Andy Eckert has stepped down from his role as President and CEO of Eclipsys and will leave the company, Eclipsys announced this morning. He has been replaced by Philip M. Pead, an Eclipsys director and former chairman, president, and CEO of Per-Se.

According to the announcement, Eckert "has decided to leave the company after accomplishing a number of important operational goals." A quote from Eckert also cited his family ties in California as a reason for his departure.

Pead joined the Eclipsys board on February 17 of this year.

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From Louis Crabb: “Re: acronyms. This site is useful.” Link. It sure is. I tried some fairly obscure healthcare IT acronyms and they were all there. Some cool tools are bundled with the search, too. Industry noobs should look there for starters when facing an unfamiliar acronym. Good find.

From Dean Sittig: “Re: tagging articles by vendor. Why not just have them use the Google site search option, or go to Google and enter: topic site:histalk2.com. I’m a big fan of search, not a big fan of human-curated site indexes. That is what killed Yahoo.” I agree, but I’m not quite sure why Google doesn’t seem to index everything on the site. It also doesn’t separate interesting stuff from trivial mentions. I suppose it would be like indexing the newspaper – technically correct, but still only somewhat useful in trying to locate useful content.

From The PACS Designer: “Re: CCR. Since the Continuity of Care Record (CCR) created by the ASTM International E31 Healthcare Informatics Committee has been out for awhile, it was great to read that Microsoft has incorporated the CCR into their Amalga Unified Intelligence System offering. TPD was a member of the E31.28 Technical Subcommittee for Electronic Health Records that created the CCR document for caregivers and patients.” Link.

From Stifler’s Mom: “Re: Wal-Mart. I thought you’d appreciate this article about a reluctant Wal-Mart clinic visit.” Link. It’s a fun story by an admitted anti-Wal-Mart bigot who left its contracted retail clinic impressed. “As I head out into the brightly lit parking lot, I realize that this has been the easiest, most gratifying (and sociologically fascinating) trip to the doctor I’ve ever experienced. I realize that when it comes down to it—it being my thin wallet, of course, and, well, my health—there is really no way of getting around the truth. Wal-Mart did not save my life. But damn if it didn’t give me what every hard-working American deserves. And damn if I didn’t feel, dare I even say it, lucky.”

Pretty good Q3 numbers for Mediware: revenue up 4%, EPS $0.06 vs. $0.04, which the company attributes to its Hann’s On acquisition and its partnership with IntraNexus.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor e-MDs of Austin, TX. They’re new to HIStalk, but are also a Platinum Sponsor of HIStalk Practice, which we appreciate. They have the coolest-looking Web site I’ve seen, which includes an EHR Discussions blog with a lot of ARRA information. Here’s Dr. Eric Fishman’s interview with founder David Winn, MD, FAAP, who says he wrote his initial product in Paradox and PAL (we old-timers know about that). Thanks to e-MDs for supporting HIStalk.

Four hospitals and 15 clinics in UAE are live on Cerner Millennium.

In Australia, the New South Wales Department of Health announces a $74 million statewide health information exchange.

This is a good interview (in six parts) with Omnicell CEO Randy Lipps. Talking about his experience with his hospitalized child: “I was looking at a nurse who was highly paid and highly trained, and it seemed like 75% of her work was what a clerk would do. Because my daughter was on a ventilator there were a lot of disposables. My daughter had dedicated nurses, and I saw the entire cycle. When the next nurse came in she would start fumbling around the drawers, looking for stuff. I would tell her where the previous nurse had stored her stuff. The each had their own secret stash of supplies because the supply chain within the walls of the hospital was so broken. They all had their own system to make sure they had the materials they needed for their jobs.” And speaking of competitor Pyxis: “Pyxis was a Street darling before they were acquired by our big competitor. They are a division of Cardinal now. They are a great company and I wanted to mimic them so much. When they got taken over by a large company, they stopped investing in R&D, and they stopped investing in customer service. In healthcare, especially with hospitals, it is not about selling product but creating a partnership.”

OK, so the big healthcare lobbying groups offered to cut healthcare costs. Sort of. Or, maybe cut the rate of rise a little (like me saying I’ll take less of an annual increase if you’ll let me keep goofing off as an employee). They agreed to everything, but nothing. They offered self-serving reform to make sure real reform doesn’t flare up. Remember Medicare Part D, the drug company windfall profit assurance act, that was pushed through by Congressman Billy Tauzin, who immediately quit to become the president of PhRMA, the drug company lobbying group that benefitted most from his political maneuvering? Those reform-minded folks are at the table, of course, with newfound heartfelt concerns about Joe Sixpack. There’s a long history of scumbaggery by some of those groups and the politicians who take their money. Want real reform? Impose it without their involvement. If they offered $2 trillion, $20 trillion should be about right for starters.

