

Vendor Deals and Announcements

• Parkland Health & Hospital System (TX) implements Innovation’s PharmASSIST pharmacy automation systems across its nine pharmacy sites. PharmASSIST is integrated with the Cerner PharmNet system to process 6,000 prescriptions a day.
• SecureCare Technologies’ Sfax solution is now integrated into Addison Health Systems’ WritePad EMR.
• Interactive patient care system provider Skylight Healthcare Systems signs an agreement to deploy Skylight ACCESS for Cancer Treatment Centers of America’s new facility at Western Regional Medical Center.
• Edward Hospital and Health Services (IL) will implement Allscripts’ Enterprise EHR/PM solution for 50+ providers. Another 40 providers will use just the Allscripts’ PM solution.
• Centegra Health Systems (IL) signs a long term service agreement with Perot to provide support for its IT platform and assistance implementing a clinical system and other technologies.
• Brigham and Women’s Hospital (MA) will use Vocantas’ CallAssure interactive voice response system to study the effectiveness of using automated telephone follow-up systems to manage chronically ill patients using commonly prescribed medications.
• Former Cerner sales leader Mike Fiorito is named the new chief sales and marketing office for LifeWatch Services.
• Children’s Health System (AL) will deploy Eclipsys’ Sunrise solutions at its new $500 million facility opening in 2012.
• Acesis announces the release of Clinical Product Review Suite, a new product designed to automate the peer review process for hospitals and other healthcare providers.
• Harold Miller is named president and CEO of the Network for Regional Healthcare Improvement.
• Twelve critical access hospitals in North Dakota launch a pilot program focused on improving patient safety through automated and shared data collection. The Critical Access Hospital Quality Network with use Clarity Group’s Healthcare SafteyZone Portal.
• Western Missouri Medical Center completes installation of DR Systems’ PACS solution.
• Rodney Schutt is named Asprya’s new CEO, having previously been with Luminetx, Smith and Nephew Orthopaedics, and GE Healthcare.
• Seattle Children’s Hospital selects DatStat to provide its staff tools to improve enterprise research and to facilitate feedback from employees, patients, and patients’ families.
• Wexford-Mercy PHO (MI) selects WellCentive Registry to help improve clinical quality outcomes and streamline the care delivery process.
• BCBS of Vermont says it has saved almost $500K using VUE Compensation Management’s compensation management technology.
• Orthopedic Associates of Meadville (OH) selects SRS’s EMR solution for its five-physician practice.
• Daniel Kohl is named the new president and CEO of clinical documentation service provider Spheris.
• Bert Fish Medical Center (FL) selects Xceedium’s GateKeeper technology to provide secure remote administration services.
• Mediware Information Systems acquires the assets of pharmacy management software provider Hann’s On Software (HOS). The purchase, which includes $3.5 million in cash plus potential operational performance monies, adds 320 pharmacy facilities to Mediware’s client base.
• dbMotion is named winner of the Healthcare IT Summit’s Innovation Award in the Best Case Study Presentation category. The winning presentation focused on dbMotion’s implementation at UPMC.
• Healthvision solutions is a new reseller for MediSolution’s Virtuo BI solutions.
• The Defense Health Information Management Systems Program selects Base Technologies to provide teleradiology support services for Medweb’s PACS solution in war zones.
• CCHIT announces three new members to its board of trustees. Meighan Girgus, EVP for the American Heart Association; Wes Rishel, VP for Gartner; and Dr. Bruce Taffel, VP/CMO for Shared Health. They will serve staggered, three-year terms.
• Lynn Hudson, national EMR product manager for HealthPort,is a new member of The Electronic Health Records Association Executive Committee.

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