Cerner boosts earnings on cost cutting, but misses estimates and issues warnings
FTC pushes Red Flags rule back again
Ad industry worries about increased government oversight of healthcare advertising
From Michael: “Re: trouble. A number of reliable sources are saying that the high visibility HIE vendor in the Boston area is in trouble. The senior engineers have left. Less than a handful of employees can be seen entering the building. Phones are not answered. Customers are bailing.” We guessed at the vendor in question and Inga placed some calls to their offices, all of which went to voice mail. It’s hard to believe that a company in that business would scale back right on the cusp of massive government HIT spending, but I can’t explain why they’re so hard to reach. Lots of their developers are offshore, I’ve heard, so maybe nobody’s left near the phone.
From Perez: “Re: site name. ‘So,’ my wife said walking by, ‘what’s new on your his story website?’ An avid reader of Perez Hilton, she’s always looking for similar vices she can nail me on. ‘It’s HIStalk’, I said. ‘Hiss – like the noise a snake makes. It’s an acronym, not a guy thing.” This got me thinking … what IS the gender ratio of HIStalk readers? And is it even possible to have a cool name for a site like this that someone like my wife would understand as something more than just another celebrity gossip website?” According to one of the site analyzer tools, the HIStalk audience is 63% male, 37% female. As to names, maybe we need a synonym since I made up HIStalk back in 2003 with the firm belief that I would be the only one reading it, so the name wasn’t too important. I bet some of those marketing people I’m always making fun of could come up with something.
From C.C. Ryder: “Re: Utah’s law requiring patient ID. You’ll note that this is useless — there are no penalties for the provider not asking or the patient not providing.” Right you are, according to the bill’s text.
From Raleigh in Raleigh: “Re: Allscripts. Heard that Allscripts has offloaded their field engineering staff to Decision One. The move will be announced by the end of this week. All the field engineers were told about it on Monday.” Unverified.
From The PACS Designer: “Re: HP printers in sync. TPD got a kick out of some guys who synced a group of printers to produce a clever video of printing coordination.” It’s brilliant.
Summa Health (OH) goes live with Sentillion’s single sign-on and context management, with an eventual rollout to 4,000 caregivers.
A software entrepreneur whose wife was dying of cancer promised her he would develop tools to help home medical companies. He started Ankota.
Nurses at St. Joseph Hospital (CA) accused by administrators of intentionally oversedating ICU patients blame what sounds like Pyxis Consultant narcotics tracking software, claiming it didn’t give a true picture of their activities. One of them admitted that the night crew regularly brought in food, played their guitars, read books, played games, checked eBay, and watched Internet video, but said they gave good care nonetheless.
Cerner reports Q2 results: flat revenue, with obvious cost cutting to earn $0.52 vs. $0.42, missing estimates slightly and warning of lower Q3 earnings and FY09 revenue. Global revenue declined by 21%, but domestic revenue was up 6%. Pat yourself on the back for helping the cause if you’re paying maintenance fees because that revenue was up 13%. From the earnings call: as everybody is finding out, providers are not making capital expenditures and are also waiting until meaningful use is defined (thanks for the slowdown, Uncle Sam). They announced plans to take over more of the IT operations of customers and to sell Lighthouse clinical optimization services. They’re also looking to sell into small hospitals (better be ready to cut the price). This sounds interesting, even though I don’t have a clue what it means: “For the most part, the core of our business runs on several hundred large relationships, across a few thousand individuals. The real consumers that establish the success of our brand are those that rely on our solutions and services as part of their day-to-day role in healthcare … This is only one click away from an even bigger audience, patients. The number jumps to 60 million to 70 million plus interactions across our client base annually … We envision a day when Cerner has more than 120 million relationships, self organizing all with a contextual identity, consuming Blue Sky services to navigate and address their healthcare needs.” Sounds like they’re trying to add some dot-com sexiness or maybe planning to get into some kind of consumer advertising, maybe to avoid talking about Epic. Blue Sky is Cerner’s cloud computing strategy. Neal wasn’t on the call.
