From Lizzie Borden: “Re: University of Rochester. I hear they just signed with Epic systems for their EMR solution. What are they installing and are they hiring? Interestingly, I also know that Buffalo Medical Group has acted proactively and offered their Epic analysts a $$ incentive to stay with them instead of fleeing to U of R.” URMC’s Web site says Epic says contract negotiations “were finalized in September 2009.” It also says that they’ve had to scale the $49 million project back, but still hope to nab $8 million of taxpayer ARRA money. It’s the full-blown inpatient system, apparently, expected to go live in the fall of 2011. Details here.

From Topper Harley: “Re: trial. Not too nice of the doctor!” An HIT company executive goes on trial this week, facing multiple felony charges for an alleged road rage incident. I initially did a detailed write-up complete with links and accident scene photos, but I reconsidered for several reasons: (a) he’s been charged, but not found guilty, which means he’s innocent; (b) he is an HIStalk reader and I’ve swapped e-mails with him in the past, so it would be needlessly painful for him to read the story here and know that his peers are doing the same; (c) I could easily wreck his career unintentionally just by giving the unproven details a spotlight. If and when he’s found guilty of something major, I’ll provide details. Until then, I’ll express non-specific sympathy for all involved and my hope that justice prevails.

From Luke O’Scyte: “Re: Ontario. It is called a learning opportunity, or perhaps a teachable moment, how not to spend one billion dollars. The Ontario government, through arrogance and folly, decided that they new best how to pick the market winners, run their own networks, decide on which technologies to approve and which to ignore. So how did that work out for them? See the auditor’s report (warning: PDF).” It’s full of juicy details, like that eHealth Ontario’s CEO paid a recruiter $1 million upfront to fill 15 management positions; one successful contractor’s bid was five times more than a comparable one and more than quadruple the budgeted amount; and $800 million of the $1 billion spent to date was for a private network that “remains significantly underutilized because as yet there is insufficient health-related information on it.” in other words, they jumped all over their equivalent of NHIN without first getting provider EMRs up and running to populate it. 

UCSF finally confirms what I reported in August as a rumor (supported by a reader-forwarded copy of an internal department e-mail): UCSF has halted (temporarily, at least) its $50 million GE Centricity project. You’d never know there was trouble in paradise if you Google UCSF+Centricity: the rags and press releases were making it sound like a match made in heaven. Thanks to SF Business Times Chris Rauber for giving HIStalk and rumor reporter UCSFWatch credit.

Here’s the next gossipy tidbit provided to me by one of those UCSF rumor reporters: as soon as UCSF’s lawyers get them out of their GE contract, they’re going with Epic. Unverified.

Cisco takes its Vision Van (or whatever you call a demo trailer) to Auburn Memorial Hospital (NY), showing off technologies such as videoconferencing and mobile caregiver communication.

Eclipsys announces scheduled events for its EUN conference in Dallas next week. ARRA’s on the list, not too shockingly, along with the customer knowledge sharing tool Eclipsys Outcomes Toolkits and physician sessions on its PeakPractice ambulatory EHR.

Welcome back to HIStalk Gold Sponsor MedMatica Consulting Associates of Chester Springs, PA, a software and technology implementation firm (Epic, Eclipsys, Siemens, Meditech, Cerner, etc.) The company provides HISAssist support plans (live, telephone-based, or Web-based) for those vendor products as well. I’m blessed with amazing sponsor retention, so having MedMatica come back soothes my overwhelming feelings of inadequacy at least temporarily.

McKesson announces that all of its physician EMRs can now use Bright Note Technology. I didn’t really understand from the press release what it does, exactly, but it’s some kind of multiple input/single search capability for patient data. I found this demo on YouTube, showing a doctor using speech recognition to dictate a single SOAP note that parses out the information into specific chart data elements.

Inga’s update from MGMA today is on HIStalk Practice.

GetWellNetwork announces GetWell Town, an interactive patient care system designed for pediatric patients, and its first customer, Walt Disney Pavilion at Florida Hospital for Children. It includes care content, child life programming, entertainment options, parental controls, pediatric education, and pediatric pathways.