Massachusetts tried and failed to curb medically unnecessary ED visits, apparently, as the 47% rate of inappropriate utilization hasn’t changed, but costs have spiked 17% over two years.

Don’t forget that you can see recent comments on this page I created.

Jobs: Cerner CPOE Activation Support, IMPAC Mosaiq Consultant, SVP of Sales.

Michael William Freeman, son of Medicity RVP of sales Bill Freeman, has a role as Morgan Gutherie in the season finale of The Mentalist. Check him out next Tuesday at 9 Eastern.

McKesson is interested in acquiring more medical device companies from Israel, saying that country has companies that excel at linking medical devices with information technology.

A Cerner software guy invents Web Bootstrapper, a technology used in Cerner’s PHR that tailors a Web site’s display based on the speed of the device connecting to it, such as smart phones.

McKesson’s practice management people are staying in Dubuque, the GM says, now that the company’s office has moved to a technology park after leaving downtown Dubuque and laying employees off.

Famous neurosurgeon Ben Carson of Johns Hopkins (mentioned by Hopkins CIO Stephanie Reel when I interviewed her and holder of an amazing 50 honorary doctorates) is on the board of Physician Capital Group, started by a friend of his. Doctors input their fee-based activities into a BlackBerry or iPhone and the company pays immediately, but takes 12% as a commission while it waits on its own check from the insurance company.

Open source software is touted as a good solution at the first Philippine eHealth and Telemedicine conference. I tracked down the company of one speaker, myCare2x, an Germany-based open source system (PHP, Apache, MySQL) that has a fully online live demo.

Nuance Communications files its Q2 report: revenue up 13%, EPS $0.03 vs. -$0.13 (and $0.24 not counting asset amortization).

You knew it was coming: the husband of the first US resident to die of H1N1 is suing pork producer Smithfield Foods, whose Mexican farm is where “some believe” is where the virus originated.

E-mail me.

HERtalk by Inga

Johns Hopkins Hospital is the latest medical facility to warn patients of potential data theft. The hospital sent a letter (warning: PDF) dated April 4 to the Maryland attorney general’s office alerting them that a former employee was suspected of fraud involving fake Virginia drivers’ licenses. The hospital first learned of potential problems on January 20 and notified 10,000 patients of their suspicions April 3.

Kathleen Sebelius names nine staffers to the Office of Health Reform. This is the office tasked with spearheading HHS’s efforts to pass health reform this year. A quick glance at the list suggests the staffers are mostly political appointees (former Obama campaign staffers and the like) along with one doctor.

Our HIStalk Hero of the Week is Medicity, which donated $5,600 worth of IKEA furniture to help Ronald McDonald House Charities furnish a new wing at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. The sofa and assorted tables and chairs were originally acquired and used to furnish Medicity’s booth at HIMSS.

Even in a recession, vanity prevails. The number one surgical procedure nationwide last year was breast augmentation and the top non-surgical procedure was Botox injections. Over 355,000 breast augmentations were performed in 2008 at an average cost of $3,900. That’s a lot of implants.

Shareholders of HealthSouth file a civil lawsuit against founder Richard Scrushy, asking him to pay $2.6 billion for his alleged role in a HealthSouth fraud scheme. Shareholders are asking Scrushy to repay salary, bonuses, and stock deals, as well as personal plane flights and breast implants for a singer he was promoting. Regardless of how the suit is settled, it’s unlikely Scrushy still has much money of his own. He’s in prison on a state bribery charge.

Merge Healthcare aligns with Shanghaie Kingstar Winning Co, a Chinese healthcare IT company serving over 800 hospitals. The arrangement allows Kingstar to offer its clients Merge’s document imaging solutions.

UNC Hospitals (NC) select MediClick to provide its Contracts & Analysis solution to manage supply contracts and purchased services agreements.

The LA Times releases an interview with Farrah Fawcett, which includes plenty of criticism for UCLA Medical Center’s failure to protect her privacy. When details of her cancer appeared in the National Enquirer, Fawcett was convinced the leaks originated from UCLA. She and her doctor eventually set up a sting operation, which led to an investigation by UCLA officials, who tracked the leaks to one particular employee. At the same time, UCLA repeatedly asked Fawcett to donate money to the hospital for a foundation to be set up in her name.

AMICAS posts $11.3 million in revenues for the first quarter, compared to $12.8 million the first quarter of 2008. Net loss for the quarter was $1.2 million, or $(.03) per share, compared to last year’s loss of $467,000 ($.01) per share.

An English plumber visits his GP’s office after experiencing tremendous pain and bleeding from his belly button. The GP removes a 4 cm fetus, which was determined to be his parasitic twin – an identical twin brother that had died in their mother’s womb. Here’s the really icky part. The plumber had his brother’s fetus placed into a jar and took him home.