The government wants to ban peer-to-peer software from government and contractor computers following reported information leaks and a consultant’s demonstration of how installing LimeWire opens up the My Documents folder for full sharing. LimeWire’s chairman showed up to dispute that claim, stating that no files are shared by default and Office and PDF files aren’t shared at all. Arguments aside, there’s no reason anyone needs LimeWire to do their jobs, so banning it makes perfect sense to me.
The advertising industry is upset that the government is raining on its parade — frowning on consumer drug advertising, considering laws against Internet user tracking, threatening increased FDA oversight of nutritional claims, and flexing control over ad budgets at Chrysler and GM. They’re also worried about potential FDA regulation of health-related searches. But, this advertising CEO had a brilliant comeback: “Advertising is the makeup on the public face of capitalism, for better or for worse, so any tension that people feel about capitalism comes right down to their feelings about advertising. If what happens in business offends them, the advertising gets blamed.”
Computer Weekly points out that the UK’s NPfIT is being used as an example, but not as the government planned. It quotes an Economist article: “They’d wanted the NPfIT to be used by various governments as an exemplar. It is – as a type of scheme to be avoided.” And, quoting another newspaper editorial: “We only have to read current headlines from England to see the unintended consequences of trying to implement a nationalized HIT system … the programme was started in 2002 and implementation began in 2005. It was originally supposed to cost $3.7bn over a three year period of time for full implementation … it should have been up and running successfully since 2008. As of this month, only very small parts of the NHS NPfIT are working correctly and two of their four main contractors have either been fired or quit. There is now a revised completion date of 2015 and a revised projected cost of $32.9bn – if it is even finished…”
Former MedAssets software VP Wade Wright joins RemitDATA as CTO. The Memphis company sells Web-based tools for practice reimbursement and document management.
The National Library of Medicine’s PubMed search engine will get a Web page makeover later this year, with the goal of improving the way related information is presented when users search.
Buffalo-based Computer Task Group’s profits fell 32% in Q2, but the CEO says the company is getting lots of EMR activity that should help business.
The big Medicare fraud raids this week were made possible by cooperation among the FBI, HHS, DEA, and the Texas Attorney General, but also software that can detect fraud “as it’s happening, using real-time data analysis of Medicare billing records.”
Odd lawsuit: an anesthesiologist claims someone at his previous hospital employer caused him to lose his new job by stealing his credit card and ordering a sex toy under his name, shipping to a female colleague.
HERtalk by Inga
From Richie Simmons: “Re: obesity rates. I think we should start with Congress reducing their obesity rates! While at Healthcare Unbound Conference, I was appalled by the number of obese participants. Surely they see the numbers every day as to why there is now such a market for remote patient monitoring. Check out this related article.” The article, entitled “Overweight and Obese Health Providers Aren’t Taken Seriously”, looks at the problem of overweight providers who struggle when they need to advise a patient to lose weight. Maybe we need to start some virtual HIStalk weight-loss contest. Perhaps the winner could have his/her picture posted in HIStalk in a speedo/bikini (a la Valerie Bertinelli in People magazine).
From Friend of Minne’s: “Re: new Allscripts partner. Allscripts does have a new partnership with mPayGateway. I’m at the ACE meeting in Orlando and they are showing off the new product, called Patient Payment Assurance. It’s already in GA for the Tiger product and will soon be available for the other product lines.”
Speaking of the Allscripts Client Experience (ACE), the company announces a record 2,700 registrants for the event, which includes both Allscripts customers and the former Misys clients.
Last week we noted that Cardinal Health hired the former Motorola exec Patricia Morrison as CIO. Interestingly, Morrison sits on the board of SPSS, the company IBM just announced it was buying.
Genesis Physicians Group, a 1,400 member physician organization in Dallas, has secured Covisint to provide its cloud-based healthcare platform. The solution will provide physicians a centralized view and SSO access to such applications as e-prescribing, EMRs, and referral management.
The FTC again pushes back the deadline to enforce the “red flags” rule, moving it from August 1 to November 1 to provide additional resources and guidance to businesses.
