From HISJunkie: “Re: InfoLogix. Looks like they are on their last breath. Never did think this outfit would make it. They always seemed kind of shifty to me — did the Wall Street dance, pumped it up, took it public, made a killing on stock sales … then puff!” The company, which sells an odd lot of healthcare systems ranging from RFID to ERP, defaults on loan covenants requiring it to keep $1.5 million of cash. They were supposed to either raise $12 million or sell themselves by July 31, but missed the deadline. Share price has dropped steadily over the last couple of years, from over $5 to the current $0.18 and a market cap of less than $5 million.
From CK: “Re: Lindsey Jarrell, CIO of BayCare. He was awarded the CHIME-AHA Transformational Leadership Award on Thursday at CHIME’s Fall Conference.”
Jonathan Bush in the athenahealth earnings call, acknowledging that the company is at capacity in its EMR implementations: “.. our Clinicals implementation process still has some vestiges of the early EMR thought that went into building it. EMR is a shitty way to get a practice online. It’s just garbage, and we still have that stock inside of some of our thinking. It’s almost gone … we are getting much more of our thinking oriented towards, ‘This is a clinical information network.’” He answered a question about enterprise deals with a little jab at the big HIT vendors: “We don’t have massive professional golfers on the ground ready to be buddies with these people the way some of our giant competitors do. The athena jet doesn’t fly people into the experience center to have a day of visualizing the software of the future.”
Interpreters at UNC Hospitals (NC) replace their pagers and cell phones with the iPod Touch at half the cost, also rolling out a customized version of their ServiceHub dispatching software to work over WiFi.
British parliament member Richard Bacon gets his answer on how many people actually use NHS’s Lorenzo system in the five early adopter trusts: 174 total, with a peak concurrent user count of 19, according to NPfIT. Bacon’s cost estimate of up to a million pounds per user may not be far off.
Data analysis vendor Initiate Systems (I challenge you to concisely describe what they sell after a quick glance at their Web site, but they’ll always be an EMPI vendor to me) acquires interoperability vendor Accenx. You may recall that Initiate was initially an investment and also a vendor of the CIA (identity intelligence stuff, which was big during the previous administration) and also pulled its $75 million IPO last year.
Weird News Andy, straying from his core competency of weird news, recommends this healthcare series by noted thinker Dr. Thomas Sowell. I like it that Sowell is not only brilliant, but actually writes so you can understand it (unlike the 99% of academics who lapse into obfuscatory journo-babble). “In reality, an injured, deformed, or brain-damaged baby and an eloquent lawyer can lead to jury awards in the millions of dollars, even when it is by no means clear that the doctor who delivered that baby was in any way at fault … It costs a jury nothing to ‘send a message’ warning doctors to be more careful, and the particular doctor in the case at hand probably has insurance from a company that can pay a few million dollars easily out of its billions of dollars in assets.”
The HIT Standards Committee wants to hear about your EHR experiences, good or bad. You can also vote on the submissions of others. “Today, the Health IT Standards Committee within the Department of Health and Human Services will begin an unprecedented effort to get the public’s view on how our work might ‘pull forward’ the benefits of healthcare information technology (IT). Specifically, we’re interested in uncovering new strategies to accelerate the adoption of health IT standards.” Your comments are welcome by November 19, the date on which they will be presented to the committee.
Results of my CPHIMS poll are above. Apparently, the credential doesn’t hurt but also doesn’t usually help, which is what I would have said. New poll to your right: should clinical software be treated as a medical device under FDA guidelines?
Border unrest escalates between Missouri and Kansas, bitter combatants fighting for the right to pay Cerner hundreds of millions of dollars in incentives to lure its office complex and the pro soccer team that Neal and Cliff own chunks of to their apparently economically desperate states. Right as Cerner was choosing its new BFF state, Missouri hires the commerce secretary of Kansas who was instrumental in putting the Kansas package together. Kansas officials, sustaining mortal wounds in the civic pride area, said that’s was like a baseball player switching teams during the World Series, with one adding, “We thought (Kerr’s) Number 1 goal was to bring jobs to Kansas, but find out now he was working to take his own job to Missouri.”
Doctor complaints about patient safety and an increasing backlog of delinquent charts lead Jefferson Regional Medical Center (PA) to go back to paper for some reports. They’re using Siemens, as evidenced by this cheery article about how swell it was going in 2007. You wouldn’t think chart completion would be such a big deal.
TPD has updated his list of iPhone applications.
A quiz question for you non-newbies, spawned from some random Googling: in what year did these companies first make the Healthcare Informatics Top 100: Per-Se, Applied Healthcare Informatics, Object Products, and Triple G? (hint: it was the same year that these companies were acquired and therefore fell off the list: Phamis, Amisys, Medicode, Medicus, HPR, Bukstel & Halfpenny, SDK, Rothenberg, and HCI).
