The views and opinions expressed in this blog are mine personally, and are not necessarily representative of Texas Health Resources or its subsidiaries.
The Secret to Successful CPOE Adoption—Revealed
By Ed Marx
Before revealing the secret, let me establish credibility. I first implemented electronic health records in 1995. A few years later, while CIO at University Hospitals, we achieved a 95% CPOE rate at our academic medical center. Presently, with 12 of our 14 hospitals implemented at Texas Health, we are averaging over 80% CPOE. Remarkably, half of these are entered via standardized order sets. What makes the Texas situation particularly unusual is the lack of executive mandate. The all-voluntary medical staff made it happen. Although I had little to do with the above successes, I did learn the secret.
Organizations will spend millions on consultants, hoping to tap into some sort of magic sauce that they can liberally apply to ensure significant adoption. The majority of these consultants will have had no direct professional experience implementing or supporting the technology. The secret to successful CPOE adoption rides not on one silver bullet, but many. You can do better than a consultant can, and here is how.
These 21 factors, when in synch, will bring your institution success with CPOE. You must be excellent at 18 or more of these to forge the secret.
· Senior Leadership Engagement- CEO must actively promote and reinforce, and receive regular reports. Base enterprise incentives on CPOE adoption levels.
· Hospital Leadership Engagement- Presidents need to be very visible and articulate. Same with directs.
· CMIO- This rare individual can bridge the gap between IT and medical staff. If IDN, recommend multiple CMIO approach. (Not an expensive tactic in the big scheme of things)
· Project Leadership- They must walk on water and be clinicians. They are the face and brains of the operation. Surround them with grace and all the resources they ask for.
· Project Team- Majority should be clinicians. 90% of your team must be actively engaged. The road is long with many winding curves. Build up staying power.
· Clinical Staff- Can’t be successful without engaged physicians and nurses. Sometimes you must facilitate their engagement if initially resistant.
· Culture- Culture eats strategy everyday. Set up literal shared incentives for success. If IDN, culture must acknowledge but transcend individual hospitals.
· Relationships- Relationships cover a multitude of sins. Develop relationships with everyone from clinicians to support staff to leadership.
· Visibility- Key leaders must be visible during Go Live and after. Most of our leaders participate in Go Live support, even if just to answer phones.
· Agility & Velocity- Have a pool of highly trained staff who can respond to crisis at a moment’s notice. Team should report to CMIO.
· Build- Lay a solid foundation from the onset to withstand the continual storms. Design must include clinical staff for usability and acceptance.
· Standardized Order Sets- Present CPOE as the ultimate tool to drive transformation, clinical quality, and drive out costs.
· Governance- Set up an effective decision-making body on two levels: a senior executive team for strategy; a larger team for tactics and operations. Assign clinicians to key roles.
· Change Control Process- Control application evolution at a rate that introduces new features while maintaining an acceptable learning adaptation curve.
· Implementation- Keenly organized, with additional staffing at the physician’s elbow.
· Marketing & Communication- Need a multi-dimensional, targeted strategy including actual customers. Don’t limit yourself to traditional media; be innovative and leverage social networks.
· Training- Use multiple venues: traditional methods blended with modern, such as our video vignettes. Make access to applications dependent upon completion of training.
· Support- Post implementation support must be impeccable and ubiquitous.
· Vendor Connections- Best relationships start at the top, with C-Level execs exchanging strategy and vision. Establish escalation paths to solve issues quickly.
· Infrastructure- Monitor and tune to ensure optimal uptime and response speed.
· Software- Select a seasoned application. Test and retest enhancements and patches prior to releasing to clinicians.
If you can’t deliver on the majority of the above factors, stop your project. Take the hit early where impact is limited rather than when you are too far down the tracks where a collision will occur. I.e. we took a three-month hiatus because our standardized order sets were suboptimal. We retooled. Today, we have 80% CPOE adoption with 50% of all orders coming from the standardized order sets.
A final point to remember. None of these factors is a onetime event. Each requires continual care and feeding. Indefinitely.
Want more? Follow our CMIO and Medical Director on Twitter; ftvelasco; Isaldanamd
Ed Marx is senior vice president and CIO at Texas Health Resources in Dallas-Fort Worth, TX. Ed encourages your interaction through this blog. (Use the “add a comment” function at the bottom of each post.) You can also connect with him directly through his profile pages on social networking sites LinkedIn and Facebook, and you can follow him via Twitter – User Name “marxists.”