St. Elizabeth Healthcare (KY) announces plans to roll out Epic throughout its entire system, which includes 31 primary care offices. Beginning in September, St. Elizabeth’s will introduce EpicCare Ambulatory to its nearly 1,000 physicians. St. Elizabeth’s is also adding Resolute Hospital Billing, EpicCare Inpatient, Prelude Registration and Cadence Scheduling.
Legacy Hospital Partners (TX) announces four new management team members, including former PHNS COO Lawrence V. Schunder as CIO and SVP of business processes.
Crittenden Regional Hospital selects Healthcare Management Systems to supply financial and ancillary clinical HIT solutions, planning to go live in October.
The University of Miami UM-JMH Center for Pain Safety deploys a hand hygiene compliance pilot project that uses IR-RF sensors in soap dispensing units. The IR-RF devices read staff ID badges and monitor the location and timing of hand-washing events. Dynamic Computer Corporation and Versus Technology provided the technology for the project, which I am going to propose to a couple of my favorite dive restaurants.
Affiliated Computer Services promotes Connie Harvey to group president of business process solutions.
Did we really need a scientific study to figure this out? A PhD surveyed 1,400 adults and concludes that taking time for leisure activities helps people function better physically and mentally. And, the more time you spend doing different enjoyable activities, the better one’s health tends to be. I’m thinking about heading to a beach to confirm if this is true.
Here is a brilliant new business model for healthcare. An Iowa dentist gives up his traditional practice and sets up shop at Iowa 80 Truck Stop (the world’s largest truck stop). About 35,000 people a week stop at Iowa 80 and Dr. Thomas P. Roemer correctly guessed he could stay busy helping truckers who needed immediate dental care (apparently he does a lot of extractions.) Some days he doesn’t see any patients; others he sees as many as 15. I bet it’s only a matter of time until some enterprising doctor follows suit.
E-mail me.
McKesson beats earnings estimates on flat revenue
Confirmed: VA puts Cerner LIS project on hold
Varian acquisition does not include Varian Medical Systems (correction below)
From The Alchemist: “Re: shocked, amazed, and totally blindsided.” IBM announces that it will acquire statistical and data mining software vendor SPSS for $1.2 billion in cash. Everyone who has taken Stats 101 in the last few years has almost certainly bought a copy of one of their products. IBM is paying 4x annual revenue and 33x annual net income, which seems way too much to a cheap seater like me.
From A Reader: “Re: Cedars-Sinai. Went live on schedule across the house with EpicRx (Epic pharmacy module) this weekend, after the activation of all Epic revenue cycle modules (Cadence, Prelude, Resolute, and Coding/Abstracting) in March. Next Epic clinical roll-out will be in the emergency dept (all disciplines) plus inpatient nursing and clerk order entry in the fall.”
From Captain Hook: “Re: Epic. I represent a hospital who recently selected Epic to replace Meditech after more than 20 years. Meditech let their product languish and chose to take money out of the business instead of investing in their product. The choices were clear — stay with Meditech and share in that stagnation or seek a solution that created a connected, integrated care environment, which Epic does. Does it cost more than Meditech? You bet. We are well on our way to creating that integrated care community (including patients) and would have been nowhere near it with Meditech.”
From Tony Romano: “Re: Google. A hospital where I used to work was looking for a CMS to run our intranet and to search documents. Proposals ran into the tens of thousands of dollars and required an IT learning curve. Enter Google Appliance for $3K – searchable documents from the storage servers already set up.” I love Google Search Appliance and it truly mystifies me why most hospitals don’t have it. Why work to set up a complicated folder structure, permissions, and document naming convention when you can just let Google crawl the darned things and offer a full-text search? Everybody has tons of policies, paper order sets, forms, meeting minutes, lists, etc., but nobody can ever find them easily. Google Mini handles 50,000 documents for $2,990 for two years.
I got both “like it/don’t like it” comments about putting the biggest news stories first, mostly because of appearance. One person said they didn’t want me picking the top stories and instead suggested tagging every item in some way, but that’s beyond the scope of this little makeover. So, here’s the compromise, as you’ve already seen. I’ll put the headlines of what I think are the main news items first, then go right into the usual format.