E-mail Inga.

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Thanks for participating in my reader survey. Here are some high points that I took from it.

• A little less than half of readers have ever posted a comment to an article. (Try it! Everybody has something to say or share.)
• The most important elements of HIStalk are news (4.61 on a 5.0 scale), rumors (4.44), humor (4.31), and Inga (4.30).
• 95% of readers say HIStalk influences their perception of products and companies.
• 77% of readers say they have a higher interest in companies mentioned in HIStalk.
• 79% of readers say HIStalk helped them perform their job better in the past year.
• 99% say HIStalk has influence on the industry.
• 92% said the HIStalk’s posting frequency is “about right”.

Here are some specific comments and suggestions I pulled out as representative of what readers provided. The most common comment was “don’t change a thing,” which I appreciate as well. Your feedback on any of these is welcome.

• It’s more important about NOT changing your basic tenets: provide an accurate, concise summary of what’s happening in the industry, sorting out the rumor mill facts, letting us hear from interesting people in the industry and the new ideas and people in the industry. You are the only one providing this unbiased service and I really appreciate it. Thank you.
• The site is pretty ugly and difficult to read. Us vendor folks could mentor you in design if you ever asked I know, but I like it amateurish because, well, I’m an amateur. I admit to having zero aesthetic ability.
• Too many Flash ads. Several readers mentioned that the animated ads are distracting. The immediate solution was to offer the View/Print Text Only link at the bottom of every article that shows only the article itself. I will also pass the suggestion of static-only ads along to the sponsors, although it’s their call.
• More writing about smaller companies. I would love to, but it’s hard to separate the PR from reality sometimes. I’ve been burned before about what I hoped would be an honest appraisal of a technology or company only to have the marketing people swoop in to spin the facts.
• Don’t run unsubstantiated rumors. I like the dichotomy that a few readers made the same comment, yet rumors are the second most popular feature. I try to get confirmation and often do, but not always. I don’t run all the rumors I get, so I have to walk a line between what sounds likely but with the understanding that sometimes the rumor is wrong. The good thing is that if it really is wrong, someone in the know will usually correct me quickly and I always run those corrections.
• I would like to change HIStalk discussion forum. I’d like to see it used more, but I’ve learned to live with the fact that HIStalk readers just don’t like posting to a discussion board. They are doing better in posting article comments, though.
• HIStalk is Mr. HIStalk’s unique thing; don’t change anything because I trust Mr. HIStalk’s judgment. Thank you.
• Paragraph headings with vendor/site/technology/main-topic keyword, to allow skimming. That’s really hard since we cover a lot of ground in one posting (that would be a ton of headlines). Other readers suggested some kind of online compendium of items grouped by vendor, provider, or product, which would be pretty cool but a big of a pain to maintain. Thoughts? I’m sure I could find some cheap labor to pick through each HIStalk post, cull out items by company or person, and then add them to a specific page for that company or person. Would anyone find this useful enough to be worth the expense?
• Have scheduled online chats. I’ve tried those and participation wasn’t very good. I’m not sure people like chats in general, plus their synchronous nature requires being in front of a PC at a specific time.
• Don’t let your "interviews" be PR spots for their products or companies. I try, but it’s sometimes hard to derail the subject from their agenda.
• Do a podcast version, e.g., interviews with actual HIS users with experiences to share. I’m not a fan of podcasts, but I’m looking at recorded Webinars as a good alternative. Stay tuned.
• Make it your full time job as it should be netting you around $2 million a year by my estimates if you were charging what it is worth. This would allow you to do a better job building your portfolio by extending your brand. Of course you would have to ‘out’ yourself which won’t be a bad thing. OK, I admit I included this reader’s comment here just because it flatters me.
• This is a hard question because you do such an incredible job. The only change I can think of to more strongly encourage people to do reporting ("it takes a village to make a great blog even greater"), especially from conferences that everyone does not have time to attend, and coach people on how to develop pithy content vs. vague comments, "here’s three things I hadn’t heard before" vs. "the conference was ok, but fewer vendors were there.” That would be great, although I’m always wary (from experience) of assuming that good readers will happily transition into good writers. I respect the fact that some folks just want to read and leave, but having a few more readers who are more involved would be super.
• If you comment on someone else’s dialogue, make your comments a different color, or make there’s different all of the time so it is easy to tell who is "speaking." Man, I have struggled with this one. I post reader comments in blue, but that still leaves quotes from articles. I’m open to ideas.
• I would look for success stories in healthcare delivery (the real stuff, you know, when a doc/nurse and a patient interact, and that interaction is enhanced by technology); we all need to see them and remind ourselves why we do what we do. That would be great. I wish I got more of those stories.