If you had to answer the question below in one sentence, what would you say?
What is the fundamental contribution of information technology?
My answer — information technology enables complexity.
Our personal financial assets are much more complex that those of our grandparents; savings accounts have been replaced by retirement plans and mutual funds that can automatically shift assets based on a person’s risk tolerance. Handwritten flight manifests have been replaced by the ability of an individual to book air travel involving multiple stops and carriers. Weather forecasting based on seasonal expectations and reports from adjacent states has been replaced by sophisticated models. Complex activities such as sending a satellite to Jupiter, non-invasively observing metabolism in the brain, and simulating the interactions between proteins would not be possible without information technology.
These problems of healthcare cost, safety and quality are based in and exacerbated by the complexity of healthcare. The knowledge domain of medicine is vast and evolves rapidly. Patients with complex acute problems and multiple chronic diseases will be seen by many providers within a short period of time and undergo several parallel treatments. The delivery system is highly fragmented and dominated by small physician groups and hospitals. Standardized care processes have multiple varieties. Managed care contract provisions can fill volumes.
Information technology can be applied to enable the complexity in healthcare. Clinical decision support and clinical documentation applications can assist the provider in keeping up with medical evidence. Results management systems can highlight the patient data that deserves the most attention. Interoperable electronic health records can support the coordination of multiple providers taking care of an elderly patient. Telemedicine can assist patients and providers in joint management of chronic disease.
Maybe that’s the fundamental contribution of information technology in healthcare. It might enable the current complexity to actually work.
John Glaser is vice president and CIO at Partners HealthCare System. He describes himself as an "irregular regular contributor" to HIStalk.
VA plans emerging technology research center
iSoft lays off in England
Children’s Pittsburgh leads peds hospitals in HIT
From Scott: “Re: Joint Commission and nondisclosure. Yesterday’s Sentinel Event Alert provides further support for providers’ rejection of vendor nondisclosure clauses that could limit the sharing of information on software problems that have patient safety implications. The Joint Commission’s previous Sentinel Alert, Safely implementing health information and converging technologies, is also worthwhile reading for providers who might rush to deploy EHR systems in response to federal incentives.” Joint Commission should be all over healthcare IT in the context of patient care. It would give customers a way to collectively pressure their vendors (with regard to design and disclosure, for example). For vendors, it’s still better than having the FDA in your shop. For patients, Joint Commission is the one group that looks out for their best interests as a package, not just how technology is deployed and managed in a vacuum. And unlike HIMSS and its spawn, they have no vested vendor interest.
From Billy Roentgen: “Re: Stanford. Stanford is going live on Epic September 1, replacing Siemens Invision. Palo Alto Medical Group is going live on Epic at about the same time, replacing IDX. Epic is EVERYWHERE, starting in the physician’s office and carrying through to the hospital.” It’s easy to see with 20-20-hindsight why Epic owns the markets they choose to play in: (a) they built new products that reflected that inpatient-outpatient continuum while their competitors kept bolting on marginally useful features and acquisitions onto old platforms that were clearly unsuited for them; (b) they created MyChart before anyone cared about sharing data and PHRs; (c) they didn’t get bogged down in a Viet Nam of unsuitable customers by selling indiscriminately to just anyone; and (d) they ran their implementations firmly and protected customers from their own success-sapping indecision. Nobody else is even close, handing over the entire upper-end market to Epic without much resistance. Cerner had a shot but doesn’t seem to be selling much new business, while the reps from GE, Siemens, and McKesson might as well carry a white flag when they visit hospitals of more than 400 beds. Eclipsys is strong in the traditional inpatient core of CPOE, pharmacy, and nursing, but won’t get a foothold with customers who want a broad application line that covers outpatient in a single database. Epic owes its success to weak competition as much as anything else. In a perfect world, someone would step up to offer an Cadillac alternative, but for now, Epic is running its own Cash for Clunkers program (they get the cash).
From Joce: “Re: Logi-D. Heard a rumor that Stanley InnerSpace might have entered into an agreement to acquire Logi-D. Any truth to this?” I’m probably the wrong guy to ask since I don’t follow either company. Stanley makes carts and cabinets, Logi-D is a Canadian logistics consulting company specializing in the OR.
