Ivo Nelson, founder and CEO of the former Houston-based Healthlink consulting firm that he sold to IBM in 2005, has started a new firm with the convenient acronym EHR (Encore Health Resources). He can be reached at ivo@encorehealthresources.com.

Is this a really great time or a terrible time to be starting a consulting business? 

That’s a great question. The answer is that I don’t know and I don’t think anybody else knows, either. When I first decided to start this business, I was not aware of how fast the Obama money was going to start coming into healthcare. It’s not the reason why we started Encore. It may turn out to be a great day for Encore. I just don’t know that right now.

The reason I can’t predict what is going to happen is that we’re faced with conflicting agendas. We’ve got CFOs out there that are putting a screeching halt on capital investment because of the bad economy, and yet we have an infusion of capital coming from the government to help fund IT projects. I don’t think there’s anybody in the industry right no that can predict how that’s going to play out. So as a businessman who’s staring a company, I have just have to fall back on the experience that I’ve had and just do what’s right, basic blocking and tackling and take what the industry has to give us.

Surely you made a fortune when you sold out to IBM. Why do you want to do this all over again?

This is just what I do. That’s kind of like asking a lawyer why he practices law, or asking a doctor, “Why practice medicine?”

When I left IBM, I took 3-4 months off and just kind of chilled out. I took the kids to school, cooked meals at night, watched regular TV shows. I even played some golf. It was a needed break from having been a global road warrior for a lot of years.

I’m 53 years old. I’ve still got a lot left in me. I just absolutely love surrounding myself with great people. I love working with clients. This business of starting up a consulting firm and building it gets my blood flowing and it gets me excited. It’s just what I like to do. I think everybody dreams of doing what they love to do. I’m following my dream.

When you went with IBM, did you think you would do something like this again at some point?

When I left IBM, it truly was … I just needed a break. I really just needed some time to get away from the business for a little while. I would recommend anybody that hits it as hard as I was hitting it for as long as I was … to take a time out just for a few months. Kind of a sabbatical of sorts.

I had no intent, really, on starting another company. Not that I was opposed to it, it just wasn’t something that I had a plan to do. I didn’t really have any plans. I had gotten some advice from friends of mine who had gone into semi-retirement. They said, “Do nothing for awhile. Allow the fog to lift. Allow your head to clear and then start making important decisions about the future.”

Those were some very wise words. I think once I had a chance to really sit back and reflect and decide what I wanted to do here in the next stage of my life, my call was answered.

When you look back at what Healthlink was when it was independent and then afterwards when you sold it to IBM, what are your thoughts on how it changed? Is it something you are proud of or something that you wished you hadn’t done?

I have no regrets at all about selling Healthlink. Healthlink was at the right time at the right place.

At the time that we were building a privately held company, we kind of hit a wall of sorts. We were trying to penetrate the federal government business. We were in the process of going global. We opened an office in London. I was working at Australia Asia Pacific for the next move and it struck me that this next step in the company … and all companies kind of go through steps.

We’d hit $100 million in revenue and needed to take a big move to take the company to the next level. We were not capitalized to be able to do that adequately. On top of that, we had investors in the company that expected to get a return on their investment. We put those two things together.

The logical thing was to look at a partner, someone we could partner up that already had a global presence, that already had a strong federal business and needed the United States domestic business that we had built a good market share in. IBM was a good fit because they had acquired PWC some years back but did not acquire their healthcare practice, so they had a gaping hole in healthcare and Healthlink was able to fill that.

So, to answer your question, I really had no regrets. It was the right time. I think it was the right company and I think we’ve helped IBM have a stronger footprint in the healthcare business.

Healthlink was among the two or three highest regarded consulting companies out there. Did those folks fit into the IBM culture? I can imagine a lot of them turned over.

There’s people that are born to work in small companies and there are people born to work in big companies. So the kind of tradition that we saw at Healthlink was pretty much what you’d expect. People not comfortable working in a larger company, they are going to have a lot more process and bureaucracy than a smaller company is going to have. A different kind of culture.

I don’t think anybody can fault IBM for not being a great company. It’s an institution. But there’s some people that … whether its IBM or Oracle or Microsoft or General Electric, it doesn’t really matter. People have to find their home where they feel comfortable. So the Healthlink people that felt pretty comfortable at IBM still are there. Some of them didn’t and they left.

I did some analysis and it’s frankly not that much different from what we would have seen or any consulting firm would have seen otherwise. There’s a natural, pretty high turnover in consulting firms because of lifestyle issues and all the traveling you have to do. So we’ve seen between 15-20% per year. Over a course of three or four years, you’re going to almost turn over your whole company whether you’re getting acquired or not.

So that’s a long-winded answer to the retention issues and how that relates to the culture of Healthlink versus the culture of IBM. My analysis shows that there is slightly higher turnover at IBM, but not as much as what people think.

Now that you’ve done it both ways as a big enterprise and as a start-up enterprise, what are the business goals for Encore and what kind of culture do you build?

Encore is owned by two people. Those are the two founders, who are myself and Dana Sellers. We don’t have any expectations. If I had a bunch of investors or if I was publicly traded, they’d never accept that as an answer because they want to see a very strict business plan. They want to see you hit the goals that you set.

I’m perfectly happy with having an expectation that says we’re going to hire really good people and we’re going to do great work for our clients and the growth is going to be whatever the market has to give us. If this is a 30, 40, or 50-consultant company in five years and we’ve got 100% referenceability and we’re considered the place to work in the industry and every time I talk to a consultant they tell me how much they love working for Encore, I consider that to be a grand slam home run.

If it’s 500 people and we’re not providing great services to clients and we’ve got people quitting because they hate working for Encore but we’re making a ton of money, I’ll consider the company a huge failure. Dana and I, we really just want to build a really good company that clients can be proud that we’re working for them and our consultants can be proud to say that they work for Encore.

It seems like all of the old-schoool companies that were at that level — Healthlink, Superior, FCG, maybe JJWILD — were bought up. Is that good or bad for coming back with what may look like a Healthlink in an environment where there aren’t many more Healthlinks?

Well, I think it’s good for Encore because there’s a hole in the market that those companies left. It’s what I call the trusted advisor. Our clients really like to be able to have a 1-800-Ivo or 1-800-Dana that they can call and just say, ”I need help with this” or “Can you do this for me?” And they know that when we tell them that we’re going to take care of it, that we’re going to take care of it.