A summer intern (Harvard-graduated lawyer, Stanford PhD candidate) at IBM Research comes up with an encryption breakthrough that may have great potential for protecting health information, especially with cloud computing. Homomorphic encryption, formerly viewed as impossible by cryptographers because it takes a lot of computing horsepower, allows running calculations on encrypted data without actually decrypting it. IBM hired him, of course.

Listening: My Dying Bride, an old favorite doom metal band that I’d forgotten about.

Weird News Andy characterizes this story as both weird and sad. An 31-year-old English veteran of the war in Iraq dies after receiving cancerous lungs transplanted from a donor who had been a heavy smoker. The tumor wasn’t discovered until months after the transplant, during which time its growth accelerated, fueled by the routine post-transplant immunosuppressive drugs the patient was taking. The delay in noticing the tumor was blamed on poor communication among the radiologists and doctors involved. The cancerous lung made him ineligible for a second transplant since, under hospital rules, he had become a cancer patient.

NIH gives Kaiser $54 million of ARRA/taxpayer money to conduct biomedical and personalized health research using HealthConnect.

RelayHealth announces that 50 health systems and hospitals have contracted to join its RelayHealth Network, which connects 20,000 doctors, 90% of retail pharmacies, and 52 reference labs, all of which automatically update 7.6 million shareable personal health records for HIE connectivity and care coordination. We may need to talk to a participating site since that sounds pretty interesting.

Allscripts announces that it’s the first EMR vendor to integrate its systems with Intuit’s Quicken Health Bill Pay, which gives patients an easily understood statement and the ability to pay online. Doctors get paid 18 days faster on average. Everybody seems to like the Quicken app, which I first wrote about in early 2006 and talked up as potentially a big deal, although it seemed to take a long time to see the light of day.

Also announced: Allscripts will offer its practice customers point-of-care patient payments via mPay Gateway, which calculates patient responsibility and obtains payment authorization before the patient leaves the office. Inga interviewed mPay Gateway CEO Brian Beutner just last week on HIStalk Practice. We asked him the obvious question – are patients really willing to pay before leaving the office? He says 90% of them will. “They like the fact that there are no more unpleasant surprises and the simplicity of taking care of the payment up front, rather than having to wade through numerous statements from the doctor and comparing them to the multiple EOBs and other confusing insurance documents.”

Check out TPD’s list of iPhone applications for healthcare. If you know of others, leave a comment on that article and he will expand his list. Thanks to TPD for putting the list together and for his ongoing contributions to HIStalk.

Dave Roberts, the VP of government relations for HIMSS and former mayor of Solana Beach, CA is running for Congress.

A reader e-mailed to ask if I’d heard of QlikView, with which she was impressed in using it on a consulting project. I hadn’t, so I Googled. It’s a very cool BI tool (check the online demos) and supposedly the fastest growing BI company in the world (which probably means Oracle, IBM, or Microsoft will be buying them next week, unfortunately). I noticed that Bassett Healthcare was listed as one of its healthcare customers, so I Googled yet again to find that apparently Surgical information Systems uses it for its SIS Analytics offering (PDF case study here).

Two Johns Hopkins pediatricians and informatics faculty members launch Applied Clinical Informatics, an official online publication of the International Medical Informatics Association and AMDIS that hopes to “bridge the gap between visionary design and successful and pragmatic deployment.”

The VA awards a claims processing contract worth up to $60 million to VistA integrator Document Storage Systems.

Cedars-Sinai admits that it overdosed 206 CT scan patients with eight times the intended dose of radiation because of  “a misunderstanding about an embedded default setting applied by the machine.”

Dell, fresh off its Perot buy, will be looking for more healthcare acquisitions, says Michael Dell.

UVA Medical Center confirms that it will implement Epic, which I speculated in February (I’m not psychic – if a hospital has more than 400 beds, I always guess Epic and I’m usually right). UVA was the hospital that got a lot of press (some of it snarky) recently when it said it would hire scribes instead of repurposing busy doctors, so now we know which EMR they’ll be typing into.

University of Central Florida gets preliminary HHS approval to start a health technology regional extension center and apply for $8 million in stimulus money.

An Oklahoma hospice owner fears that reimbursement cuts and government-encouraged EMRs will drive him out of business. “One of the things they talk about is electronic medical records, which has great applications for medical doctors’ offices, but for hospices, that doesn’t help us at all.”