The Teamsters put out an angry press release against McKesson, which sided with the minority of shareholders in continuing to allow “golden coffin” provisions to be offered without shareholder approval. Those provisions pay a lump sump to heirs when a senior executive dies, $25 to $39 million when John Hammergren meets his maker (in addition to the $80 million his family would get from his retirement plan). “Mr. Hammergren took home $29 million in total realized pay last year alone and has ample opportunities to provide for his estate. We believe shareholders should have a say in whether they’re saddled with payments made without receiving any services in return, and clearly our fellow McKesson shareholders agree.” For the first time ever, I agree with the Teamsters. Hammergren is always in the top ten lists of executives salaries, benefits, and security costs. You would think he founded the company instead of just coming on board eight years ago. Maybe Senator Grassley should look there if he wonders why healthcare is so expensive. But, if MCK shareholders would rather he get the money than them, so be it.
A hospital in Ireland reduces appointment no-shows by 44% by sending patients text message reminders.
Speaking of text messaging, StaffKnex, a nurse scheduling vendor whose product sends text messages about open shifts and schedule changes, raises $1.3 million in funding. The product originally sent only text messages, but it now converts them into voice messages for recipients who don’t like texting. Interesting: recipients can respond to the message (“I’ll work that shift”), the scheduler is alerted to the overtime cost involved, and the request is routed to the supervisor for approval.
A group of California hospitals that includes Stanford, San Francisco General, and two Kaiser facilities says it reduced medication administration errors by 88% by following best practices from the California Nursing Outcomes Coalition. I was hoping to find a list of those practices but struck out.
Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire drug company founder with a keen interest in healthcare technology, offers to back $100 million in loans to reopen MLK-Harbor in LA. He’s on the board of Dossia. I tried to line up an interview awhile back, but he passed.
Charlie McCall’s attorney says he’ll call former HBOC president and CFO Al Bergonzi to the stand. He says Bergonzi, convicted years ago, will back Charlie’s story that all the phony accounting happened without Charlie’s knowledge.
Merge Healthcare’s Q3 numbers: revenue up 16%, EPS -$0.02 vs. $0.01.
Confidential records of House ethics investigators are made public when a junior staff member working on documents from home accidentally makes them available to his peer-to-peer file sharing application.
Quality Systems’ Q2 numbers: revenue up 22%, EPS $0.41 vs. $0.37, meeting expectations on earnings and exceeding on revenue. ARRA is accelerating PM/EMR sales, the company says. Market cap for the company, including its QSI and NextGen divisions, is at $1.74 billion, of which founder and chairman Sheldon Razin holds over $300 million worth.
Odd lawsuit: drug company Amgen is sued by 14 states for offering doctors kickbacks for using the anemia drug Aranesp. The suit claims that Amgen intentionally added extra overfill to the drug vial as a “free sample” that could be billed to insurers.
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From HITGhost: “Re: Aspyra. It voluntarily delists itself from NYSE Amex.” The market cap of the LIS/PACS vendor is down to $1.4 million, so obviously it’s not worth the administrative cost to stay publicly traded.
From UKnowMe: “Re: Accenture. I hear that Accenture is eliminating its healthcare practice over the next 2-3 months and will be releasing 300-400 people. Can anyone confirm?” I haven’t heard that, but Accenture just launched the Center for Health. I never know what a company or university means when it announces a “center” that doesn’t seem to involve new people, new facilities, or anything more than a new marketing campaign and maybe a new suit or two, but it happens all the time. Here’s another one: IBM is opening a Health Analytics Solution Center in Dallas, which one of its people says is related to Dell’s Perot acquisition.
From Weird News Andy: “Re: brain surgery. Being in Britain, the patients did not have to pay through the nose for this procedure.” Surgeons are removing skull base tumors through the nose, with one patient leaving the hospital just to days later. Just in case this doesn’t impress, the newspaper article gives a graphic description of the alternative: “Previously, neurosurgeons would have had to split the facial skeleton or peel back the scalp and remove the skull on the forehead to complete the same operation.”
Athenahealth reports Q3 numbers: revenue up 37% to $49 million, EPS $0.14 vs. $0.14, missing expectations of $0.16.
In Britain, a member of Parliament wants to know the cost of iSoft Lorenzo at early adopter sites, saying the number could run anywhere from hundreds of thousands to even millions of pounds per concurrent user. Richard Bacon says Lorenzo isn’t providing value and Cerner Millennium “has caused absolute havoc.” On the other hand, the arguments seems largely political.