We’re not a no-name, no-face, resume-pushing company that’s just out there trying to shove consultants down their throats. We really are looking out for their best interests. That’s all about relationships and that’s all about the trust and confidence that you build over a whole lot of years having done it a lot of times for clients. So that’s the hole out there right now, those types of companies. It’s a gap that we hope to fill. I think it’s a huge advantage for us and hope that we can live up to that.

A lot of what you and the others did along the way is either acquire somebody or be acquired. Is that anything that you even care about at this point?

As we were growing at Healthlink, I acquired a number of boutique firms. The way we got the name Healthlink was through a merger with another consulting firm called Healthlink. Before that we were called IMG, Insource Management Group.

All of those acquisitions tended to work out pretty well for us, but it was not always easy. Having been acquired and watched other similar companies get acquired, too, I think it’s extremely difficult to take a people company like a consulting firm and have cultures meshed with a technology company that’s more asset-based. It’s a very difficult thing to do. So that’s one thing to consider — it’s hard to pull something like that off and have that be a win for everybody involved.

That said, for Encore, we have no intention of selling the company. I can make that very clear. I think it takes not just years, but decades to build really great companies. This is a company I’d like to see built the right way and I’d like to see it last a really long time. If it will last forever, that would be perfect, but that’s naive to say that a company can last forever. But if this has got a 15, 20, 25 or 30-year life span, I think that would be a great thing.

I don’t want to overanalyze the situation, but since you’re not motivated financially, is this your wanting to leave a legacy and proving that you can do it again?

The short answer is no. I hope I’m past that. I’d probably as soon be in the back office, frankly. Dana is really the CEO of this company. I’m the chairman. She will run the company. She is one of the greatest operators that I’ve ever worked with in my professional career. I’ve got tremendous confidence in her and her ability to manage the company. 

This is nothing more than me doing what I love to do. If it leaves a legacy, I think that’s OK, but I’m not sure what you really get out of that. When I’m hopefully up in my 80s or 90s and I pass away, the people that are going to come to my funeral are going to be my family. It’s not going to be clients. It’s going to be people that are close to me personally in my personal life, my kids and my sisters and a handful of friends probably that I have. That’s a legacy.

You say, "What kind of legacy would I want to leave?" and it would be a legacy that’s more related to being a good father to my children and being a good husband to my wife. That kind of stuff. Not anything I do professionally.

Do you think you’ll end up working with some of the folk that were consultants at Healthlink again?

I hope so. I mean, there’s a bond and sense of camaraderie with people that worked at Healthlink that I’m proud of. People who feel like they worked for a really good company. To have that caliber of person back to be a part of Encore would be something I’d be proud to have.

Are you getting a lot of calls now that the announcement has been made?

I think it’s around 350 resumes that have come in. That’s a by-product of a lot of people that would like to come back and people that knew of us in the industry, clients. Also, it’s not that great of an economy, so you’ve got people that are looking for a job.

I don’t think we’ll have any problem at all hiring great people. Great people are looking for companies like this to work for. They like the family feeling that they get. An analogy I had a client used for me once was, "Being in business with you guys is like going to the corner grocery store, where I go in and, I’ve forgot my wallet, and Joe the cashier says, no problem, you can bring it later today. Pick up a couple of loaves of bread and some meat. Walking out, he says, how’s your son? I heard he had his wisdom teeth taken out last night. Is everything OK? Yeah. Everything’s fine, Joe. See you tomorrow. Sorry I forgot my wallet."

That’s the feeling that they get. People like that feeling of culture when they’re in a company. They feel better about that than if they feel like they are walking into a Super Wal-Mart where nobody cares.

What kind of consultants will you be hiring?

I hate to sound too generic, but we’re really looking for really good people. We tend to go after experienced people more that inexperienced people. It’s not the kind of company that hires people out of college and sends them to a program to get up to where they can be consultants. We hire them once they are already proven at what they do.

We also have a bias for hiring people that have a lot of direct industry expertise. We had a couple of hundred nurses at Healthlink, doctors, pharmacists — people who had walked in the shoes of the client. They can really relate to the client’s issues more than they can the process issues. So, we’ll be more inclined to go after those types of people.

Encore will have a different focus than at Healthlink. Healthlink was much more enterprise-wide, process-oriented IT consulting firm. At Encore, we’ll be focused more on the data. There’s a huge number of implementations that are going on, transaction systems being implemented, whether they are Cerner or Epic or MEDITECH. Very few organizations have really thought through how they are going to manage the information side, the by-product of huge amounts of data they are going to have to organize that they haven’t had in the past.

We’re going to help these organizations get value out of their IT investment. It will be more of an information focus. Then we’ll provide them with the relevant skill sets of people to get this.

When you say working with data or using what information they are capturing, what kind of engagements would you say would be typical for what you are envisioning?

We’d like to walk into, say, an operating room on an OR department and be able to work with leaders there and say, “Are you getting these five key reports to be able to manage your business? Are you operating to these 10 metrics that are considerably best in class for an OR?” Then, work with them on the gap analysis between where they are now and where they need to be without any bias as to whether they need to buy any new technology.

The best engagement for us would be the client doesn’t have to buy any new technology at all. They just take what they have and they introduce better operating results as a result of getting better information, better processes. So that’s the type of a project that we’d take. We’d also do that for an emergency department. It’s a little different than looking at the entire enterprise and saying you’ll do clinical transformation. I think that has been proven to not work very well for these organizations. So we’re kind of parsing it up, taking it in chunks and then bringing the relevant expertise to be able to do that.

It’s also quite different form the usual small company that grabs a couple of Epic consultants and starts billing them out like crazy. Whether it’s already been selected or its already been planned, you want to ride that middle between system implementation and strategic planning to optimize the use and look at the outcomes.

Yeah, I think that’s good way to say it. There’s a large number of consulting firms out there right now that I wouldn’t even call consulting firms because I don’t think they do consulting. They do staff augmentation. The body shops. They shop resumes. That’s really a different business than really going in and working with the client on a solution.

Some of those same people would be great in Encore because they may have a tremendous amount of understanding and expertise of the application, whether its Picis or Epic or Cerner. But we combine that with people who have strong process or information capabilities and then throw them at solving a problem for the client. Hopefully, that’s why we’ll get hired — to help solve those problems. Not just to be a headcount in their organization.