• Resolve the HIStalk-HIStalk Practice weirdness. They seem to repeat some information, and they don’t apparently link to one another. HIStalk covers everything, while HIStalk Practice covers physician practice technology. Sometimes the same item appears in both, but only when it’s appropriate. The idea was that HIStalk Practice would cultivate a new audience interested in ambulatory topics and not the more hospital-centric topics that appear on HIStalk. We interviewed individual doctors about their EMRs, for example, for HIStalk Practice, something we probably wouldn’t have run in HIStalk. While some readers follow both, we expect each to have a majority of readers who don’t look at the other. It will take some time to figure out if that’s indeed the case.
• Give yourself a break–you must work enormous hours. I do. I need to quit my day job one of these days, but I would need to find something that would offset the income I would lose using the time I would gain. And, some activity that would keep me in the industry since there are plenty of bystander writers out there, but not as many participant ones.
• Might be interesting to profile healthcare providers and hospitals more to get a feel for what’s happening out where systems are used. You’ve done it occasionally, but most of your interviews and profiles are from vendors. That would be great, assuming provider people would participate. We will try to get more of those.
• Do more for job placement or available positions. Maybe by region? I’ll consider that.
• Still don’t understand the difference between Inga’s section and Mr. HIStalk, except for the footwear comments. It’s only to let you know who is writing, especially if we express an opinion. Inga often writes first, so if she covers an item, it goes in her section. Since we’re kind of chatty and personal, there would be “weirdness” (to use the reader’s word above) if you didn’t know who was “talking”.
• I use IE6 w/ virtually no security, but I still never see any "…on your right" columns/content. Vendor ads are on the left, your editorial paragraphs are in the middle, blank space on the right. How about a "setup your browser for this site" FAQ link? I’m always the last to know about IE problems because I don’t use it. Readers e-mail fairly often saying that something is wrong with HIStalk’s layout, ads, or signup forms. Invariably they are using IE. If someone readers HIStalk on IE6 or 7 and everything works like it does in Firefox, let me know what settings you’re using (screen shots?) and I’ll pass it on.
• HIStalk is a fantastic contribution to the industry – someone should write a "good guy" story about you! Please keep it coming!! That one was me preening again. I’d rather be anonymous, though. As the very few people who have known me for years as Mr. HIStalk will attest, I’m uncomfortable talking about it.
• Having Deb Peel pose as Inga in Chicago was a scream. I agree. She was fun, as were our other sash-wearers.
• You’re a game-changer… many people I know don’t pick up the trade rags anymore. Thank you. I haven’t read any of the glossies for years, so it isn’t just me.
• Because I am new to this site and HIT but interested in learning as I go (you are my tutorial) I would love a decode area where I can find out exactly what acronyms like CCHIT and HIMSS stand for, etc. I figure I can start with a glossary and then take it from there. It would help me if users would provide some of the definitions.
• Since I am new to healthcare (vendor side), HIStalk has been VERY instrumental in helping me learn both sides of the industry and issues. I would like an occasional "101 learning piece" for the newbies- maybe in the form of a subject and the Seasoned folks can comment. "What I wish I knew when I was new…" or something like that. HIStalk has been like being the new kid in school but the cool kids still let you hang out with them. Thanks SO much! Best of luck! That’s a fun idea. If I could ever get people to read and post to a discussion form, that would be a perfect vehicle. Maybe I need a redesigned forum, although you wouldn’t believe how hard it is to keep spammers out.
• Do you have a day job (I assume the answer is yes), a family, hobbies? Yes, yes, and yes. Well, OK, I really don’t have any hobbies other than HIStalk.
• Thank you for including peer-review journal articles in your analysis and not limiting your reporting to just the commercial press. Happy to do it. If you see something interesting that I can get full text for, I’m happy to critique it.
• You can get started on vendor-independent Webinars – specifically to cover new technology usage in real hospitals/practices, and provide business cases that others could emulate. These would have to be done by healthcare providers. Working on that. I agree completely.
• The work you guys do has been invaluable to my career. I reference your work often (and give much deserved credit), and you have provided keen insight into the industry’s inherent complexity and overarching issues. My time as a journalist taught me a lot about the value of curating and meaningful dispensing content, and I can recognize editorial value when I see it. You guys nail it. Thank you.
• Some of the questions in this survey seem more commercial than the tone you have historically taken with this blog. Please don’t tell me you are being seduced by the money available for more directly pushing sponsors or others products! It’s the same old survey. I have plenty of sponsors and make zero effort to get more, other than writing HIStalk as usual. I’ll be honest: it’s great to not have to worry about that.
• Brilliant job, don’t know how you do it, but so glad you do, I am completely your fan! Keep going and add more contributors to write guest columns like "Being John Glaser". Expert judgment is one of our best assets. The washout rate for guest columnists is high, but I would like to have more of them since I enjoy what they have to say as well.
• Make links easier to see in Firefox. Working on that now.
• Put up an industry events page or calendar. Working on that now.
• You provide the conscience to this crazy business. If you’ve made one person in power a more honest person, then you’ve done a great service to us all. Thank you.
• A great job. I’ve gotten our CMIO and our CIO to read it. Of course, when his name appears in a report he’s not too happy, but hey, at least the stuff is usually accurate, even if we can’t figure out who named names.