From The Nuge: “Re: claims. The reader’s comment hit the nail on the head, but that’s only a small part. Look at what happened with Emdeon and Aetna a few years back when they went exclusive (how can that even be legal?) Misys couldn’t send electronic claims to them for months! And what when PCN bought Versyss, declared bankrupty (iirc), was picked up by Medical Manager for pennies, and sold zillions of ambulatory claim events to WebMD? Very well orchestrated.”
From Kwame Mojito: “Re: GE. The nurse call group (formerly Dukane) has been sold internally from GE Security to GE Healthcare under the clinical systems division. It will be interesting to see if they can tie this into their Centricity product in a useful manner. To my knowledge, this will make GE the only EMR vendor who also owns a nurse call system.” And a theme park.
From Curious George: “Re: OSHA. I hear that hospitals are definitely on their toes in case an OSHA inspector drops in for a chat. Do you have any information on how many physician clinics are being targeted by OSHA? Have you heard of anyone who has and what their top five non-compliant issues were?” I’ll take a lifeline. Anyone?
From Ditka: “Re: sales. Greenway, according to a sales rep, is having the best year of their lives. Office Practicum is a small peds EMR with rabid fans and their pendulum is swinging mightily up. I keep seeing eCW everywhere. I’ve run into a bunch of e-MDs sales.” I had not heard of Office Practicum – looks cool (although I’d get those old TEPR awards off the front page). None of the others you listed are surprises.
From Norberg: “Re: sales. What can I say? It’s slow. The problem is that most organizations are almost singularly focused on ARRA. And because of the ambiguity around meaningful use, they’re doing nothing. I would hazard a guess that imaging and all other ancillary (read: non-EMR) solutions are not being given any attention / considerations by providers these days. If it’s not related to ARRA, it’s not getting done. If you’re the incumbent vendor at a facility, it’s probably high cotton for you there. But you can’t even get a meeting at a facility where you’re not the incumbent HIS/CIS vendor. I have some friends in the indy EMR space and they say they’re doing pretty well. I guess there are enough independent practices who are buying that the top 3-5 vendors are making out OK. But the large , monolithic vendors are struggling.”
A funny phony magazine cover from The Onion. Some good headlines: Researchers Quietly Chuckling At Placebo Group, Congress Deadlocked Over How To Not Provide Health Care, U.S. Government Stages Fake Coup To Wipe Out National Debt.
Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, says KLAS, is the pediatric hospital IT leader, coming in at #1 of the top five. Of course, it’s only the pre-season poll.
HealthPartners (IN) saved $430K in one year with its implementation of Epic and Merge Healthcare, which the local business paper concludes “is providing some proof for health reform advocates who say that electronic medical records can save providers money.” With a payback period that spans generations, I’d say that particular proof isn’t compelling.
A reader tells me his hospital’s Epic contract has no nondisclosure terms. That’s hard to believe given Epic’s legal lock on everything from employment to implementations, but that led me to a sobering thought: what if Cerner is the only company demanding that language in its contracts? Could this medico-legal brouhaha be over just one overzealous vendor’s contracting practices? A Fan was right in the last issue, though — being legally allowed to talk about known patient-endangering software defects is not worth much if (a) the vendor doesn’t tell you about them until you find them, and (b) the customers who are aware of the problem have no incentive or platform to get the word out to other customers (assuming the vendor isn’t doing it). In fact, some of the IT departments I’ve worked in kept the lid on known errors in a manner little different than the vendor themselves and for the same reasons – vanity, lack of resources to address the issue, and condescension toward end users who shouldn’t bother their pretty little heads with computer topics (which is actually sort of true – if you e-mail any of the big clinical departments about a computer problem, they drive you nuts with repeated uninformed questions and a flood of wildly unrelated problem reports that they suddenly observe and decide are related to the one you mentioned).
Intellect Resources is doing a three-question HIT hiring survey of recruiters and hiring managers if you are one of those and want to chime in .
Institute for Safe Medication Practices weighs in with ample expertise on the Ohio pharmacist’s error that killed a child. If you’ve done FMEA or other root cause analysis, it won’t surprise you that the Swiss cheese holes aligned once again. Contributing issues: (a) the pharmacy computer system was down, causing the pharmacist to be swamped; (b) pharmacy staffing was short that day; (c) they were too busy to take breaks or even eat; (d) the technician who made the IV was distracted; and (e) a nurse called to get the IV early even though she didn’t really need it, causing everyone to rush it out without following the usual cautious procedure. ISMP likens sending the pharmacist to jail to Whack-a-Mole: “Marx notes that this child’s game is a telling depiction of how we set unrealistic expectations of perfection for each other and then unjustly respond to our fellow human beings who inevitably make mistakes. We play the game at work by writing disciplinary policies that literally outlaw human error.” The bottom line: nobody’s child is any safer now than that two-year-old was then.