It seems that’s the hardest thing for a consulting firm to do — to arbitrage what they can pay a consultant versus what they can bill them out for and try to add value without becoming a commodity.

Exactly. The key word that you used there is commodity. We’re always going to run into clients that are asking, “Can you provide me with a person that’s got this kind of expertise?” If they are a client that we’ve been working with in the past, we’ll be happy to try to do that, but by and large, we really want to be in the solution business. We really want to go in and help solve problems for clients.

I agree, it’s a harder business to be in. It takes longer to build your credibility when you’re in that business. You don’t get a quick hit with some client calling up and saying, “Hey, You’ve got these five Epic people" and so you’re throwing them over the wall and you’ve got instantaneous revenue from doing that. It’s slower and it’s harder to build and it looks harder to build a company this way, but it’s lasting, built to last. That’s the kind of model and company we want to be.

Do you think stimulus money will create a lot of new companies and will yours get lost among 20 new ones people just throw together?

I don’t know. I wish I did know. I’ve never really worried much about the competition. I think being in this business is kind of like playing golf. You really want to take where you are, whatever your handicap is, and when you go out and play, you want to do a little better than you did the last time. Who I’m playing with is not relevant to me.

I would encourage and hope that people who have the entrepreneurial spirit and have a way they can go build a company, do that. I’ve loved being an entrepreneur for most of my life and I respect and encourage other entrepreneurs, but it really has nothing to do with Encore and how we’re going to build our business. The stimulus package is convenient based on the timing of starting Encore, but its not the reason why we started Encore. Five years from now, it certainly will have nothing to do with Encore.

Healthcare IT had always been in flux, but it’s arguably more so now than ever. What people or organizations do you think might emerge as the leaders in what ever the next phase is?

I’m not so sure about people. Clearly Epic has shown tremendous success. In the last five years in particular, I’ve spent a substantial amount of time in the global markets, I’ve seen Cerner finding a lot of success in the global markets. MEDITECH has continued to be a Steady Eddie in the market. I think they have been able to continue to progress their products and seem to have happy clients out there.

Those three in particular are the ones that seem to have been the winners in the more recent past as we’ve seen clinical applications proliferate across the industry. I think on a go-forward basis, those companies that can really solve the information problem, that can take their transaction systems and help their clients really produce information for better decision making and better process, are going to be successful.

I think those that are poised to address the global marketplace are also going to be successful. Because a lot of the rest of the world is kind of where the United States was maybe back in the late 90s, but they are a lot more sophisticated because they have watched the Unites States and they watched the UK make mistakes, they can learn from as they move forward with their healthcare IT initiatives.

You probably have had more of an international vantage point than just about anybody in the industry. How important, both for Encore and for the industry in general, is it to look globally and not just domestically?

If the goal is to be able to consistently grow your company, I think it’s a big advantage.

One of the things I’ve learned having worked around some of these companies within this industry and outside this industry is that they have a difficult time servicing the global healthcare marketplace because they are too siloed around particular geographies. At Encore, we designed the company to go global from the start. So if we send somebody to Dubai or Singapore or Beijing, it’s the same to us as if we are sending someone to New York or Kansas City or Los Angeles. We have to he attentive to HR issues, to labor laws, and additional administrative processes that we have to go through.

From a skill set perspective, it’s really not all that different when you go across the world. There’s a huge gap in expertise overseas. So the United States, amazingly, may become a resource tool. They may be outsourcing for us for the expertise they need for the healthcare IT implementations, at least for the next probably five years, as they’re starting to build up their own teams of people.

HIMSS says the stimulus bill will make it hard to find skilled resources, especially for vendors who wait too long for the downturn to end. Are there enough skilled people or will they have to sacrifice quality just to get a body in the door?

I hope not. I think there will be an increase, but I don’t think it’s going to be as much as what some of these folks are predicting. One thing that all of our clients out there are going to have to be attentive to is that this is going to create a tremendous amount of hype, particularly from the software vendors and outsourcing companies that have a lot to gain — and consulting firms, frankly — that have a lot to gain from hospital CEOs, CFOs or COOs who are sitting there watching the news or sitting there listening to documents coming in from the American Hospital Association or whatnot, that this is going to be a big deal for them. So we don’t know yet. There’s not enough level of detail in what’s coming out on the stimulus package.

I think to have clear enough understanding of exactly how the hospitals are going to need to respond to this or need to be compliant to get the money. A lot of them are going to be focused on what’s minimally required to get the money, which may not require a huge amount of resources or technology. We just don’t know yet. It could go anywhere from being moderately more than what we see now to being a tsunami of labor that is going to be required to get everybody up to a Level 4 HIMSS Analytics standard, depending on how ultimately "meaningful" gets defined.

I have a wait and see attitude right now. As we talked about earlier in the discussion, my focus is on really hiring good people that are going to manage the services that are our core business well regardless of what happens with the stimulus package. Those companies who over-respond too specifically to what the stimulus package has to offer are going to have big problem in three or four years.

Hospitals always seem to have the problem where they buy technology, but turn into a bitter customer because they don’t have the commitment or knowledge to do anything useful with it. Do you think the stimulus package will just encourage more of that?

I think that’s a big concern. I would advise people to read the John Glaser article that you had. I think he talks specifically to the fact he nothing really has changed in terms of how you get value from the IT. So just because there’s a bunch of money getting poured into the system doesn’t mean that the focus on quality; that the focus on making sure the processes are aligned; the physician adoption is there; all those things we’ve learned really haven’t spilled a lot of blood and broken a lot of bones over the last 15 years with these EMR implementations. None of those lessons have changed. They are still there. I would certainly hope it encouraged all of the hospitals to stay focused on doing it the right way.

What the industry is going to look like in three to five years?

I would take whatever the industry pundits say and divide by two. That’s what we’ll see.

I think this is an industry that moves slower than people have ever wanted it to move. Anytime I tried, to steal a Wayne Gretzky quote, "to skate where the puck is going to be," I’ve always had to slow down some and realize the decision processes and change processes — they just don’t happen very fast in healthcare. It would be great if we had something that Obama did or a massive change in the healthcare system to make it more efficient. I think that would be great. I’m not expecting that anytime in the near term.