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From Stan van Man: “Re: Sage. I just got an e-mail from one of the people who was cut at Sage who told me that Sage Healthcare RIF (don’t you love that acronym) was 500.” My company contact tells me that Sage North America reduced headcount (employees plus open positions) by 500, but that’s throughout all of Sage, not just Healthcare (which took a relatively minor hit).

From Dr. Lyle: “Re: Cerner MPages. I’m a long-time Cerner user and have many bruises to show for it. However, I am cautiously optimistic about MPages as it appears to be what many of us have been asking for: a Web-like front end to the data and functionality in the system. At the very least, it allows users to use HTML and similar programming to create a user interface which displays disparate data in the way they want, such as creating a diabetes screen that brings together meds, labs, physical exam findings, and evidence-based findings. At the very most, there may be some opportunity for interactivity via data input (e.g. change a variable to see how it affects the data) and ordering (e.g. meds, tests) on that very screen. In other words, they are beginning to go down the road of separating the data from the application and interface and allowing end-users to create the displays and customized functionality we believe will work best for us. While this might seem like common sense, most EMR vendors continue to work in a closed, three-tier system (data, application, and interface) that does not allow for this level or ease of customization. It could lead a new paradigm of what an EMR is and does, shifting EMRs to become a platform that holds the data and applications, but allowing interfaces to be in the hands of the users.” Dr. Lyle refers to his blog entry on EMR usability. I liked that idea going back to the mid-1990s, when vendors or users of character-based systems turned them into something that looked slick and brand new by using screen-scraping tools like Attachmate or Seagull to create GUIs that could even tie multiple applications together under the covers. It would be cool if a vendor app could provide functions and tags that would work like ColdFusion or PHP, giving users control of the display and maybe extending its functionality by doing lookups into other systems, links to Web content, or databases or running self-developed functions. Customizing screens, screen flow, and reports is most of what users want to change, not the underlying database or internals, so that would be powerful.

Speaking of MPages, I found this site, run by techies at UW, Stanford, and UAB, which is trying to build an open community of MPages developers.

From Josh: “Re: reusable components. I thought it was worth reiterating a point in your 5/6 update: ‘What healthcare needs are small, specialized systems that interact.’ This diametrically opposes the notion of ALL of the major HIS vendors to date. The idea of small, standards-based reusable components rather than monolithic, interconnected systems is called Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). There are a number of successes in other industries and the core notions (Enterprise Service Bus, Agile development, composite views, etc.) are readily understood in the software development community. What seems not to have been done is the transformation of provider requirements to force deconstruction of these systems. I’ve long been flabbergasted at the interface inflexibility in most commercial HIS offerings and the uselessness of data we generate in applications not intended by the designer. It’s time that the providers start dictating detailed requirements to our vendors – and SOA may be the mechanism to do that.” That is an interesting paradigm – CIOs have pushed the “off the shelf” idea to the point that prospects rarely put system design issues into their contracts, either accepting the product as-is or choosing a different one. When I worked for a vendor, I hated the idea that we couldn’t do something specific for a customer unless we rolled it into the base product, which either meant we had unhappy customers or a Frankensteinized product with a bunch of jerry-rigged bolt-ons added just to make some weird customer happy (usually one of our biggest customers, no surprise there, who bring both unreasonable influence and illogical processes to the table). I like where this discussion (and the one above) are going. If software could be customizable while remaining supportable, everyone wins.

I just posted a summary of the 2009 HIStalk reader survey. I didn’t e-mail blast it since not everyone cares about it, but if you’d like to know what readers suggested and what I think I can accomplish, check it out.

England’s Department of Health gives BT $150 million in advance payments despite what the Guardian says is “years of delays, system failures, and overspending …” and a temporary government ban on Cerner rollouts because of system problems.

I’ve hosted a visit by Traveling HIT Man, my new BFF (that’s him, helping me edit today’s post). He’s looking for the next stop on his HIT tour (see the pics of where he’s been), so if you’d like to have him come to your place, let me know and I’ll send him your way. 

HHS announces members chosen for the Health IT Policy Committee (advises ONCHIT on interoperability) and Health IT Standards Committee (advises ONCHIT on standards and certification). Both committees hold their first meetings this week in Washington.