The board of Phelps County Regional Hospital (MO) approves a measure that mandates physician CPOE usage.
An excellent Wired Magazine article makes a point that companies that can turn out “cheap but good enough” alternatives to expensive products can thrive, giving fresh-thinking startups a big advantage over their Goliath competitors who “believe the myth of quality” and fail to see "the rubric of accessibility”. One example is a Kaiser experiment to put high-tech offices in strip malls. “In 2007, Flanagin and her colleagues wondered what would happen if, instead of building a hospital in a new area, Kaiser just leased space in a strip mall, set up a high tech office, and hired two doctors to staff it. Thanks to the digitization of records, patients could go to this ‘microclinic’ for most of their needs and seamlessly transition to a hospital farther away when necessary. So Flanagin and her team began a series of trials to see what such an office could do. They cut everything they could out of the clinics: no pharmacy, no radiology. They even explored cutting the receptionist in favor of an ATM-like kiosk where patients would check in with their Kaiser card. What they found is that the system performed very well. Two doctors working out of a microclinic could meet 80 percent of a typical patient’s needs. With a hi-def video conferencing add-on, members could even link to a nearby hospital for a quick consult with a specialist.” Makes perfect sense to me. Wouldn’t electronic triage be a lot more efficient and convenient to all involved?
University of Central Florida launches its 20-month master’s in healthcare informatics degree.
This can’t be entirely good news: iSoft will lay off up to 100 technical employees in England, but brags it will offset that by hiring up to 50 salespeople.
Odd: PACS vendor UltraRAD gets an FDA warning for “failure to validate computer software for its intended use.” The software that drew the warning: Microsoft’s SharePoint portal and the HEAT help desk system.
The VP of human resources at St. Joseph’s Medical Center (CA) is indicted for paying no income taxes in the past 12 years, also charged with altering the hospital’s computer records to reduce her withholding.
My last poll found that the employer of 18% of respondents is using Skype for some business purpose. Pretty interesting, although now the obvious question is “for what?” New poll to your right for providers: how good are your vendors of clinical systems at notifying you of patient-endangering problems and getting them fixed fast?
The VA is soliciting proposals to build a San Diego-based Emerging Health Technologies Advancement Center. Projects to be conducted there involve identity verification, interoperability, and developing an interface for patient consent directives.
Raj Dharampuriya, one of the founders of eClinicalWorks, is interviewed by India Knowledge @ Wharton. He mentions that the company has opened a Mumbai support center to handle US customers that run 24 hours a day, such as a prison. The company will hire 500 people in the next two years, most of them in implementation and support, and will open an office next month in San Francisco. He credits the Indian culture of the founders in helping them focus on their goal of building a business and changing the delivery of healthcare. He still practices medicine part time and says he’s in the top 10% of performers according to BCBS.
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CEO donates $1 billion to create “Bell Labs of healthcare”
Investors seek HIT companies that improve provider cash flow
Organizations partner to create next-generation LIS
From Roger Murdock: “Can you figure out a way to shake the truth out of HIT vendors and consultants? It seems to me that sales and acquisitions of anything HIT have really stalled since the beginning of the year. What do you think? I know vendors are reluctant to say anything other than ‘Sales are through the roof!’, but I don’t think so.” I don’t think so either, in most cases. Some companies, especially those with big market share and some diversification, are doing OK. Most, I’m guessing, are limping along as meaningful use uncertainty and capital constraints keep customers on the sidelines, at least for now. I think you’ll see the rich and the best get richer, while those with mediocre leadership, uninspiring products, and a shrinking war chest will find it hard to keep the vampires away until daylight finally comes. Vendors, please leave a comment (anonymous is OK) about your experience – is it boom times, so-so, or bust?