So, three to five years from now, I think we’re going to see more of the same of what we see now, and hopefully some incremental improvements to how the system works because of initiatives that have come out of Obama’s administration. I am not going to predict that we’re going to see massive levels of healthcare reform. I think this country will be challenged with that level of disruption in how this process is working. I’m not saying that I wouldn’t support massive healthcare reform or that we don’t need massive healthcare reform. I’m just not predicting that’s what is actually going to happen.

Anything else we should talk about or that’s on your mind?

Anything that you wanted to ask that you didn’t ask?

I don’t hold back, so if I thought of it, it came out of my mouth. I’m always curious about how the whole arrangement with IBM worked out. It’s none of my business, but I’m curious when you’re IBM and you grab this company Healthvision and say ,“I love you, now change".

I’m a little bit of an anomaly in that I was there for three years and three years is far longer than how long most  entrepreneurial CEOs last in big companies.

I can honestly say that IBM provided me with some unique opportunities that I had a hard time finding at Healthlink or anywhere else. They put me up in the very senior team of people. To be able to see how a $100 billion company operates is fascinating. They sent me all over the world. Some of that was healthcare related; some of that was just around helping IBM become more of a global company.

It was a great mind-expanding and challenging, enlightening experience for me. But my roots are really in being an entrepreneur. In healthcare, it’s just 10 times easier to deal with the hospitals when you’re in a smaller company than when you are with a big company, The hospitals prefer it, frankly.

A lot of them got burned paying $280 an hour for some kid right out of college to create credenza-ware. All these people bought strategic plans and IT assessments and all this advice but just never did anything with it. Every place I’ve worked paid these people to come in, we asked their opinion, and then we ignored their advice because it was too much trouble to actually do.

I think there’s a been a lot of lessons learned. I hope there’s been a lot of lessons learned. I don’t think these big enterprise clinical transformation projects, $20 million consulting gigs — I don’t think those things really delivered value back to the clients. Encore services will break things down into manageable components. Let’s just go do this in the OR and let’s use a similar philosophy in the ED. Let’s look at revenue management and medication management. There’s ways to parse it out. You still have this common thread that connects them. So in time you get the enterprise changed, it’s just done incrementally — a more practical, pragmatic, doable, get-results approach.

Sounds good.

I hope!

Look at it this way. It’s a hobby for you at this point. You don’t have to starve. So at least you’re only risking your ego if it fails this time.

It might be my ego, but it’s a lot of these people’s jobs. I care a lot about that.

Wouldn’t it be hard for a consulting company to actually fail if they make a fairly good effort?

I think when we were in Healthlink, I felt that way a lot of times.

Really? You can’t scale the business as you go? It seems like since you don’t have a huge capital investment other than people capital that the risk would be lower. You don’t have high fixed costs other than salaries.

There’s kind of an economy of scale there. I think where you get up to where you’ve got 40 or 50 consultants, there’s less risk. Frequently what happens with a lot of these consulting firms is, until they have close to 100 consultants, they generally have three or four clients that really make or break them. There are a lot of times, if a one client were to go south on me, I felt like the company was going to be at risk.

That can happen. The CEO changes. She walks in and says, “Who are these consultants? Get rid of them”. Overnight, you may have 10-20 people billable somewhere that are gone. The easy thing is you just let them go. When you’ve built a culture that has got a family feeling to it and people know that they are cared for, it’s not such an easy thing to do.

I guess the thing is maybe keep the projects a manageable size where you do have your eggs spread out among a few baskets, where one client can’t hurt you that much and you spread the risk among smaller projects.

Smaller projects or more clients. I remember going into one client once and going to five of the different executives with a transition program and saying how they needed to get rid of us and hire their own people to do the stuff our people were doing. The reason why is, I told them frankly, “I’d rather have you as a long-term client than all of a sudden somebody realizes you’ve got more consultants than you need and we get hurt from it. So let’s manage this in a responsible way. By the way, you’ve got too many consultants here. It should be staffed by your own people”. They were very appreciative and they turned into a good long-term client of ours. Hopefully, they’ll be a good client for Encore.

I guess that’s the question I didn’t ask you, but since you bought it up, how many consultants are you going to start with? Do you have a number in mind to hit that peak, that higher efficiency?

I really don’t. Like I told you earlier, we’ll take what the market has to give us. If that’s 20 or 30, that’s great. If it’s 50, that’s good. We’ve been doing this long enough, so we understand how to manage the projects, the utilization in the bench to try to keep the company profitable as we’re building a client base out there. We’re taking one step at a time.

Have you had a lot of calls of that kind where people say, “Wow, glad you’re back. How about helping us out?” 

We’ve had about five of the CIOs so far call up. They aren’t necessarily big projects. They’ll say, “Can you come out here and talk to me about this?” I’m encouraged by that. Those are five projects that you get right off the bat.

In a small company when you are starting up, you don’t always have a skill sets of people that meet the need. Let’s say three customers of the five work. You’ve got three customers. That’s the hardest thing about a startup is getting those first initial core clients out there that are willing to take  risk on you. I’ll never forget the first clients I had at Healthlink and I’ll remember them forever. I feel like I’ll owe them forever because they gave me a chance when nobody else would.

Have many of those have called you?

I would say half of them have retired. [laughs] As a matter of fact, I have. A couple of them have called. Interestingly, one of those clients did retire and one of the projects that came up for us was an interim CIO job at an academic medical center. We called him up and said, “You want to come out of retirement and come do this work?”, and he said, “Yeah”. So what goes around comes around.

The word on Encore won’t have really gotten out very far by the time this runs. I bet you’ll get a lot of calls, if nothing else, just to say, "What are you up to? What are you offering?" You know everybody in the industry, right?

I don’t know everybody in the industry. The industry changes all the time. New people coming in, old people going out. It’s always a grind just getting out into the industry and getting to know people. Our business is a relationship business, so it takes me hiring people who have good relationship orientations. That’s what helped make me successful and that’s what has made Dana Sellers successful and frankly that’s what made Healthlink successful. We were able to build that team of people that could be trusted in the marketplace.

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From Todd: "Re: Mass General. The Boston Globe reports that Mass General waited four days before alerting public health authorities that a wave of gastrointestinal illness was sweeping through one of their floors." Link. The hospital stopped admitting patients to the affected unit after nine patients and 18 employees came down with vomiting and diarrhea, but did not report the suspected disease outbreak immediately to the Boston Public Health Commission as city regulations require. The hospital says the "so-called delay" was necessary because they were collecting information for the commission.

