Comments on: News 5/8/09

By: BackItUp

BackItUp — Sat, 09 May 2009 14:35:36 +0000

Inga – not only hardware failure, but think burglary, fire, flooding, etc. Lots of ways to lose your data! And with more & more personal data being stored electronically (receipts, pictures, address books, etc), the loss potential is much greater now.

I finally signed up for an online backup service last year. I selected iDrive, but there’s a host of other services like Mozy, Carbonite, etc. It gives me great piece of mind — I have a personal encryption key (so the data is encrypted before it leaves my PC) and it backs up my files nightly. I used to be nervous about using an online backup, but I’ve finally decided that the peace of mind of having an offsite, current backup outweighs the risk that my personal, encrypted data will be breached.

(disclaimer: I don’t have any vested interest in these services – just a satisfied customer!)

By: interested

interested — Fri, 08 May 2009 20:43:42 +0000

Interested in more details regarding the post from Revenue Randy about Stnaford Medical. We here on the West coast are always ready to here what’s going on with that Epic client!

By: Grizzled Veteran

Grizzled Veteran — Fri, 08 May 2009 17:22:01 +0000

The Allscripts-Cardinal arrangement sounds like an eClinicalworks- Sam’s “me too” deal. The difference is these lead swap things never work. The Cardinal guy won’t know enough to talk about EMR and he will be concerned if he looks stupid trying or if the Allscripts guy makes a bad impression then Cardinal risks losing their core business—why take a chance?

By: Needs_Gas

Needs_Gas — Fri, 08 May 2009 14:59:45 +0000

Re: GE/Intermountain partnership. Interesting announcement. The partnership has been in place since 2005-2006. Why this announcement now? Also unless something has changed that I dont know about, the ‘pilot’ program at American Fork Hospital has the program running on IHC’s HELP system in the back end. So for $300M and 3+ years all IHC has is a new UI.

By: MSCFan

MSCFan — Fri, 08 May 2009 14:36:34 +0000

Re: Medsphere and the cost of open source

(Setting aside the press release fatigue…)

The actual point in yesterday’s report was the contention that open source software costs _more_ than other models. The comment was made by a high level government official 5 months into the project.

Given the general nature of the comment and their reference to interfacing, I can only assume that the comment is about the cost of interfacing in general. This is actually an advantage of open source — proprietary vendors charge for every interface, open source systems grow a library of interfaces that are available to the community at no cost.

The advantages in the areas of cost and ROI of open source systems have been reinforced by a recent study conducted three years after go-live at Midland Memorial. The total project cost was one third the cost of the replacement system from their existing vendor. The study also showed some compelling clinical results associating the EHR implementation with a decrease in hospital acquired infections (ventilator associated pneumonia and central line infections), among several other safety and quality measures. The assessment section begins on page 21 of this case study [1].

Not only does the data support the assertion that the OpenVista system proved a cost benefit, but it also shows significant ROI from a clinical perspective.

[1] http://tinyurl.com/dfdogu (PDF)