HIMSS continues its acquisition of other member groups, this time taking over the Medical Banking Project (HIMSS always calls it “unification with” the group it takes over). Its membership is a bit company-heavy with 163 individuals and 42 corporate members. The only employee mentioned is its founder, from whose home in Franklin, TN it is apparently run. I could find only one reference that called it a non-profit, with its own materials describing it as “a self-funded policy research firm.”
CHIME awards Ivo Nelson, chairman of Encore Health Resources, its Lifetime Achievement Award. I couldn’t find a link for the press release that someone sent me.
A radiation oncologist says Varian’s linear accelerator sales should increase in an economic recovery, but its clunky ARIA oncology EMR is a dog that might hold it back. In his words, “ARIA is far too complex and does none of the simple everyday tasks well. Obviously written by an engineer with little clinical input from the end users, ARIA is a major physician dissatisfier, as they find daily tasks much more time consuming.” Just what you want your doctor to be struggling with as they’re treating you for cancer. If you agree with his opinion, that is.
In all the Charlie McCall talk, I shamefully neglected to observe the October 18 11-year anniversary of the announcement that McKesson was buying HBOC. I editorialized about his first trial back in 2006, with this shout-out to the neglected McKesson shareholders who got burned the worst: “Among those involved were certainly some crooks and some fools, but let’s not forget those who suffered most, those McKesson lifers who had stashed away years’ worth of shares of their unexciting company’s stock instead of risking it on flaky enterprises like Microsoft and Dell. When lonely old conservative widower Dad McKesson brought home a sexy young step-mom named HBOC, she stole the kids’ piggybank.”
Cerner announces Q3 numbers: revenue down 3%, EPS $0.57 vs. $0.54, falling short of revenue estimates. System sales were down 14% and global revenue was down 23%. CERN also guided down on Q4 revenue. Neal actually chimed in at the end of the conference call.
A little recognition for HIStalk’s Founding Sponsors: Medicity and Nuance. Medicity has started a rather cool HIE Blog, I notice, that unlike the usually crappy corporate “blogs” that have “posts” written by chipper marketing types that don’t even claim to be written by executives, Medicity’s is the real deal. Included are posts from one of the smartest people I know in the biz, Robert Connely. Both companies (eScription, in the case of Nuance) were among the sponsors of HIStalk back when I was writing it with a chisel on stone, so I ought to thank them a little more often.
Allscripts used to own the domain escripts.com but let it lapse, so it went up for auction this week. There were no takers at the expected range of $10-25K. On the other hand, medicalpractice.com went for $9,000, conciergedoctor.com fetched $1,250, and h1n1fluvaccines.com was bought for $1,000.
I e-mailed the Canadian medical device licensing people about classifying EMRs as regulated devices. I appreciate this response:
In general, but not necessarily inclusive, patient management software is any software that is intended to be used to diagnose, treat, mitigate or prevent a disease, disorder or abnormal physical state, or its symptoms, in a human being. Please be advised that the classification of patient management software as a medical device and the requirement for licensing is not a new approach taken by Health Canada. Manufacturers have always been responsible to undertake their own due diligence to determine regulatory requirements. Health Canada has considered software of this nature a medical device for several years. Health Canada did not create the notice regarding patient management software with specific ‘information systems’ in mind. It has always been Health Canada’s role to review medical devices to assess their safety, effectiveness and quality before being authorized for sale in Canada.
According to the US FDA’s interpretation, a medical device is “intended for use in the diagnosis of disease or other conditions, or in the cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease, in man or other animals.” It almost sounds like software vendors in Canada recognized their own products as medical devices and had them evaluated as such, but US vendors have staunchly argued that their products aren’t covered. Software that displays or manipulates lab results, provides diagnostic suggestions, or manages drug therapy seems to fall into the broad category as laid out by FDA.
Ten software developers in Rwanda who work on the OpenMRS EMR graduate from an 11-month course called e-Health Software Development and Implementation, part of the country’s effort to transform itself into an IT hub.
The Center for Connected Health and Mass General buy a Tandberg telepresence videoconferencing system for telemedicine. I thought they dealt more with home medical sensors and monitoring, but maybe the mission has changed.
A med student and his programming partner (isn’t that who always creates medical apps?) develop iMurmur, an iPhone-based learning tool for heart murmur. It has sold 15,000 copies to users in 35 countries, pushing its price from 99 cents to $2.99 and leading to its acquisition by a digital stethoscope company.
The King of Jordan hosts hosts a public demo of its VistA system, implemented by Perot and the non-profit Electronic Health Solutions. Jordan is creating a VistA educational program to make itself self-sustainable.