Some readers posted comments ridiculing the idea that Epic is cutting back on staff, while others (some of whom have HR contacts at Epic) assure me it’s happening. Supposedly individual employees are being asked to resign, not exactly a layoff, but perhaps a quiet way to cut back while assuring employees there are no "layoffs." Someone who should know tells me the company’s benefits/departures team is overwhelmed. One reader says it’s the glut of 2004 hires now hitting their five-year mark (and earning additional benefits) who are leaving, maybe not voluntarily. All speculation, nothing verified.

A New York woman complains that she constantly receives PHI-containing faxes intended for the HIM department at Putnam Hospital Center, whose telephone exchange is one digit off from hers.

UPMC hires a big-bucks Hollywood PR agent to market itself, joining notables such as Paris Hilton, Hulk Hogan, and Wesley Snipes on his client roster. The $7 billion chain refused to say what it’s paying. When the newspaper asked the PR guy’s people about the deal, they gave a very non-PR answer: no comment.

The Friday post was a little bit abbreviated, as you may have noticed. Inga did, instantly e-mailing me, "Have a hot date?" She’s good: Mrs. HIStalk and I actually spent time together in in which we were (a) both awake, and (b) not eating, with me sitting at a live performance with her instead of being hunched over a smoldering keyboard (although I admit that I longed to be there a couple of times). I actually bought her flowers for Valentine’s Day as well, thus earning significant goodwill after her initial shock waned.

Kaiser Permanente’s executives are told to cut costs after the health system lost $800 million in investments last year: freezing salaries, limiting hires, laying off, cutting back on contractors, reducing travel, and spending aggressively on marketing and sales to get new members (as with most non-profit hospitals, it’s simply unthinkable to scale expenses to volume — the answer is always to fight harder to steal more sick people who are going elsewhere, thereby adding zero incremental value to the health system as a whole).

Listening: Tsunami Bomb, defunct female-led pop-punk.

Housekeeping reminders: the Subscribe to Updates box to your upper right is the lifeline between you and me since you won’t know about HIStalk updates unless you sign up. If you’re not getting e-mails when I write something new, check with your e-mail server people since the spam blockers are getting more aggressive these days. Also to the right is a Google search box for the nearly six years’ of HIStalk, an Email to a Friend button that will let you tell your compatriots about HIStalk, and some other cool stuff. Topside is the Archives link (at the very top of the page) where you can browse previous HIStalk articles and a link to the discussion forum, which is cool but rarely used, unfortunately. Please don’t forget about HIStalk Practice, where Inga and I (and our guest authors) write for the physician practice IT crowd (it has its own signup for updates, so what the heck, drop your e-mail in there, too). Also to the right is my version of the telethon tote board, that magic count of how many people have visited HIStalk since I started it in mid-2003. Will it hit the 2 million mark by HIMSS? Maybe — I’ll be watching it with great interest since we Web misfits have nothing to live for except our page hits. And related to that electronic narcissism, thanks to the folks who have signed up for the volunteer-created HIStalk Fan Club on LinkedIn, a veritable Who’s Who of the industry (and Inga and I will approve all LinkedIn connection requests to scratch your electronic back since you would do the same for us, wouldn’t you?). Thank you sincerely for reading and thanks to the sponsors who keep the keyboards clacking.

Peter Waegemann and Claudia Tessier have left what’s left of the Medical Records Institute and TEPR (not much, apparently), moving to their newly created non-profit cell phone organization mHealth Initiative. Waegemann defended MRI’s for-profit status in the "HIT Moment" I did with him a few weeks ago, but was apparently careful to make the new group seem less proprietary since the "non-profit" part is mentioned prominently (despite dues ranging from $500 per year for individuals to $9,500 for larger vendors). Tessier is listed as serving in all corporate roles in its Massachusetts corporate filing.

Speaking of mobile phones in healthcare, that was a hot topic at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Also mentioned was a new organization with a similar mission and name to the one Peter Waegemann chose: the non-profit mHealth Alliance, launched by the Rockefeller Foundation, the United Nations Foundation, and the Vodafone Foundation last week.

Lots has happened with Stanford International Bank, the primary owner of failed Emageon acquirer Health Systems Solutions. Billionaire owner Allen Stanford has been found and served, most of his enterprise has been frozen by the SEC, Antigua is having a run on banks including ones he doesn’t own (like Bank of Antigua above), liens have been placed on his US properties for the $104 million he owes in back taxes, and even pro jocks can’t pay their bills because their money is frozen in Stanford’s bank, earning twice the interest everyone else was paying (hmm …) Sir Allen (he earned himself an Antiguan knighthood for buying up the island) may have been located, but his bank’s claimed $8 billion in assets hasn’t. The New York Times says his wealth wasn’t built by admirable bootstrapping and shrewd Houston property investments as he says; instead, he took millions from his father and started offshore banks on loosely regulated Caribbean islands. Sounds like HSS just got stuck in the middle of the mess through no fault of its own, at least pending its resolution.

Staff at Genesis Medical Center East (IA) set up a Webcam so that a husband hospitalized for kidney stones could join his wife’s 80th birthday party virtually. Both the hospital and the site of the 250-guest celebration (a local bar) had wireless, so the guests dropped by the camera to send good wishes to the husband.

InterSystems Iberia wins a prize for the best technology effort for developing healthcare solutions in Spain.

Healthcare portal vendor MEDSEEK acquires Visibility Factor, whose technology it will use for search engine optimization projects.

Dubai News
By Ms. Adventure

Since there seems to be so much interest in what is happening over in Dubai, I thought I would let everyone know what the latest news is and the effects of the economic crisis in this country.

Many construction projects have been put on hold indefinitely. Yes, that includes many of the new hospital construction projects. In the Dubai Healthcare City, the University Hospital construction has been halted for a period of 18 months ( it might as well be indefinitely). With the halting of construction, 60 clinical planning and non-clinical projects employees were laid off, and only six were retained for management purposes (C-suite).

The new Epic Systems contract is also under investigation, as there are charges of corruption in the management and acquisition of University Hospital HIS system.