From Vilma Banky: “Re: MUSC. Funny, but I can remember community hospitals and vendor executives saying that they didn’t need anything that one of those big tertiary care or academic hospitals might need. MUSC provides care across a wide spectrum of patients in the Charleston area. I just can’t imagine them not needing everything for clinical documentation or medication administration. There are relatively standard charting requirement or needs (as well as medication administration needs).” I think Frank was saying that he doesn’t necessarily want it all from a single vendor. I’ve interviewed him twice and I really like him, by the way. I can never tell how someone comes across in the written interview transcript, but I can tell you that he impresses me as honest, sincere, and respectful.
From The PACS Designer: “Re: another WebOS. WebOS platforms are gaining more popularity, and this month SourceForge has named eyeOS as project of the month. The eyeOS application was created in Spain and is an open source Web desktop that would be good for testing potential cloud applications.”
From Seeking Truth: “Re: Cigna’s decision to stop receiving electronic claims via the Emdeon clearinghouse. The battle is presumably over the fees Emdeon charges payers to receive electronic claims. Cigna doesn’t want to pay and Emdeon doesn’t want to offer a lower price. Emdeon and Cigna may resolve this price battle, or alternatively, Emdeon may ‘reclassify’ the payer as ‘non-participating’ payer (similar to Medicare and Medicaid, which are prevented from paying clearinghouse fees). This reclassification may allow Emdeon to charge providers a higher per claim charge per their contract terms with the provider. The Cigna e-mail indicates other options available to providers, but those options require a vendor change, which may involve other costs to the provider community. Obviously, the healthcare industry is being hammered to ‘reduce costs’ and this may be a payer response to that pressure. As a publically traded company, Emdeon will try to preserve their revenue, though clearinghouse charges may be difficult to justify. Since the advent of HIPAA Title II – Transactions and Code Sets (TCS), clearinghouses have had growing difficulty justifying transaction charges incurred by both providers and payers (consider how many ownership changes for Emdeon, NDC Health, Per Se’ and other clearinghouse vendors since 2002). The upcoming ANSI 5010 conversion may also influence how payers and providers exchange transactions. Dare I say, ‘never a dull moment in healthcare EDI.’”
From Ex-Cerner Guy: “Re: Waterbury to Meditech. Waterbury hosts site visits and reference calls for Cerner and WH Clinicians are happy. Could be for Patient Financials / Rev Cycle, but even then, I doubt it.” Me too. A reader’s got a line on a source there who may give us the real scoop, which I’m betting is no scoop since I doubt they’re switching.
From A Fan: “Re: vendor disclosure. We’re coming at it from the wrong angle. The real issue here is not what your vendor is preventing you from disclosing, but rather what your vendor discloses to you (whether or not it came from another client). The other thing I wonder is, of the issues that are reported to someone like Dr. Koppel, how many make it to the vendor? There’s no question vendors gear development towards sales, but as we all know, health care has arguably as much bureaucracy as government and the feedback loop from real users to vendors is not great.” I know my vendor doesn’t seem to care much about issues we report, even those with patient safety implications. Their excuse always is: (a) it’s working like we designed it, as suckily as that might well be; (b) nobody else has reported it, so it can’t be much of a problem; (c) you’re doing weird stuff, so stop it; (d) we begrudgingly acknowledge that it’s a problem, but we plan to give you an unrealistic workaround and mark it as a future development project until you simply wear down; and (e) it will take at least a year to get a quick fix into your hands, so that automatically makes it unimportant since you’re stuck with it until then. I’ll also say that none of my vendors have ever been very good at proactively letting customers know about issues reported by others, meaning you go through a ton of testing and documentation to place the neatly tied package into their laps only to be told they already knew about the problem. If your vendor is better than mine, tell me.
All Children’s Hospital (FL)will open its new building in December (a very cool set of daily construction pictures is here – check out the Time Lapse option) and will use the Pediatric Edition of the Patient Life System by GetWellNetwork.
SNOMED Terminology Solutions is offering a free course by teleconference, SNOMED Clinical Terms Basics. New courses offered: Introduction to Terminology and Classifications and Introduction to Mapping.
I’m guesting (is that a word?) at Inside Healthcare Computing with an editorial called Lessons from Shark Tank — Beware of Vendors Borrowing Money or Going Public, where I drew my inspiration from (what else?) a TV show. Here’s a snip: “It also makes me wonder how many dull, average companies got that way because they took someone’s cash, put the founders out to pasture, and set all the fun, smart ideas aside and turned themselves into a bad mutual fund run by second-tier MBA school graduates.” I also worked in a fun reference to, as I call him, Dead Billy Mays.