Jobs: Director of Business Development, Clinical Application Educators, Cerner Remote PathNet Support.
Half of the doctors responding to a British survey say they are too busy typing into the computer to look patients in the eye. One doctor said, “The demands of the patient’s agenda, the Government’s agenda and the requirement that everything I hear, say and do must be meticulously recorded make for an extremely crowded consultation.”
John at Chilmark Research finds interesting facts about the Dossia PHR. After they parted ways with Omnimedix and hooked up with the Indivo platform from Children’s Boston, they found that Indivo wouldn’t scale, so they had to rewrite it. John outlines other problems they’re having. One I’ll add is that PHRs aren’t exactly lighting up the skies and Google and Microsoft are formidable competitors for what little interest there is.
Odd lawsuit: welfare recipients in Michigan file a class action lawsuit against the state for not paying for adult dental benefits. The state is broke, of course.
Also going broke: California, which paid $2.1 billion in overtime to state employees last year. One state hospital nurse made $733K in overtime in a five-year period, while two other nurses at the same hospital made $132K each per year, twice their annual salary.
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HERtalk by Inga
The US Postal Service finds CalOptima’s missing CDs that contained unencrypted personal data on 68,000 members. The package landed in a secure postal facility in Atlanta and the disks appear to be intact.
GE Healthcare’s Medical Quality Improvement Consortium (MQIC) is submitting anonymous clinical data to the CDC to provide H1N1 tracking information. MQIC is a repository of de-identified clinical data captured from GE’s Centricity EMR users. Every 24 hours, MQIC is forwarding updated data that’s been collected from 14 million record patient records. Great use of EMR data, though I wonder if the patients (and/or providers) are aware their de-identified clinical data is being used for this purpose. Or if they need to know.
Would you be more willing to travel to Thailand for surgery if you knew the hospital was using Microsoft HealthVault to document your treatment? Me neither. Hospital officials at the Bumrungrad International Hospital in Bangkok seem to think it will add to their appeal. I believe the $5,000 knee replacement that would cost $50,000 at home is still the bigger draw.
St. Paul Eye Clinic (MN) selects SRS EMR for its 15-provider group.
API Healthcare announces that seven new hospitals have signed on for its human capital management solutions.
El Camino Hospital (CA) deploys Web performance monitoring solutions from Gomez, Inc. The performance and availability monitoring applications will concentrate on El Camino’s recently launched public Web site and its physician application site.
Ingenious Med reports that nine new organizations have added its inpatient practice management system over the last three months.
I love my iPhone, so I was not surprised to learn that 99% of all iPhone users are happy with their smart phones. In fact, we are two times more likely than BlackBerry users to say we are very satisfied. I’m not sure I can think of any other consumer product with a 99% satisfaction rating.
Speaking of iPhones, Harvard Medical School launches an application to update consumers with the latest H1N1 flu virus news, including tips for shaking hands or other body parts to avoid the spread of virus. (Do people seriously do this?)
One last iPhone comment: here’s a nice list of healthcare applications, complete with product summaries and pricing.
GE expands its healthymagination campaign, launching a new e-health business unit that is focused on connectivity among providers, hospitals, and patients. While the announcement suggests that GE is jumping into a brand new world, the core products sound familiar: LifeSensor PHR, Centricity HIE, a clinical portal, and master patient index technology. I guess GE wasn’t too concerned over the use of “eHealth”, even though the folks in Ontario sort of sleazed up the name.
Allina Hospitals collaborates with CVS’s MinuteClinics to align clinical care operations and medical oversight. Allina and MinuteClinic will also develop interfaces between their two EMR systems.
Regional Medical Center Anniston (AL) selects ProVation MD software for cardiology procedure documentation and coding.
A Florida man opens his mailbox and finds an envelope containing medical records of over 70 people. The full chain of events is unclear, though a postal employee or two seem partly at fault. Just a reminder that while we might one day have fully secure EMRs, we’ll never rid the world of stupid (lazy?) people.
Send Inga a scary note
Parker Hinshaw is CEO and co-founder of maxIT Healthcare.
What made you move from the provider side to running companies?
I’m a service-oriented kind of a thinker. It always felt like one of my strengths was surrounding myself with really talented people because I need people around me that could make me look good, I suppose. It was successful for me working in hospitals.
It seemed like there was just a real need for that out in the marketplace. The software vendors always struggle with how they keep their costs down. They end up hiring a lot of young people who take awhile to really be productive. Also, generally speaking, they don’t have a real hospital experience, so they’re learning on the job. And they’re overpriced.