In other areas of the Healthcare City, over 100 people were laid off. In Dubai overall, 1,500 people per day are cancelling their visas and returning to their home country. As they are leaving, they are also leaving their debt behind.

So who is left in Dubai and where is all the excitement? Looks like Cerner is going strong, working on their project for the Ministry of Health (14 hospitals and 60 clinics) named Wareed. I had the pleasure of meeting a few of the project consultants demonstrating applications in the MOH booth at Arab Health ( I was shocked that Cerner actually had quality and seasoned people working on the project — looks like many of them came over from the States to live in Dubai). You could see that the relationship with MOH and Cerner is very good and that Love was in the air. I caught glimpses of the Cerner executives interacting with the UAE Minister of Health as he introduced them very happily to other Ministers of Health in the region (couldn’t hear which countries they were from).

I have been in this region over 10 years and sadly I will be returning home soon. I must say that in one short year things have changed so much, from a thriving and booming town to a town that may not have a tomorrow.

More About CCHIT

People still insist on posting absolute drivel about CCHIT for some reason, some of it so clearly wrong that I’ve heard that HIMSS has loosed its lawyers to ask (some have called it "threaten") bloggers to remove some of the more hysterical comments posted by the same, anonymous person (and often duplicated word for word on multiple sites). You know you need a twit filter when a major investigative point of contention is that Mark Leavitt and Mike Leavitt share the same last name even though they are not related.

For all the time the conspiracy theorists have spent writing up their imaginative speculation, you would think that maybe they could have done a little bit of research. The question about CCHIT’s incorporation status has been endlessly pontificated upon, with relevance unclear (Would be it be a travesty if they weren’t actually incorporated? Does anyone really lose sleep wondering in which state it’s incorporated)?

Well, all the Internet nimrods had to do was look. Within 60 seconds (literally) of deciding I’d look for myself, I had both CCHIT’s corporate records and their federal tax filings (from October) in front of me, maybe another indication that these aren’t exactly geniuses out there riding the comments trail.

I figured CCHIT was, like many organizations, probably incorporated in Delaware. Looked it up online, bingo. Incorporated as an LLC in 2004, reincorporated as a non-profit C-corporation in 2006. I e-mailed Sue Reber at CCHIT and she confirmed that the Illinois incorporation was accidentally allowed to lapse, which is why those records show "involuntary dissolution." OK, is everybody happy that they’re really incorporated? The only question I couldn’t answer is why they filed for domestic residency, which according to the Delaware department of state, means "this entity is domiciled in Delaware." I’m sure they have a registered agent in Delaware, so that may be adequate to claim that category. I find it hard to get excited about it one way or another. They’re legal, not a big shocker since they get government contracts and Uncle tends to check those things (unlike when paying Medicare claims).

On with the tax records. CCHIT’s address on the tax form is 200 S. Wacker Drive, Chicago, IL 60606. That’s a 41-story building that includes CCHIT’s Suite 3100, which is actually a Regus/HQ Business Center that will rent you a "virtual office" for $225 per month or a mail box for $80 per month. In other words, I could share a suite with CCHIT if wanted (along with about a zillion companies that use same suite number). I wouldn’t plan a field trip during the HIMSS conference since I’m pretty sure there won’t be any certification activities happening there, just some people sorting mail into roomful of boxes. It is a cool building, though — I bet I would get some good HIStalk writing inspiration there.

Anyway, here’s the money story: CCHIT took in $4.7 million in FY2007, spent $3.6 million of that, and banked $1.1 million, bringing its fund balance up to $2.7 million and total assets of $3.4 million (they’re running some pretty heavy AR at $750K, so someone’s not paying their bills on time).

Of the $4.7 million in income, $2 million was from certification fees, $2.7 million was from government contracts. CCHIT got an HHS contract in 2005 to develop and a certification program, which it says is "transitional" and will be followed by a self-sustaining model (all the more reason to bank some of its income). That’s dead on with earlier announcements that pegged the HHS award at $7.5 million over three years, plus a $1.4 million extension that runs through April 2009, so it would appear that CCHIT’s only income will very soon be from certification, which means it will need to do some cost-cutting (current spend $3.6 million, current income $2 million).

CCHIT’s biggest expense by far was for consulting – $1.9 million. There are some mildly interesting expenses there:

• ISIS Health Informatics Resource Group was paid $243K. That’s a Canadian company owned by Guy Paterson, who was previously CCHIT’s director of certification development according to his LinkedIn profile (although it also lists him as currently employed by CCHIT, so it’s not entirely clear). According to CCHIT meeting minutes, he left in July 2007. Perhaps he’s contracting back to CCHIT at a handsome rate.
• Public Communications, Inc. received $184K. That’s a Chicago PR company that also has HIMSS among its clients.
• Soloman Appavu was paid $166K. A Google search shows him as a former Stroger Hospital and Cook County employee who served on CCHIT’s security and reliability work group. He has also listed in his biography as being President of Center for Healthcare Automation Ltd. whose address appears to be a residence (he lists that employment for a HITSP article planned for a June printing by HIMSS) and whose Illinois corporation has been dissolved. He is listed on CCHIT documents as "staff."
• Reber Marketing got $157K. I assume that’s my contact Sue Reber, who is CCHIT’s marketing director.
• Merril Prager was paid $152K. Her LinkedIn profile shows her as an independent consultant specializing in helping organizations turn around their financial performance. She is listed on CCHIT documents as "staff." Her name is on the tax form as the contact for financial records.

Salaries totalled $356K for officers, $382K for staff. CCHIT reported having four employees. The highest paid non-officer made $110K with benefits, but that doesn’t count those folks above, I assume, since they are paid as contractors. Alisa Ray, executive director, made $192K.

CCHIT reported $866K transferred to AHIMA in a category that includes sharing of equipment, facilities, or employees. HIMSS received $196K for a category that includes performance of membership services.

The tax records indicate that CCHIT chair Mark Leavitt is still a HIMSS employee, "on leave from his position as HIMSS’ Chief Medical Officer while serving as Chair of CCHIT. CCHIT pays HIMSS an hourly rate for Dr. Leavitt’s services that is intended to cover the portion of his salary and benefits allocable to those hours." That’s at odds with both his CCHIT bio and his LinkedIn write-up, which say he’s finished with HIMSS and working full-time for CCHIT (he put on LinkedIn that he left HIMSS in September 2005). I don’t know which is correct, but he is shown as being paid $164K for 40 hours a week at CCHIT and I would bet he’s making more than that.