Odd: two motorcycle riders in India, one of them a Dell software engineer, ride around pulling the scarves of girls for some reason. Locals caught them and beat up one of them, but the Dell guy escaped, only to be arrested later and charged with criminal intimidation and assault with the intent to outrage modesty. His punishment is to sweep the floors of a local hospital for one hour per day for a month.

Patient Safety Technologies, the sponge counting system company, names board chair Steven Kane as CEO following the pursuing of other interests of David Bruce, former president and CEO.

Cooper University Hospital (NJ) gets a local newspaper mention for going live on its $30 million Epic project.

The swine flu is coming and humanity will be wiped out! Old-timers have heard this before, in 1976, and we even had a vaccine then (although it had a couple of minor problems: it didn’t work and people who got it sometimes died. But hey, some people died who didn’t get it, so evidence is inconclusive.) Concerned Americans who heard about today’s crisis on celebrity gossip sites have responded to this serious risk to their health by drinking, speeding, smoking, having unprotected sex, chowing down on superhuman junk food portions, and taking a bottomless pharmacopeia of dangerous prescription and illicit drugs. 

President Ford — uhh, Obama — has a great health care plan, other than it will cost $1.5 trillion. I’ll let Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon speak for me: “You go to a town meeting and people are talking about bailout fatigue. They like the president. They think he’s a straight shooter. But they are concerned about the amount of money that is heading out the door, and the debts their kids are going to have to absorb." The article wisely observes that “one person’s wasteful spending is someone else’s bread and butter,” saying that doctors, hospitals, and drug companies are going to raise holy hell about any attempt to pay them less, even for good reason.

Chinese hackers break into Cal-Berkeley’s health sciences servers, giving them access to the health data of 160,000 students and relatives. Nobody noticed for six months.

The UCLA Medical Center employee who pleaded guilty to selling celebrity medical records to the National Enquirer has died of breast cancer.

A university does the “buy some old drives from eBay and see what’s on them” test. What they found: Lockheed Martin ground-to-air missile plans and its personnel records, medical records, pictures of nursing home patients, correspondence from a Federal Reserve Board member about a $50 billion currency exchange, and security logs from the German Embassy in Paris.

Speaking of which, thanks to the reader who reminded Inga about the need for offsite PC backups (since my trusty USB hard drive sits two feet from the PC, giving it little chance of selective survival in a fire or disaster). I’m doing a 15-day free trial of Carbonite.

Here’s what I love about hospitals: a 17-year-old high school athlete goes to the ED of Kadlec Medical Center (WA) with a shortness of breath. She is correctly diagnosed by the ED staff as having a pulmonary embolism, almost unheard of in young, healthy patients. The next night was prom night, so the peds staff brought in her dressed-up boyfriend and classmates, made her up in her prom dress, took pictures, set up a CD player and disco ball in her prom-decorated room, and provided a candlelit dinner for the couple (with Jello for dessert, of course, since it’s a hospital). “We are totally blown away by what they did,” the mother said.

E-mail me.

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From Ellis Dee: “Re: ARRA. A hospital that has a large outpatient makeup but very little inpatient appears to get significantly less ARRA reimbursement for EHR since the calculation only mentions inpatient. I’d be curious if this is just a legislation snafu that will generate enough complaints to include outpatient. It seems EHR investments and continuum of care applies even more so to outpatient.”

From Roy G. Biv: “Re: HHS. Is it me or is the new health IT web site a little thin? For some reason, they also changed the domain from www.hhs.gov/healthit to healthit.hhs.gov. My take is they implemented a new portal vendor, while the last site was home grown and content managed by HHS directly. I included a link to the Internet Archive ( Wayback Machine ) of a cached version of the site a year ago – a lot more content – and bigger print.” Before, after. It looks like it might be portal software from the former Plumtree Software, which was bought by BEA, which was bought by Oracle (the software version of a Matrushka doll).

From Looking for Answers: “Re: Cerner. What is Cerner’s MPages, why are people so excited about it (to make a video), and does it give Cerner an edge?”

From X-Sage: “Re: layoffs. 1,000 layoffs announced by Sage in England during briefing on six-month financials earlier this week, with Sage Healthcare getting hit once again starting on Tuesday.” One reader put the healthcare cuts at 200 people with more to come. In the mean time, one stock analyst likes Sage stock OK, but says getting into healthcare was a mistake, especially now that Allscripts and Misys have merged to create a formidable competitor.

From Revenue Randy: “Re: Sutter EMR project. Get ready for Son of Sutter … Stanford Medical.”

If you’re a doctor shopper looking for OxyContin in Virginia, now’s your chance: the state database that hackers hijacked is the one that healthcare professionals check to identify drug-seekers. It’s now offline. Mr. Limbaugh, your prescription is ready.