So when I looked at it, it seemed like there was just a real opportunity to do two things. One was to create opportunities for people who ran up against the ceiling at a hospital, as a really good technical person or functional application person. You can get bored at some point in time if you’re really somebody who needs to be learning new things all the time. In a hospital, you’re going to run out of new things to do.
It’s just interesting that you can hire folks that are underpaid at a hospital, pay them better, and still have a really positive, wholesome, healthy culture that you get at a hospital. Most people that work in healthcare are all about taking care of the patient in the end. That’s what drives us all, and the opportunity to do that even on a larger scale.
It’s those two things, I guess, and just a desire to create a company culture that’s very, very positive, because I’ve worked in many that weren’t. [laughs] It just seemed like if you were spending that much time working for someone, it ought to be a good thing. If you were going to spend that much time going to work, you should feeling good about going to work.
So I left the provider side and went to the software companies. That was bizarre. They were just so political, so aggressive in their treatment of people, so callous. It just didn’t work for me at all. I had to find something in between the two, I guess, in the end. This seemed to be a good thing.
Where were you working?
I spent time working for Compucare in the early 80s when they were going from an outsourcing firm — which is what I thought I was doing — (laughs) to becoming a software company. That was during the Baxter years. Baxter had acquired five good companies and messed them all up, in my opinion. [laughs]
Are you gearing up for new business because of ARRA?
Yes. To me, it’s just the next wave. I’ve been around a long time now. When you do something for 35 years, you start to see the patterns. If it hadn’t been this, it would have been something else, is my view of it.
This one seems like a really good one, though. I think this one is very exciting, because those of us who’ve been around a while always figured something had to change in a major scale, because we’ve been doing everything the same way, in reality, from the beginning of IT in healthcare.
I think it’s time. I don’t know how it’s going to shake out. I don’t think anybody does. But something had to change, and I don’t think they’re doing this because there’s not a problem. I’m very excited about it.
We’re also starting to get involved in the payer space primarily for those reasons, because something’s got to change. It seemed like a good opportunity in several different areas. It’s not just the hospitals and the ambulatory centers. It seems like a great opportunity to me.
So what type of things are you looking to do in the payer space?
It’s really very similar. It’s got an IT bent to it. It’s really all about the systems, change. You really look at what ours are about; it’s all about facilitating change. So most of the time IT is in the depths of all of that.
We fundamentally track the customer base of the software vendors because of what we were talking about before. The software vendors, because of the way they are reimbursed with delivery points ultimately, there is a parting of ways in the goals and objectives of the customer versus the goals and objectives of the software firm. That’s where firms like ours come in and fill that void, because they need to go on to closing their next deal and make sure the people keep their pipeline full.
Then they turn it over to the service organization of the software company. Then you’ve got all those dynamics that we were talking about before, the politics of the organization, those things, the churn that goes on with people trying to cover more than they could possibly handle. Those are the profit requirements of a for-profit company.
How does a consulting firm add value other than simply marking up the hourly rate of its consultants?
I think the way that we add value is that the IT side of the work that we do is almost secondary. What we really have is clinicians and financial folks first who happen to be really good with IT. I think the way that we really make a difference is — and hopefully, what we’re doing is hiring the cream of the crop, right? I mean, if we hire those people that hit the ceiling in a hospital because they’re better and they need more work, that kind of thing, then hopefully we’re better than the folks that are traditionally happy and satisfied staying at a hospital level.
So it’s really all about knowledge transfer. I talk to my folks all the time. “Your job, really, is to work yourself out of the job in every engagement that we do.” It’s all about knowledge transfer, right? If you do that really well, then that hospital that you’re working for is going to give you another job to work yourself out of.
So perpetual knowledge transfer is really what this is all about. Elevating the skill sets of the people in the hospital that use those products and understanding it.
People get satisfied doing the same job over and over and over again. Some people do. When they have to change and do something different, it takes a special person, I think, to help them understand that they can still get to that comfort zone that they’re used to. But it’s got to change. You have to move forward. Those people that like the process of change need to help those that don’t. I think that’s where we fit.
You’ve got eyes and ears all over the hospital IT business. What are the most interesting and innovative things being done out there right now?
I think there’s an awful lot of exciting things happening in cardiology, radiology. Lot of the clinical departments that we’re seeing a real need for that really aren’t the traditional spots that firms like ours work in. It’s usually about nursing or lab or pharmacy, all the traditional things that we spend most of our time on.
But right now, we’ve decided that what our role could be as a transitional thing and also to make work interesting for people, is to do departmental management consulting. I wouldn’t call it strategic in any way, but really it’s a lot about helping departments in a hospital do assessments, figure out how to better utilize the equipment that they have, improve on the work flows, all those kinds of things.