I’m not finding any smoking guns here. Everything looks entirely above-board, although Mark Leavitt’s employment status probably should be clarified by CCHIT.

E-mail me.

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From The Watchman: “Re: rumblings from Verona. I’m hearing that there’s a 10% Epic downsizing going on. Can this be validated?” That doesn’t sound likely, but someone will probably chime in one way or another.

From Lemmy: “Re: announcement from Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates, Boston. ‘I regret to inform you that Kash Basavappa, Chief Information Officer, has resigned from Atrius Health effective March 18 to pursue other career opportunities.’”

Ardent Health Services announces that it has saved $2 million (TN) using the eScription computer-aided medical transcription system.

World Health Organization designates Regenstrief Institute as the first WHO Collaborating Center for Medical Informatics. Paul Biondich, MD from Indiana University School of Medicine has been named director; he co-founded the OpenMRS EMR for resource-constrained environments (aren’t they all these days?) 

Albert Einstein (PA) signs up for Cerner Millennium.

McKesson announces its Achieve IT Web site and telephone center for doctors interested in HITECH.

Here’s what piles of stimulus money does: the non-profit Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative creates a for-profit subsidiary to bid on commercial EMR work. As far as I’m concerned, they should now be treated like any other for-profit vendor, with justified suspicion about credibility and lack of bias when they start trotting out educational programs and studies. Too bad. Even HIMSS couldn’t pull that off with HIMSS Analytics.

E-mail me.

HERtalk by Inga From Famous Johnny: “Re: HIMSS. Just wanted mention how sorry I am we shall again not meet at HIMSS, you being undercover and all. However, I, being the public kind of guy I apparently am, will be the one nursing an obvious hangover. Folks I know in this world have recently postulated that with HIMSS budgets being skinny, a few notable no-shows, and these governmental (we hope) tailwinds combined with economic headwinds, this year may be more substantive than most. I guess we’ll see.” That is actually a great point. If you are a real buyer, you are going to find it in the budget to attend HIMSS. If you are a vendor, perhaps you will see fewer tire kickers and those (like me) just stopping by for free trinkets.

 From Oakie: “Re: HIMSS Webinar. Just wondering if the word from the Webinar today was focused only on EMR/EHRs? Or is some of this $$$$ able to be used for other HIT like eRx, registries, portals, document management, etc. We deal with a LOT of small practices who aren’t always so gung ho about EMR, even eRx for that matter. Just wondering what help they can expect, if any.” I sat through most of the HIMSS Webinar Wednesday that gave an overview of the economic stimulus act and its HIT components. No specific mention (that I recall) about funding for eRX, etc. One requirement for receiving government reimbursement is that a provider use the EHR in a “meaningful” way, which includes eRX, information exchange, and reporting on quality measures. My guess is that a purchase of document management only, for example, would not qualify. However, if someone interprets this differently, please share your thoughts. Here is a link to the HIMSS presentation, if you are interested.

This may very well be the year that I come home from HIMSS with a new Vespa scooter. Despite the recession, tight budgets, and HIStalk criticism of the ludicrous and crass commercialism of such a move, Health Data Management and three co-sponsors are giving away four of these cool rides for dropping by booths. One sponsor is athenahealth, surprising given its anti-boat show stance.

Speaking of HIMSS, we hear that consulting firm Quammen Group is the latest vendor to cancel.

Mercy Medical Center (IA) implements a hiring freeze, as well as a salary freeze for its managers, directors, and senior managers. In addition to the general economic decline, Mercy is still recovering from the floods last June, which forced the hospital to be evacuated and created $66.3 million in property damage.

Another troubled hospital is River West Hospital (LA), which cuts its FTE count in half to around 100. The cuts couldn’t have been too much of a surprise given that the paychecks of 60 employees bounced last month. It’s another hurricane-related problem.

German eHealth service provider CompuGroup, spurned in 2007 for iSoft but looking for acquisitions since, completes a “substantial” equity investment into Noteworthy Medical Systems.

A transcription company lapse is blamed when patient records from Northeast Orthopaedics (NY), including full dictations and patient data, are found to be openly accessible on the Internet.

I’m always amazed by the number of niche solutions in HIT. Case in point: a company named ACEOS announces that the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center has successfully implemented a wound documentation system called WoundMatrix. Who knew such programs existed?

Pee Dee Cardiology, a 16-provider group in SC, selects Allscripts’ EHR and PM to replace its Misys system originally purchased in 1987.

Sentillion signs 30 new customers in 2008, representing over 500,000 new licenses for its SSO product.

The 25-bed Marcus Daly Memorial Hospital (MT) installs HospitalPortal.NET’s Intranet solution.

Allen Technologies, an interactive patient communication systems provider, adopts the Avance high-availability software from Stratus Technologies.

Frimley Park Hospital NHS Foundation Trust selects Picis CareSuite integrated software.

DR Systems announces $1.53 million in sales for four new Unity RIS/PACS solutions.

Satilla Regional Medical Center (GA) enters into an agreement with Perceptive Software to deploy ImageNow enterprise document management, imaging, and workflow software.

E-mail Inga.

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Submit your article of up to 500 words in length, subject to editing for clarity and brevity. I’ll use a phony name for you unless you tell me otherwise. Thanks for sharing!

The Real Problem with CCHIT Certification
By Dewey Howell MD, PhD, Founder, CEO
Design Clinicals, Inc.

I have been reading discussions on the HIT provisions in the new stimulus bill that was signed this week by President Obama. One discussion that caught my attention relates to what it means to be a “certified” product. Throughout the bill, it states that funds are to encourage adoption of “certified” products. While it is not yet completely clear what this means, most folks are assuming it will mean certified by CCHIT.

Thus the debate begins. One camp argues that CCHIT is the only way to go, like the quote from the recent interview with Glen Tullman here on HIStalk: “Every physician who buys ought to be buying a CCHIT system.” The other camp counters that CCHIT hinders innovation. Their argument says that new companies doing innovative work and producing focused products that move the industry forward can’t get certification because of the time and resources required.

While I agree with this to a point (heck, I am the CEO of one of these new companies), it doesn’t get to the real problem with CCHIT certification. Even if I am sitting on a pile of money and have time and people to invest in the certification, I can’t get my products certified. This is because of CCHIT’s definitions and how certification is structured.