McKesson announces Q1 numbers: flat revenues, EPS $1.06 vs. $0.83, handily beating earnings estimates. The company raised its full-year outlook.
Meddius announces the launch of SecureTransport, an SSL-based connectivity platform that allows healthcare networks to exchange information over a public network without using site-to-site VPNs.
Stamford Hospital (CT) buys 100 licenses for eClinicalWorks. The hospital will use EHR, PM, the patient portal, the electronic health exchange, the Enterprise Business Optimizer, and eClinicalMobile.
I don’t even know where to begin with the spelling and grammar errors in this CIO job posting. Other than bizarre upper case and underlining, maybe the zero-for-two spelling of the two vendors mentioned: “Siemans” and “GE Contricity.” Or, maybe they’ve had a bad experience with GE and made up their own derogatory name.
Confirmed in a Modern Healthcare story by Joe Conn: one of the halted VA projects is the one that would have replaced VistA’s LIS with Cerner. That could be a bump in the road or it could be a second chance to reevaluate what a lot of people (me being one) thought was an ill-advised push toward commercial software.
Healthcare Growth Partners releases its Q2 HIT industry transaction report (warning: PDF).
St. Barnabas Hospital (NY) chooses Eclipsys Sunrise Acute Care, hoping for a quick implementation that will meet meaningful use requirements.
I Google “histalk” a couple of times a year just to see who’s saying what, so I was happy to find a PowerPoint PDF from John Lillie, interface supervisor at SISU Medical Systems (it’s a non-profit IT resource sharing organization in Duluth, MN). In his slide urging attendees to keep up with their HIT education, he mentioned, in order, the State of Minnesota, HIStalk, HIMSS, AMDIS, and HITSP. Thanks, John. I need to buy him a beer or something.
Inga did a great HIStalk Practice interview with Christoph Diasio, a pediatrician who likes technology, but not necessarily EHRs that take more of his time. “That’s just not enough money for it to be worth it for me to do this. This is just a major gift to the EMR industry and it’s the guy who’s head of the VA said, ‘We’ve basically had major market failure,’ and that’s why you’re having to pay people to adopt EMRs that slow them down. A one-time payment or a couple years’ payment is just not going to be enough to convince me that I should do something that doesn’t make sense to me.”
A New Zealand newspaper article says the growth of integration technology vendor Orion Health has slowed from the predicted 20-30%, much of that because of hospital conditions in the US. Says the CEO, “Even though there is going to be a huge investment over the next three years, in the last six months there have been hospitals that have been struggling.”
Speaking of Orion Health, estimates for an EHR for New Zealand are $32-$96 million US if you believe the government or $300 million if you believe Orion’s CEO. He mostly seems unhappy at the prospect of competing with US vendors for the business, saying the health boards seem “pretty keen on getting a big American product in here … If they are New Zealand-supplied solutions, we can take that intellectual property and can sell it to the rest of the world.”
Agfa’s Q2 numbers: revenue down 12.9%, earnings up 2.7%. Healthcare sales dropped because customers delayed their IT investments.
Inga and I have been working hard to bring you some interesting interviews, several of which are yet to come. Know someone we should talk to, preferably on the non-vendor side of the house so that nobody claims bias?
A proposed e-health plan for Australia recommends that the government steer clear of a “big procurement” free market approach and instead create standards and technology goals that developers can follow, with e-prescribing being the highest priority.
Agilent Technologies will acquire rival medical instrument maker Varian for $1.5 billion. It looks like most of the rags missed the HIT connection that we hospital types got immediately: that acquisition includes Varian’s widely used oncology EMR, ARIA (formerly OpTx, acquired by Varian in 2004). Agilent, you may recall, was a 1999 spinoff of Hewlett-Packard’s medical products business by then-CEO Carly Fiorina in her first year with the company. CORRECTION: some of the initial media reports were incorrect and have been updated — thanks to the reader who pointed out that Varian Medical Systems, spun off in 1999, is not part of the acquisition. Agilent is buying only Varian, Inc., which shares its headquarters with Varian Medical Systems. Oddly enough, Varian Medical uses the domain varian.com, which didn’t help my confusion. Also not involved in the deal is a third spinoff, Varian Semiconductor Equipment Associates. So, no change for ARIA customers.