I guess a wheezing economy has led us to this TV news headline, which refers to temporary jobs at a McKesson H1N1 vaccine center: Swine Flu Brings Jobs to West Sacramento.
Sunquest, Mass General, and Partners will jointly develop a new generation of LIS that focuses on anatomic and clinical pathology. I’ve said for years that if you want to see inarguable success in getting benefits from IT, find yourself some lab people. It’s no accident that the first really useful and clinically-focused hospital systems were LISs, back in the day when “nursing systems” meant online requisitions (aka, “order communication”). The most advanced automation of its kind is in the big reference labs, where you see a lot of computers and not so many people handling pipettes and swabbing agar plates. Instead of complaining about automation, laboratorians embraced it, designed it, extended it (rules capability, standard interfaces, repositories, barcoding, digital imaging, FDA-regulated instrument interfaces, portable data collection, RFID), and are now on the cutting edge of genomics, clinical alerting, and data warehousing. Among all providers and ancillary departments in hospitals, labs are about the only ones that we don’t have to be embarrassed by when talking to people from other sectors that are decades ahead of healthcare. The MGH pathology informatics doc said that tomorrow’s labs will “utilize advanced diagnostic and information management technologies, such as digital pathology, molecular studies, business intelligence and service-oriented architectures to simplify and strengthen the informatics infrastructure.” That ball you saw going over the Green Monster was Sunquest smacking one out of the park in a blockbuster boost to the company.
You know when a press release says somebody “applauds” some government action, they’re smelling cash. The HIMSS Electronic Health Record Association “responded with enthusiasm” (salivation) to Uncle Sam’s decision to donate $1.2 billion in freshly printed and rapidly devaluing currency to pay for the software its members sell. According to the “About” section, membership is open only to HIMSS Corporate Members. Should a non-profit, advocacy-heavy member organization like HIMSS really be running a vendor trade group while claiming to be impartial and patient-centered? As a provider, should I be paying dues to an organization that sells my information to vendors (mailing lists, HIMSS Analytics survey results, conference information), organizes those vendors to influence government policy, and runs Webinars and sales pitches on their behalf that are aimed at getting us poor provider members to buy stuff from its far more lucrative vendor members? It’s Ladies’ Night – I’m getting cheap drinks, but only if I can stand being constantly groped by those paying full price for that privilege.
Peace Health expects to get $30 million from HITECH.
This is one of those times where I say that I’m a bit behind despite working absurd hours, so if you’ve e-mailed me about something lately, be patient – I read every e-mail and respond appropriately, but it might be a bit slow in coming (working two full-time jobs is sometimes challenging).
Another vendor heard from who does not put non-disclosure language in its contracts: Eclipsys. They join Meditech and Medsphere. So. what say you, Cerner, Epic, and McKesson?
Inga connected with one of our old pals at Noteworthy Medical Systems (they used to be a sponsor pre-CompuGroup) since a reader asked about the Cleveland office. She says it’s alive and well and nobody has moved to Phoenix, although all locations have had some restructuring.
If you don’t read HIStalk Practice, you missed this excellent piece, DrLyle’s Meaningful Discussion about Meaningful Use. Put your e-mail address on that page if you want updates when we write something new on HIStalk Practice – it has its own e-mail list separate from the HIStalk one. We have some fine sponsors, guest writers, and interviews there – like HIStalk, but more oriented toward physician practices.
Sparrow Hospital (MI) kicks off its EMR project.
A sweet deal for Misys PLC CEO Mike Lawrie: his contract requires him to be paid in dollars, so the significant drop in pound against the dollar didn’t cost him loss of several hundred thousand dollars of buying power. With a projected US 10-year deficit now up to $9 trillion, I don’t think he’ll have that problem for long.
In India, Apollo Group of Hospitals has started on its IBM-led “Health Superhighway” connectivity project. It’s also working on a unique ID number project. I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned both before, but it’s still pretty cool.
A WSJ blog on venture capital says investors are looking for opportunity at the intersection of healthcare and IT (that’s us). It credits athenahealth and its $1.3 billion market cap for increasing investor interest, also juiced by HITECH headlines. As we’ve said here before, though, investors want companies that can improve the cash flow of providers, not those trying to sell a nice-to-have product.
Dayton Children’s (OH) goes live with its $27 million Epic project.