Porter County, Indiana was sued last year for $3.4 million by a management software vendor that claimed Porter Hospital used its software without permission after the hospital was sold to for-profit Community Health Systems. The county argued that the new owner should have worked out a deal with the vendor, so they paid $200K to get out of the suit. Now the hospital has countersued the county, claiming a contract clause makes it the county’s problem. The county is threatening to counter-counter-sue the hospital for the $200K.

I’ll say this, having worked for a non-profit hospital bought by a chain: a former non-profit’s employees sleep behind enemy lines because everyone in the community suddenly hates you, even though you’re going to work in the same building with the same people. Appropriately so in my case: the company running my hospital was a truly impressive bunch of sleazebags and scoundrels who gravitated to healthcare only because the money was good and fraud wasn’t often detected. A classic line from our brand new 24-year-old hospital president in his first real job, speaking to our long-time CFO who predated him by decades: “We need to use less oxygen.” We snickered at his stupidity, but he went on to make dozens of millions running the slimeball organization, somehow avoiding jail time unlike many of his peers. If you were a patient in our hospital back then, I am truly sorry our management brought in clearly incompetent doctors whose only attribute was that they would take orders from a 24-year-old MBA using patients to rise through the ranks. I have a lot of stories, unfortunately.

The State of Massachusetts is considering ditching fee-for-service payments to doctors and hospitals and instead giving them a capitated yearly payment. This is an interesting thought: “… because doctors and hospitals would have to work together more closely to manage the budget, the hope is they will better coordinate care for patients, which could improve quality.” Catfight!

A WHO advisor provides an opinion on the US healthcare system, one question being what advice he would have for the President: “My advice would be to avoid a search for villains (e.g. insurance or pharmaceutical companies) or panaceas (e.g. the electronic medical record), neither of which will be very productive.  Instead, Americans need an intelligent public policy debate that both builds strong consensus for the goal of universal coverage and fosters understanding of the consequences of the structural fragmentation of the existing system and why this has to be addressed.  Expanding coverage without tackling this underlying problem will be very costly, so equal attention needs to be given to both fairness and efficiency if the U.S. is to move towards a system that is both universal and affordable.”

Non-profit Global Patient Identifiers, Inc. and software vendor MEDNET announce a partnership in which MEDNET will issue cards with GPII’s Voluntary Universal Healthcare Identifier and also donate in kind to GPII.

Not satisfied with wasting your personal time Twittering? Now you can reduce your company’s productivity as well with the aptly named Yammer, a near-clone of it aimed at private networks (it reminds me of the old Groove before Microsoft bought it). It might be useful, although I don’t see much benefit over a decent e-mail and IM system (why does everyone fret about blocking unnecessary e-mails when most people just delete them anyway?) The New York Times kind of liked it. It’s free to join, but to get more control and security features costs the employer $1 per user per month (so unlike Twitter, it might actually have a business model other than being sold).

Cambridge Consultants rolls out a Bluetooth-enabled inhaler that follows Continua standards in allowing inhaler usage data to be collected and placed into PHRs.

This sounds interesting: a Silicon Valley startup called PreviMed starts a Healthcare Innovations Lab to evaluate HIT innovations from the user perspective.

This is a big deal: Citrix announces the availability of its free Citrix Receiver for the iPhone, which allows running XenApp hosted applications (Cerner, McKesson, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP are specifically mentioned).

Microsoft lays off another 3,000 employees with the likelihood of more to come.

Listening: Catatonia, alternative rock from Wales, defunct since 2001, with a startlingly pretty lead singer.

Two New Jersey men plead guilty to making $300K by stealing medical equipment from New York Presbyterian Hospital and selling it on the Internet. One was a hospital equipment specialist.

Like an ED on diversion, I’ve been too busy to accept new e-mails (or at least to reply to them). I always catch up eventually, though, even with the equivalent of at least two full-time jobs that are wearing me down steadily.

I think this is new, but I can’t tell since HIMSS doesn’t date its news items (damned annoying). They’ve got a simple online estimator of Medicare incentive payments under ARRA (if you’re a member, anyway).

I goofed: I said the Kingdom of Jordan is a Medsphere customer that was recently quoted a saying open source would cost them at least as much as commercial applications. I knew they were implementing VistA and found 2,000 Google hits linking Jordan with Medsphere (Medsphere proudly ran press releases announcing that the Jordan people were considering them). Medsphere lost that business to Perot.