IBM and Nuance announce an expansion of their joint agreement to accelerate the use of advanced speech recognition in several industries, one of them being healthcare and life sciences. IBM still has ViaVoice as far as I can tell (one of the last consumer-grade competitors to Dragon Naturally Speaking), but Nuance even sells that under some kind of exclusive distribution agreement.
E-mail me.
HERtalk by Inga
From St. Pauli’s Girl: “Re: new Allscripts partner. I hear that Allscripts has signed on with another strategic partner, this time mPay Gateway.” Unconfirmed, but sounds like it would be a good fit. mPay Gateway offers a Web-based credit card payment system that helps practices calculate and collect patient monies at the time of service.
QuadraMed launches Quantim Coding Simulator, its ICD-10 compliant encoder training tool. The new tool is designed to enable coders to gain proficiency in using ICD-10-CD/ICD-10-PCS code sets. QuadraMed is showing it off at this week’s AHIMA Assembly on Education Symposium in Las Vegas.
Adena Health System (OH) selects Rhapsody Integration Engine to improve access to and facilitate messaging with the hospital’s Meditech system.
Orlando Health expands its use of MedeAnalytics software with the addition of Patient Access Services. The new tool will facilitate front-end patient workflow, including helping staff to estimate patient payment obligations.
RelayHealth signs a deal with VHA to supply its RevRunner financial clearance services. The agreement also establishes revenue management educational opportunities and preferential pricing for VHA’s members.
I mentioned in HIStalkPractice yesterday that obesity rates are rising rapidly and one in four Americans is considered obese. The medical costs for an obese person is $1,492 per year more than normal weight people and 9% of all medical spending is attributed to obesity care. Care for obesity-related conditions is costing us $147 billion a year. Since Congress seems interested in becoming involved in every other part of our life, how about they come up with a plan to give some money for everyone who is not obese and tax those that are? OK, I see all sorts of flaws in the plan, but really, when you consider how much we spend for healthcare compared to other countries and our 30th ranking for life expectancy, shouldn’t we be doing more to “fix” obesity?
Meanwhile, if you are considering bariatric surgery, refer to HealthGrades’ new report identifying the 88 best performing hospitals for the procedure. Patients treated at one of the top hospitals have, on average, a 67% lower chance of serious complications than those treated at poorly rated hospitals.
Speaking of HealthGrades, the company reported Q2 profits of $1.73 million, up from $1.21 million for the same quarter last year. HealthGrades is expecting full year revenues of $50 million, which is a 25% increase over 2008.
Arizona’s University Medical Center contracts with MEDSEEK to redesign its consumer-facing Web portal.
Advocate Health Care (IL) signs a three-year extension for its license to IntraNexus’ SAPPHIRE Patient Financial Management software suite. The extension covers all nine Advocate hospitals and continues a 16-year business relationship.
I love pop culture, but I am officially sick of hearing about Michael Jackson, his probable drug problems, and his likely negligent doctor(s). There. I feel better. OK, now back to pondering what it will take to get an invite to drink a beer at the White House.
In a report to the Board of Trustees for Phelps County Regional Medical Center (MO), CIO David Dowdy reports the hospital’s EMR has helped reduce mortality rates by 15%. Phelps has achieved Stage 6 EMR adoption with its Meditech product.
KLAS releases a new report that concludes hospitals are considering vendor-neutral solutions for archiving and accessing medical images in order to avoid being locked in to closed, proprietary software.
Another KLAS reports suggests that the release of Medtech 6.0 will provide an improved user interface and easier navigation, but many users may struggle to achieve full CPOE adoption. The biggest hurdle for most hospitals will be covering the costs associated with implementation and hardware and infrastructure upgrades.
And, Hilo Medical Center (HI) engages Healthcare Informatics Associates in a multi-year contract to implement MEDITECH 6.0 across its East Hawaii Region facilities.
E-mail Inga.