So why isn’t this making headlines? A drug company billionaire CEO/MD is donating $1 billion of the $3 billion he made from the sale of his company “to create the Bell Labs of healthcare”. Some quotes from him: “The idea is to create a health grid that empowers the patient and the provider. This should be a public utility, basically what I call a U.S. public health grid … The idea is to actually go across the country and bring scientists, mathematicians, computer scientists, engineers, biologists, clinicians, surgeons, oncologists, pathologists, all together. And really integrate, truly integrate, information from the basic science to the bench to the clinic … So I’ve started funding and bringing together computer scientist to implement the grid, in an open architecture for the country … We have now the opportunity to jump-start health care, straight into molecular world. Or having the integrated, open-source software system that allows access to the 200-300 Legacy systems of software. So my great concern is, if we go ahead and implement a plan that just says, ‘OK, everybody just has an electronic medical record, with 200 proprietary systems, that don’t talk to each other by its nature.’” This is truly amazing, fascinating, and inspiring all at once. If anyone has a connection, I’d like to interview this guy (maybe sucking up a little in a quest to become Official Blogger of the Bell Labs of Healthcare at a significant salary).
Everyone thinks Cache’ is a healthcare-only MUMPS thing, but here’s proof that they’re wrong: a private bank for rich people selects it to run its Web-based banking system.
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HERtalk by Inga
Christiana Care Health System (DE) selects Patient Care Technology Systems’ Amelior Tracker system to automate the management and tracking of its hospital assets.
Five hundred doctors with Jefferson University Physicians (PA) will soon be live on Allscripts EHR.
The newly public Emdeon signs a 15-lease for a new data center in Nashville. Emdeon, whose IPO raised $367 million, will rent 34,200 square feet for $39,500 a month, making the lease value more than $8 million.
Thanks to Mike and those crazy guys at Compuware for sending over their latest Youtube creation. This Rockstar CIO interview is definitely worth a 41-second diversion. And since I was amused enough to watch it over and over, I’ll give the company a little pitch for a survey of hospital clinical system users they’re doing that should take about 60 seconds or less of your time.
Covenant Medical Center (IA) agrees to pay $4.5 million to settle alleged violations to the Stark Law and submitting false Medicare claims. The federal lawsuit claimed the hospital paid the five specialists “above fair market value” for their services at rates that were “commercially unreasonable.” The government claims the physicians, who referred patients to the hospital, were among the highest paid hospital-employed physicians in the entire country. Records show the doctors were each paid between $633,000 and $2.1 million.
A couple of traditional ambulatory vendors announce they are now offering HIE functionality. Greenway Medical introduces PrimeEnterprise, which enables a community of Greenway customers to share select clinical and financial data. Also, Rabbit Healthcare Systems implements the first phase of its HIE solution, going live with data exchange between McKesson’s Lynx Mobile Inventory Management System, GenPath Reference Lab, and Docuda’s ERCard patient product (it doesn’t sound like an HIE, but that’s what they say).
The Stevens Institute of Technology (NJ) plans to use a $2.8 million grant from HHS to create an electronic system to boost the care of women of color with HIV/AIDS.
The Northwest Pennsylvania AIDS Alliance was also a recipient of grant money to support their IT projects. The HRSA awarded the alliance $45,188, which will allow it to create a new computer network and permit real time access to the Lab Tracker database.
More consolidation in the medical transcription world: Transcend Services will pay $16.2 million in cash and stock to acquire Medical Dictation Services.
The National Quality Forum endorses 18 standards for measuring quality and safety metrics for over-the-counter and prescription medications.
A friend was diagnosed with the H1N1 swine flu, which got me surfing a bit, just to assess the likelihood that I, too, might end up being bedridden. Fortunately my friend is now fine and I seemingly dodged the bullet. Anyway, I found this cool flu-tracker map that allows you to see the the number of suspected and confirmed cases in your community. Or, perhaps to figure out what vacation spots to avoid.
Another ex-hospital worker is arrested for allegedly stealing personal information from patients. The former Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center (LA) employee opened 46 debit cards and filed fraudulent income tax returns. He also received $20,000 from fraudulent claims.
Researchers now believe that women with stronger thighs might be better protected from knee pain. Surely my thigh abundance is related to strength. Thus, I’m no longer going to obsess about the size of my thighs; rather, I’ll now be thankful that they are helping to preserve my articulatio genu.
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