To me, it’s those kinds of areas where the technology is really improving, and we’re trying to figure out how to adapt to that and then tie it in to the traditional information system. It’s all related to the EMR; that’s where it’s all heading. Those areas that we may not even have thought about historically. “What’s going on in the OR?” “What’s going on in the ER?” and all those things.
Who do you admire in this industry?
Fundamentally, I’m an entrepreneurial guy, so I would say people that find an angle that’s different and new that really adds value, and they do it not because they want to make a bunch of money, but because they want to provide a service. The money will come as a result.
I admire people who have a real passion to do something that benefits us all, and in the end, they made it. Most entrepreneurial guys are still thinking about the dollars, but it should be secondary to providing a service that makes it valuable so you can make a dollar.
I’ll tell you one person that I really have learned to admire, and I find her to be really different — it’s Judy Faulkner. She has taken a stance that is kind of counter-culture to what the typical software vendors are about relative to customer service. She has happy customers. It’s very hard to find software companies in this industry that have happy customers.
I have admired Jim Reep, who founded First Consulting. I thought he created a really positive culture, and really fit that description that I mentioned earlier. When he went away, I think bad things happened in that company. [laughs] I guess I admire leaders fundamentally, people who see something, pursue it.
I also admire people who do it without somebody else’s money. The people who go to private equity firms and borrow — I’m a bootstrap thinker, I suppose. Those people who do it for the right reasons. That’s what happens if you’ve got a bunch of investors involved and you borrowed their money. Now, all the sudden, you’re more worried about keeping them happy than you are about your customer and taking care of your employees. So people who take that approach, I admire.
It’s always been exciting to me. I’ve always felt good about being in healthcare. I’ve felt very blessed to be somebody that was lucky enough to fall into the IT side of the industry that’s always doing the right things for the right reasons. Not always competently. [laughs] But it’s always an interesting place to be.
From Midnight Oil: “Re: Australia. The South Australian Department of Health has posted a notice on its Web site for a Vendor Conference on November 13. The RFP, to be issued in mid-December, is for a full EPAS (enterprise Patient Administration System aka HIS) and an EHR, plus Billing, Mental Health, Oncology and ED as optional components.”
From The PACS Designer: “Re: Windows 7. TPD was thinking of buying Windows 7 to load on a laptop, but now will wait based on what PC World had to say about it. It appears that the install procedure has several flaws in it, thus frustrating buyers of this new operating system. A major flaw is not recognizing the product number after entering it as instructed by the program!” I think many of the problems came from that student discount version that I have a coupon for, which had some kind of snafu with Digital River’s download package. In the mean time, I installed a Snow Leopard upgrade the other day without doing anything more than starting it and checking back a few minutes later to make sure it finished. And unlike the XP-to-Win7 “upgrade,” it did not require a fresh install. Advantage: Apple.
From HISFan32: “Re: Waterbury Hospital. Despite having spent mucho dinero on a consultant over the last five months to evaluate Meditech, WH has decided to retain Cerner on a RHO basis. Why they wasted money on this foolish endeavor is beyond reason. They had only had a successful install of Cerner only a few years ago.”
SRSsoft of Montvale, NJ has become a Platinum Sponsor of HIStalk, which Inga and I appreciate very much. The company offers a hybrid EMR (“specifically designed for high-performance, high-volume, high-revenue practices”) that focuses on workflow, not physician data entry, and thus enjoys a 100% adoption rate. Their site contains 106 testimonials that include the practitioner’s name and location (don’t you hate anonymous product testimonials that you can’t check?) CEO Evan Steele’s blog, EMR Straight Talk, is here. I’m impressed with the executive team’s credentials (lots of Ivy Leaguers, a former naval aviator who served in Vietnam, and even a sales EVP who has a Harvard MBA). Thanks to those folks for supporting HIStalk. I was going to take their six-question Stimulus IQ Test, but I was afraid I’d do poorly and would have to disclose that fact.
The Coalition for Patient Privacy urges HHS (warning: PDF) to repeal its HITECH interim rule covering breach notification, complaining that organizations involved in a breach don’t have to notify anyone if, in their judgment, those people whose information was compromised won’t be harmed by the exposure.
Professor Jon Patrick of the University of Sydney says the government should cultivate development of local open source expertise instead of importing proprietary software that wasn’t designed for Australia’s health system. I asked if he’d heard more about why the University pulled his article critical of an ED system implementation offline last week, but he still doesn’t know.
McKesson announces Q2 numbers after the bell: revenue up 2%, EPS $1.13 vs. $1.19, which beat expectations. Shares are up a little in after hours trading.