Philips posts surprisingly good Q3 numbers, with an expected loss of $66 million actually turning into a $258 million profit. Healthcare margins dropped to 9.6% and sales were down 4%, however.

You would think PHR vendor MyMedicalRecords is a huge enterprise given endless press releases and PR efforts. Not so: the quarterly revenue of its money-losing parent company was $221K.

Virginia Tech gets a $28 million NIH grant for infectious disease research at its Virginia Bioinformatics Institute.

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Submit your article of up to 500 words in length, subject to editing for clarity and brevity (please note: I run only original articles that have not appeared on any Web site or in any publication and I can’t use anything that looks like a commercial pitch). I’ll use a phony name for you unless you tell me otherwise. Thanks for sharing!

Health 2.0
By DrLyle

I attended the second day of Health 2.0. Although geared towards consumers and the Internet, I thought it was worthwhile for any HIT junkie. Here are a few points of interest.

It was a good review of what the big guys are doing (Google, MS, WebMD).

• Basically all three want to be the "holders" of your health data (e.g. your demographics, med list, lab values …).
• While both Google and MS want to also allow anyone else to create PHRs or apps that can use that data, WebMD wants to be the only one who can use the data they hold. 
• Business models — unsure on Google and MS, but I assume it is something about either company marketing or eyeballs. WebMD obviously does advertising, but they also can sell their system as a private label for employers to give their employees (and they said employees can access their data on the regular WebMD site if they leave the company). 
• Overall, I think Google and MS will be more successful since they seem to have more openness, but they are not mutually exclusive. You can have information in both, and then have a third party creating a PHR or apps that sucks in data from both of them. My hunch is that WebMD will eventually interoperate with them and focus more on the end user applications than on being data storage experts.

Seeing new/interesting startups in the Internet space.

• Most are consumer focused, mostly enthusiastic souls trying to build a site that provides new information, niche communities, or consolidated approaches to healthcare. 
• Some business plans rely on employer financing (e.g. wellness sites), while others seem to be just interested in getting eyeballs for now, with plans for ads or an upsell (e.g. extra functionality) later. 
• Particularly interesting ones included AccessDNA (helps a consumer pick out which company to use for gene banking and analysis). TrialReach (a nice improvement on the typical search for research trials). iGuard (give them your medication list, and they will email you if any FDA or similar warnings come out). RelateNow (focused exclusively on the niche of parents and providers taking care of autistic children). ScanAvert (you tell them your meds and dietary issues, and then use your phone to take a picture of a UPC code and it will tell you about interactions, etc. …) 

Keas.

The NYT article paints an amazing picture where a patient would bring in data (some manual, some automatically from pharmacies, payors…) and the Keas system would create personalized "Care Plans" that tell the patient how to get healthier. Furthermore, they see a world where any provider or company could create Care Plans within their system and then sell them to patients like iPhone apps (e.g. one of my patient might want to buy the Cleveland Clinic Diabetes Plan, while another might want to buy my group’s Diabetes Plan, and yet another will buy my own DrLyle’s Diabetes Plan).   

So I was excited to see Adam Bosworth launch Keas at the Health 2.0 conference. Unfortunately, I was underwhelmed (as were many others whom I spoke with about it). Basically, it looked like a fancier version of the same old stuff that eHealth wannabees have been pushing for years (providing personalized advice based on your data). Specifically, their Care plans seemed very basic — "eat better by doing ABC, and exercise more by doing this XYZ…  and we’ll send you three reminders a day!"  

In other words, they seem to be naïvely falling into the trap of thinking that patients are just looking for advice and knowledge. What they really need is motivation. They know they need to lose weight, so it is unlikely that a Web site telling them they need to lose weight will make it easier for them.  Additionally, the screen is quite cluttered. He seems to be using his MS roots rather than his Google ones.

However, I would not underestimate Adam and his company. The general concept is sound and they must know they have to figure out "patient motivation" eventually, so one to watch.  

 

Lyle Berkowitz, MD is a practicing internal medicine physician, a healthcare IT consultant (www.DrLyle.com), and founder of the Szollosi Healthcare Innovation Program (www.TheSHIPHome.org). He blogs regularly at The Change Doctor (http://drlyle.blogspot.com/).