What made you decide to use speech recognition instead of the usual mouse and keyboard?
I think speech recognition offers a lot of efficiency both financially and also in time savings. The accuracy is outstanding. It allows you to perform chart documentation and navigation through an electronic medical record much more effectively than without it. That is so much better than point and click with a mouse and a traditional keyboard.
What did you use before?
I’m an emergency physician. We would document 100% of our charts with traditional dictation. That was a very, very costly process. It cost us probably close to half a million dollars a year for an emergency department that saw about 70,000 patient visits.
The accuracy wasn’t all that good. Our traditional dictation would be farmed out to transcriptionists over in India. When it came back, it really needed to be cleaned up.
We went with the Allscripts emergency medicine product, which was a dynamite electronic medical record. The problem we had was that even the best-in-breed still left a lot to be desired with being able to capture the unique elements of the history in physical examination. And really, the point-and-click, drop-down menus were clunky at best in terms of telling the story. Even the navigation through the software was somewhat cumbersome.
Speech recognition was a natural solution to a lot of the shortcomings of electronic medical records and also with traditional dictation. Your startup costs are reasonable. The training time is very short. Even physicians, allied health professionals, nursing staff — the training time and complexity is so minimal that it’s certainly not a barrier. The cost savings once the initial costs are incurred — really, your investment just pays off over and over and over.
How hard was it to get Dragon to work with the Allscripts product and to get the accuracy up to par?
The Dragon product runs in the background and then it populates data elements right into the electronic medical record. I can tell you, from day one, we’ve had great success using Dragon with Allscripts.
We started back with Dragon 6.0, which was really a product that needed a lot of improvement. That improvement has been seen. In other words, right now, the 10.0 version is absolutely dynamite, for lack of a better way to put it.
Allscripts recognized how good Dragon was and actually started incorporating it with their software, making some special considerations with regard to being able to use speech recognition to navigate through their software, and actually started marketing the Allscripts product with Dragon as a bundled offering to hospitals’ emergency departments.
The onset of the roaming feature, which allows a group of people to save their voice files on a central server and then pull them into any application that you’re using in a given geographical area, has been huge. What a wonderful addition. That has worked well with the Allscripts product as well.
What would you say the main benefits have been and what were some of the drawbacks?
I think one of the main benefits is that you can tell the main story uniquely in terms of documenting a history and physical examination, review of systems, medical decision-making. All those functions that are key, absolutely essential to a physician and an allied health professional, and by that I mean a nurse practitioner or a physician’s assistant.
Dragon offers a way to do that that is so much more efficient and accurate than drop-down menus and with traditional typing. You just can’t achieve the level of accuracy by other means. So I think the cost savings is huge.
The drawback I see is that there have been criticisms about the accuracy, but as I said, what I’ve seen is that the accuracy just keeps getting better and the ability to meet the end user’s expectations has been a commitment that has been a work in process that has been achieved. I’ve used the product for many years, and I put on the headset — I’m a traditional headset user — and for me, it’s just part of the process of being a physician, just like putting a stethoscope on, a normal part of my evaluation of a patient.
I think some people have found that there have been occasional problems with recognition, but there have been problems with traditional dictation being transcribed when it came back with errors. You have to look at it and skim it to make sure it’s OK.
The speed is not a downside. The speed and accuracy actually improve as you talk faster. The recognition is actually improved when you do that. If you slow down, then there are problems.
So I wonder if some of the criticisms is that people don’t know how to use the product. In our institution, we’ve got about 25 physicians that use the product and probably about 15 or 18 mid-level providers. Part of what I do is say, "OK, let’s sit down together and let me show you how I use it." The macro feature where you can store a letter or a pre-set amount of text, then simply use a voice command to spit out, let’s say, a normal physical examination, is huge. That has been a wonderful feature as well. It’s all those little shortcuts that you can really use to improve things.
These things are easy to use. To navigate through software is very easy. It’s very intuitive. Nuance just continues to make it better and more logical.
What do you think benefits are, if any, to patients?