Speaking of McKesson, former HBOC chairman Charlie McCall is on trial again in San Francisco. The US attorney claims Charlie and general counsel Jay Lapine cooked the books to inflate revenue right before McKesson insanely bought HBO & Company for $14.5 billion in 1998 (nearly 40 times even the phony earnings), only to see its own shareholder value drop 48% just months later when the house of cards collapsed. McKesson shares still haven’t recovered from the mini-Enron, priced today lower than in their pre-HBOC heyday in 1998 (not to mention the nearly $1 billion McKesson paid in 2005 to settle shareholder lawsuits). Charlie’s mouthpiece told the jury today that his man was wronged by his trusted lieutenants, who conspired without his knowledge to write side letters and recognize phony revenue. That mouthpiece, of course, has an impeccable track record of defending those accused of white collar crime, including former labor secretary Ray Donovan, former agriculture Mike Espy, former Cheney chief of staff Scooter Libby, junk bond king Michael Milken, and the corporations behind the Exxon Valdez environmental disaster. He got Charlie and Jay an acquittal on one charge and a mistrial on the others in 2006, so here they are again in a retrial. Not to be pessimistic, but I feel sorry for a barely-six-figures assistant attorney who has to butt heads with Charlie’s uber-expensive dream team.
Cerner and Eclipsys are the final two vendors being considered to implement clinical systems for Sidra Medical and Research Center in Qatar. It must feel odd not to see Epic sitting across the table.
Speaking of Cerner, Hospital de Denia is the first in Spain to move to a single-vendor EMR, using Millennium.
Vocera ships its first smart phone, developed by Motorola and running Windows Mobile. It supports dual-band wireless networking and supports a fixed number and role-based permissions. It does not look like a Star Trek communicator, however, unlike the original Vocera badge device.
The Wall Street Journal lists the HIT vendors that were sent Senator Chuck Grassley’s letter asking for contract and product defect information: 3M, Allscripts, Cerner, Cognizant, CSC, Eclipsys, Epic, McKesson, Perot, and Philips. I’m not sure why some of those companies were included since they don’t sell inpatient EMRs (and what about Meditech, QuadraMed, Siemens, IntraNexus, Healthland, etc.?) Maybe he actually got complaints about these specific 10, which seems unlikely. This will be fascinating to watch in any case – what will the fiercely independent and reclusive Judy Faulkner do? And will the CEOs make nice long enough to ask each other whether they plan to comply and to what extent?
Thanks to Health Data Management writer Joe Goedert, who credited HIStalk in his story about the CalOptima data breach. Lots and lots of press get their ideas and sometimes their actual stories from here, but it’s uncommon for them to give credit. He and I have swapped e-mails a couple of times and I consider him first rate.
A reader forwarded a technical alert from McKesson that warns Horizon Clinical Infrastructure clients that hard-coded passwords were posted on the Internet. I found the document refreshingly free of mumbo jumbo as it listed some user actions that hopefully aren’t new to anyone technical since they are basic auditing stuff: check your firewall, disable TELNET, enable SSH, and change system-level and Oracle passwords. I’m no security expert, but the exposure seems minimal — any bad guy would need to penetrate the firewall and get into the application or database server to do any harm (the passwords don’t work from the application, I assume). Most interesting to me was the reminder that McKesson’s documentation is “Produced in Ireland,” as it says at the bottom of the notice. That always strikes me as both odd and fascinating. I may need to inspect the facility first-hand at someone else’s expense to augment Senator Grassley’s inquiry.
A cardiac hospital in Malaysia goes live with the myCare2x open source hospital information system. You can run the demo system live here, although it didn’t work for me in Firefox but did in Chrome.
Some nice news on QuadraMed CPR, which got four new sales. Everybody always forgets about them as a clinical systems player, but in the last system selection I was involved with (admittedly years ago), our nurses and I liked their product better than those of the competition (although it was Per-Se Patient1 at the time and we weren’t sold on the company). Shares are close to a 52-week high.
Kaiser Permanente will start a pilot in January in which it will exchange patient information electronically with systems from the VA and DoD (that comment is way down the page in the next-to-last paragraph of the story, but I don’t think I’ve heard it until now).
iPhone clinical alert vendor Voalte is profiled in its hometown paper in Sarasota, FL, along with its customer Sarasota Memorial Hospital. The reporter noticed the pink pants the Voalte people wore at HIMSS.
Dossia announces that its PHR can now manage information for both employees and their dependents.
The Wii Fit is the first computer game to be endorsed by British government, specifically the NHS. Nintendo will use the NHS’s Change4Life logo in its advertising. I can say first hand that it’s amazing, especially now that other really good fitness software has come out that uses the Wii console and the balance board (Wii Fit Plus, Gold’s Gym Cardio Workout, Active Life Outdoor Challenge, My Fitness Coach, etc.)