Interesting details on the GE-Intermountain partnership. Development costs of whatever they’ve been working on since February 2005 are $300 million, with Intermountain paying $100 million and GE chipping in $200 million. Intermountain gets royalty payments (that makes them a vendor, so keep that in mind as they hit the presentation circuit and offer site visits). Brent James is a smart guy, but I would question whether this quote reflects reality: “"It means our ability to deliver good care is going to explode at the same time the costs are going to drop profoundly.” Duly noted: I will be watching for Intermountain’s quality numbers to ramp up and their costs (and charges) to fall precipitously. If either happens, that will be the first time an IT system ever had that kind of effect.

SAIC gets a $158 million contract to maintain and enhance some aspects of AHLTA and CHCS for the Department of Defense.

A security company sues the SEIU healthcare worker’s union (you Easterners know them as 1199) for not paying its $2.2 million bill. The surveillance and counter-intelligence group, made up of former FBI and CIA agents, was hired to spy on the union’s own members: to conduct surveillance of the union’s offices, to intimidate union members coming and going, and to protect SEIU’s visiting executives while they secretly met with hospital CEOs and legislators. At least that’s what the National Union of Healthcare Workers, a newly formed competing union, says (also accusing SEIU union bosses, shockingly, of pillaging union assets). SEUI is suing them, of course.

E-mail me.

HERtalk by Inga

Allscripts announces Cardinal Health is its latest Allscripts MyWay reseller. Interesting move on Cardinal’s part, especially since the spinoff of CareFusion suggested Cardinal was restructuring to increase focus on its core drug distribution business.

A psychiatry fellow blogs on East Coast versus West Coast medicine. She observes that medical hierarchy is more obvious on the East Coast, e.g., doctors wear one color scrubs and nurses another. Though East Coast doctors are more blunt, they are not necessarily "meaner" than their West Coast counterparts. The most important observation: psychiatrists on the East Coast dress significantly more fashionably than those on the West Coast (see above – not a psychiatrist, but definitely one nicely dressed East Coast doctor.)

Eclipsys reports a first quarter loss of $.9 million or $.02 per share compared to last year’s $.3 million/$.01 share profit. Revenues came in above Wall Street expectations, however. Quarterly revenues were $130.2 million, with is above analysts’ $125.5 million estimate and about 5% higher than last year.

The 40 doctors at Lenox Hill Interventional Cardiac & Vascular Services implement Professional Intelligent Charge Capture by MedAptus.

This week I was having a battery problem with my laptop, so I gave Dell a call to diagnose the issue. While running diagnostics, we discovered that in addition to a failed battery, my disk drive had some serious errors and needed to be replaced. So, I pulled out the external hard drive that I have had for a year and half and never used – it was still nicely shrink-wrapped in its box. I feel as if I dodged a bullet and wondered how many times a day consumers and businesses lose precious data to hardware failures because, like me, they are too lazy to back up data?

API Healthcare announces three new hospitals and health systems are now utilizing its human capital management solutions.

An Australian hospital bans the use of its new EMR system after its second failure in three days, including a two-hour outage. An official is quoted as saying, "Staff report the electronic medical records system is so cumbersome that senior medical officers who previously saw 8-10 patients in a shift, are only getting through 5-7 because they spend so much time trying to access or enter information."

GE announces plans to invest $6 billion by 2015 on its "healthyimagination" initiative, aimed at delivering lower-cost medical equipment and care around the world, while increasing earnings at its medical systems and bioscience division. The strategy includes $3 billion in R&D on new medical systems and services, $2 billion in financing, and $1 billion for GE technology to support HIT and heath in rural and underserved areas. GE’s big plans for improving healthcare around the world almost makes me feel guilty for complaining about the $350 I just shelled out to GE to fix my broken oven.

Bridges to Excellence publishes a study entitled Physicians Respond to Pay-for-Performance Incentives: Larger Incentives Yield Greater Participation. And we needed a study to figure this out?

Healthvision adds 10 international clients in Q1.

Cedars-Sinai Medical settles Ed MaMahon’s malpractice suit from last year in which he claimed doctors failed to diagnose his broken neck, discharged him without taking an x-ray, and later botched two spine operations.

Content management vendor Open Text enters into a purchase agreement for competitor Vignette. The total transaction price is about $310 million.

Perot Systems announces plans to lay off 450 employees to offset lower project-based revenue. The reduction is expected to save $30 million annually.

QuadraMed reports a first quarter net loss of $200,000, less than the $1.1 million loss reported for the same period last year. Quarterly revenue was flat at $35.1 million.

The Ohio Department of Administrative Services selects APS Healthcare to manage the provision of disease management and health and wellness services for 50,000 state employees.

As Mr. H recently pondered, had did we survive in the olden days when we only had three network channels to keep us amused?  For the curious (and non-squeamish) you check out Wired Science’s 10 best surgical videos. Really now, are our lives more complete once we can observe a a sex-change operation?

E-mail Inga.

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