I think the benefit to the patients is that it more accurately reflects the medical encounter with the patient. I can be more efficient in my order entry in the medical record. I can do that much more quickly with Dragon. I can document more accurately the historical elements of what’s going on. In other words, tell the story better.
I can reflect what has actually happened in the emergency department by very efficiently using voice recognition to capture a decision or discussion of the risks, benefits, and alternatives with the patient. I can do it at a lower cost as a result of voice recognition compared to traditional dictation, or as a consequence of the increased cost that I incur spending 14 to 18 cents a line for traditional dictation.
Do you feel that, in all the meaningful use discussion, that the use of speech recognition is going to be a help or a hindrance?
I’m very biased on that and I’ve said this for years. When I first started using Dragon back long ago, I thought traditional dictation is going to go away. As much as I hate to see automation taking human jobs, I just don’t think we can surpass the accuracy and efficiency of voice recognition.
I think it’s only going to become more pervasive, in at least the healthcare industry, as we need to have short turnaround times on the documentation in a hospital setting. Now maybe an office setting is different, but the healthcare industry changes and evolving. Already, if you look at what’s going on in the government, we’re trying to cut costs and trying to take money out of the budget for healthcare, in Medicaid and Medicare. This is going to be yet another way we can be more efficient in how we operate.
It’s not going to be just healthcare, either. I think you’re already seeing that with the phone lines, where continued use and development of voice recognition just makes sense. I don’t think it’s going to go away, I can tell you that.
So why do you think so few hospital-based doctors use speech recognition?
You know, I wonder the same thing, because I’ve been using it for probably eight years. I think I’ve been patient with it, I believe in it, and I’ve seen it work. I see it in my own practice.
I don’t know if it’s an issue where doctors just don’t have the energy, or maybe they define themselves as needing to focus on having to diagnose appendicitis, but think they don’t have to focus on the things that are more business-related. I don’t know. I’m in Columbus Ohio, and I’ve talked actually to several other practices who had an initial bad experience with voice recognition, then abandoned the idea and never came back to it.
But I think it’s like most things that we see. With time, the technology improves, the accuracy improves, and all of a sudden you find that the product is now one that really works. And maybe it’s just that I’ve been patient and also persistent. But I also thought that it was going to allow us as a group to reduce our cost of doing business and be more efficient and that has been the case.
Frankly, I think in large part that voice recognition has allowed us to pay for electronic medical record in two and a half years, based on the cost savings that we’ve achieved by eliminating traditional dictation, because half a million dollars a year was eliminated as a result of two things: voice recognition and the electronic medical record. That just continues to accrue year after year after year.
But in terms of why other people haven’t seen the success? I don’t know. Maybe we have, where I practice, a very wonderful support system in the IT department, and a very open-minded, progressive hospital administration that says, "Hey, we have the same vision that you have, and we see that this is going to work and we appreciate the fact that you’re going down this road to develop this."
So we’ve had a lot of support. And when it came to me saying, "Hey, I’d like to upgrade Dragon to the next level," they said, "OK, here’s the money, we’ll make that happen."
Our sister group wanted to have $300 handheld microphones, with a built-in mouse and everything, whereas I was happy with a plug-in headset that cost $15. And I think I get better speech recognition than they get for the $300 handheld mic. But the fact is, we’ve had support from administration who says, "Yeah, go ahead, we’ll support both. You can use the $300 handheld mic and we’ll also pay for the $15 headset."
Maybe it is that doctors don’t want to wear headsets. You look like air traffic control person. But you know what, if it gives me the desired results better, then I’m going to wear the headset, because it frees up my hands to use the keyboard and the mouse. You know it’s not easy.
I think we want instant gratification. We want a product that, boom, just works out the box. But the fact is that the effort and the time is not that great, and really, if they give it a little bit of time they find that this really is everything that it’s said to be.
QuadraMed announced this morning that Duncan W. James will become CEO of the company when it files its 10-Q report next week. He succeeds interim president and CEO James Peebles.
James was previously with McKesson Provider Technologies, where he was group president for Health Systems Solutions from 2000-2009. Previously, he was senior VP for consulting firm Scient and VP of marketing and product management with McKesson.