Odd lawsuit: Nevada’s controlled substance prescription database flags a woman buying large quantities of hydrocodone and Soma, so the Board of Pharmacy sends letters to 14 Las Vegas pharmacies warning them that she could be a drug abuser. A year later, the impaired woman runs over a motorist changing a tire on a highway shoulder, killing him and seriously injuring another man who was helping him. The survivor and family of the deceased man are suing Walmart, Walgreens, CVS, Rite Aid, and other pharmacies, claiming they shouldn’t have filled her prescriptions after receiving the state’s warning. Drugstores say they’ll get sued by both sides: for refusing to fill questionable prescriptions or for filling them for someone who later causes harm.
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Peeking doesn’t pay, as evidenced by the federal sentences handed down to three Arkansas healthcare workers. A physician and two hospital workers are ordered to pay fines and are sentenced to probation after improperly accessing the medical records of a slain TV reporter. The doctor received the harshest judgment, which included one year of probation, a $5,000 fine, and 50 hours of community service educating professionals on HIPAA.
Carroll Hospital Center (MD) implements multiple applications from Lawson Software, including enterprise financial management and asset management suites, Lawson Business Intelligence, and HR management suite.
Picis says that over the last two quarters, six large IDNs have contracted for the Picis LYNX E/Point revenue management solution. Picis also announces it has extended its relationship with The Sullivan Group, a provider of risk management and performance solutions for EDs. Under the multi-year agreement, the companies will integrate the Sullivan Group’s risk management content with Picis ED PulseCheck.
I normally wouldn’t mention a news piece like the article above, posted on Foxnews.com. However, the headline caught my attention and I think some of Mr. H’s grammar and spelling snarkiness must be rubbing off on me.
Blood Bank of Alaska selects Mediware’s LifeTrak Technology for blood donor management.
Virtua, a multi-hospital healthcare system in New Jersey, selects NextGen EHR for its Medical Group network. In addition to implementing NextGen across its 23 locations, Virtua will offer NextGen EHR to its community-based physicians.
Congratulations to all the employers named to Modern Healthcare’s 100 Best Places to Work in Healthcare. Sadly, HIStalk came in at #101 and thus failed to be mentioned. But, Mr. H says it was an honor to be nominated.
When it opens its doors next year, The Roy and Patricia Disney Family Cancer Center (CA) will use the latest oncology products from Elekta. This includes EMR, workflow management systems, and treatment planning.
The Brooklyn Hospital Center (NY) contracts for several Eclipsys Sunrise applications.
Privately held Sunquest Information Systems reports that its fiscal year 2009 (ending May 31) was the most successful one in its 30-year history. Its FY2010 first quarter was also strong, with sales up 30% from the previous year.
Rhode Island becomes the first state to use e-prescribing records to track the spread of swine flu statewide. A brilliant example of using HIT to improve patient care (although the tracking is based on prescriptions of Tamiflu and other antivirals). Maybe things are different in Rhode Island, but in many parts of the country, physicians are reluctant to prescribe antivirals, so maybe the data isn’t all that helpful (although the directional trend may be valid). Still, I like that someone is at least trying to use that data for more than tracking prescribing trends.
New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson names the NM Health Information Collaborative the state’s official HIE. The organization will partner with MedPlus to create the HIE infrastructure to connect with physicians.
Rex Healthcare (NC) introduces Rex Express Care urgent care clinic wait meter for smart phones. This handy application (with a long name) provides instant wait time information for each of Rex’s three urgent care clinics. Great idea , but more importantly, it has helped me come up with an even better application. You know how the airlines will send you a text or e-mail telling you the status of your flight? How about an application that sends a similar note saying whether or not your doctor is running on time? Just think how handy it would be to know your doctor is 30 minutes behind so you have extra time to keep working or to stop off for a Starbucks. I’m sure it could be automated to some sort of appointment scheduling system. Feel free to steal my idea as long as you call it the Inga Meter.
The New York eHealth Collaborative appoints David L. Whitlinger its new executive director. The organization also announces it has received a $35 million grant from the State of New York to support the NYeC’s efforts to advance HIT implementations.
Regular HIStalk reader Jon Wikstrom sent over a note saying he has posted an album to Pandora. “You were the first person who ever made me aware of Pandora, though there seems to be wide recognition of it now whenever I mention it to someone.” I guess I mentioned Pandora a year or more ago, when I first set up IngaRadio (which is still out there, by the way.) Jon’s got some sweet vocals (in a James Taylor-ish way) with some jazzy influence. It may not be edgy enough for those favoring Mr. H’s picks, but I’d give it a thumbs up.
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