Our company’s products are used in ambulatory, inpatient, and emergency settings. Which certification do I choose? The real value of our products and those made by other small innovative companies is our focus on solving specific clinician problems. To be certified, though, the product must manage everything — patient demographics, meds, allergies, labs, order sets, decision support, etc.

If you have the best decision support product on the market, even if it easily integrates with any vendor system and adheres to strict integration and security requirements, it can’t be CCHIT certified. Period. Yet customers of the “certified” systems are still calling and looking for solutions to real problems.

This could stir up the old “integrated system” vs. best-of-breed approach. That debate aside, why not certify based on real hospital problems?

Carve out the enormous set of criteria for inpatient or ambulatory certification and create focused, results-driven certification criteria. Medication reconciliation, decision support, anticoagulation therapy, core measures, patient bed tracking, medication barcode administration, security auditing, medication ordering, order sets, etc. could all have their own certifications while keeping an umbrella certification process for systems that aim to do it all.

This would allow organizations with specific challenges to say, “We need to implement physician order sets because this is an area of risk for us. What are my options for certified products for this?” This focused problem would have a focused validated solution, rather than a certified system that does a plethora of things the organization doesn’t need. How could a hospital pick a certified pharmacy system? A certified nursing documentation system? A certified radiology or lab system? A certification process for these products doesn’t even exist.

Another deficiency of the current certification process is the lack of requirement for certification of results or outcomes. How do we certify and validate that the system actually delivers the outcomes that we are trying to achieve? The current process encourages vendors to throw a button or screen into their application that produces a specific action or display. But, there is no accountability to the patient and quality of care delivered with the tool. It encourages technology for technology’s sake, presuming that outcomes will be “better” just because a product is certified, instead of really validating results. Maybe this is a much tougher nut to crack, but it is considerably more important than things like, “The system shall provide the ability to allow users to search for order sets by name.”

Don’t get me wrong. Requiring certification on elements that promote access to data, usability, and clinician efficiency is a great thing because it improves patient safety, but vendors like me also need to be held accountable for delivering measurable results. This is the only way HIT will deliver on the promise of improving the quality of health care in this country.

Developing the Perfect HIT Conference
By Kurt Loincloth

You mentioned that HIStalk should put together an alternative conference (Un-Conference) that would be fun, less commercialized, and more educational and rewarding to attendees. Here is my thought on "The Open Health Care Conference."

• Make sessions 45 minutes long, featuring a four-person panel discussing the thorniest issues
• If there’s an exhibit hall, allow only working systems that can actually do something in an interconnected world
• Make the conference affordable
• Make it more modern and more relative to the younger generation

The panel sessions would have a five-minute moderator overview of context and problem – no biographies! Two panelists would be well-known thought leaders, but the other two would be more knowledgeable, lesser known, and more controversial. Each speaks for five minutes, then the rest of the time is audience Q&A.

Vendor demonstrations are not allowed to be done by marketing or sales people. No presentations. Only vendors who can interoperate with the rest of the world are allowed — no standalone products, Flash demos, or anything else that’s not working live (like the IHE area of HIMSS, which are the coolest part of the conference). If you have booths, offer only three sizes, draw randomly for location, and the size booth you get is determined by the number of solutions being demonstrated.

Charge enough to just cover costs. Offer free or cheap Webcasts of all sessions. All speaker materials must be made available at least one day before the session – no exceptions! Keep it compact, 2 or 2.5 days, with an optional field trip on the last day. Hold it in a central town that’s easy and cheap to get to (a Southwest hub), which also keeps the hotel and restaurant costs down.

Pick the topics and find the best people to do them instead of trolling for sponsored gigs. Do not pick your topics 15 months in advance — submissions are due back in 90 days and decisions made within 60 days of the conference. Offer live Webcasts. Field trips to get out of the hall! No sterile, boring locations like the Orlando mega-plex.

Small and medium-size vendors who are doing really good things will use the platform and run with it.

Challenge the HIStalk audience to develop the perfect conference with this planted seed and see what happens.

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The Stimulus Bill has been signed. The $19B healthcare IT portion is now official.

There will be Webinars, briefings, conference sessions, and blog postings galore as the industry tries to get its hands around the legislation and the challenges and opportunities that it presents. And it is appropriate that a whole lot of learning go on over the next several weeks.

As we all head up the steep part of the learning curve and enter a period of hype, anxiety, salivation, and confusion, we should be collectively thoughtful about several things.

First, it will take weeks and months before several important sections of the legislation are clear. It is not clear how states can apply for grants. The specific meaning of "meaningful use" is not clear. It will take the government some time to develop the regulations, policies, and procedures needed to fully answer the question, “What do I need to do?” Even after you’ve listed to ten Webinars, there will be holes in your understanding.

Should you wait for all to be made clear? No – you could lose valuable time. Some things are clear, e.g., e-prescribing is important and outpatient EHR implementations could be accelerated. Should you plow ahead full speed? No – some things are not clear enough, e.g., if I didn’t have a regional HIE, I wouldn’t try to start one tomorrow.

It will take some thought to figure out initiatives that should be pursued now and initiatives that would benefit from waiting a little bit.

Second, despite the near-term availability of funds, the factors critical to the success of an electronic health record implementation have not changed. Processes must be thoughtfully re-engineered. Clinicians must be meaningfully engaged. Giving these factors short shrift in a stampede to get money is not smart and could leave the organization with an EHR that has been funded by the government but has fundamentally failed since care improvement has not happened and the clinicians are angry.

Third, these funds, while large, are not infinite. At some point, monies for initiatives such as health information exchanges and research will probably go away. The country cannot afford a never-ending stimulus. Pursuing stimulus funds will require that those pursuing think through how they might sustain the activity once the stimulus bolus runs dry. Cheap/free capital can become an expensive operating budget.

The stimulus funds were meant to be spent. It is smart to pursue the funds. However it is not smart to be seduced by the prospect of buckets of money to the point that we forget that we have to balance moving forward with waiting. The fundamentals of care improvement through EHRs have not changed and capital investments bring operating budget hangovers.

John Glaser is vice president and CIO at Partners HealthCare System. He describes himself as an "irregular regular contributor" to HIStalk.

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