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TPD’s List of iPhone Apps – Update #4
By The PACS Designer

Input from HIStalkers and some further research helped expand the number of iPhone applications for this updated list. Newly added applications are marked with an (N).

Hopefully the expanded list provided with this update will get more users of iPhones the education needed to do better in their daily job performances.

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From Defiant One: “Re: University of Missouri. Don’t know if you had heard, but the CIO position there was also outsourced to Cerner. That’s a really bonehead move considering the amazing progress they have made since a Hunter turnaround in 2003. They won the CHIME collaboration award and now give away the position to Cerner.” Inga is trying to connect with MU, which is what they call themselves for some reason (odd: UM calls itself MU just like University of Kansas Medical Center calls itself KU Medical Center – are dyslexics running the Midwest?)

From Lou Mannheim: “Re: athenahealth. Maybe it got lost this week with their buy of Anodyne, but did anyone else find it interesting that athenahealth is now working with IBM for their BPO? Vague filing and no press release. Anyone know what they are doing together? Interesting given the Dell/Perot deal.” SEC filings indicate that athenahealth signed a five-year deal on October 2 to have IBM provide business services from India and the Philippines. Some of athena’s claims work was being done offshore, so I suspect this is routine.

From Ex-Cerner Guy: “Re: Bellevue lawsuit award. Ellis Hospital was more or less forced by NY State to take Bellevue over, so it should be interesting to see if NY State has written some sort of indemnification or protection into the merger agreement.” This relates to the $43 million jury award I mentioned last time in which the since-acquired 40-bed Bellevue Hospital was sued for mishandling the resuscitation during a baby’s birth in 1984. The 24-year-old woman, who has since graduated from college but uses a wheelchair, was awarded $20 million to pay home health aides, $15 million for future pain and suffering, $6 million for past pain and suffering, and $2 million for medical expenses and loss of earnings. So in a single judgment, a 40-bed hospital is on the hook for $43 million for a patient who didn’t even die (it would have been far cheaper if she had, apparently). How do you manage healthcare costs and not address cases like this? If the patient had the same injuries but wasn’t awarded the money, where would she have come up with the supposedly needed $20 million? This is another form of cost-shifting: hospitals insure themselves at great expense against awards like these, thus sticking everyone with the tab and giving insurance companies nice profits.

From Lou DiPisquale: “Re: EMRs. I have a friend looking for some suggestions for a home health/parish nursing EMR that is fairly inexpensive (her work is grant funded). Do you know of any basic EMRs that would be a good fit?” I’m calling in a lifeline since I’m a hospital guy and the home health EMRs we used were not inexpensive. Anyone have suggestions?

Cerner shares continue their tear, closing Friday at $84.41. The three-month graph above compares CERN (blue) to the Dow (red). If shares hit $89.70, Neal Patterson’s holdings will be worth a cool half a billion dollars.

HIMSS is looking for a Director of Government Services whose responsibilities will include “managing the Government Relations growing book of business for government services contracts” and “Develop programs and initiatives related to recruitment and retention of commercial organizations involved in the Payer and/or Life Sciences aspects of healthcare.” Wonder what that’s all about?

I was hoping for better news from my poll that asked how the employers of readers are doing economically compared to six months ago. Their situation is better, say 49%, while 31% say it’s worse and 20% say things haven’t changed. I suppose that’s not terrible, given that only a third are worse off now than before. Now here’s a fun new poll to your right: does your primary care doctor use an EMR and is that important to you?

This tech-savvy doctor, entrepreneur, and IT investor in Mumbai seems fun. He likes his job because “I get women pregnant – and get paid for it!” (he’s a fertility specialist). He’s got cool technology on his practice’s site and some creative informational cartoons and courses. The VP of one of his angel investments lists the Top 10 reasons that doctors in India don’t use software in their practices, observing that “Most doctors are very poorly organised, and don’t even bother to keep records of their patients. They often do not remember anything about the patient ; and forget even his name ( as many patients have learned the hard way).” India’s Top 10 is not much different than the US Top 10.

Peter Witonsky, president of iSirona, e-mailed to say that University Hospitals Geneva Medical Center is live with his company’s DeviceConX , which is sending GE critical care monitoring data to Eclipsys Sunrise.

Inga’s off to MGMA this weekend, so keep an eye out for a perky, curious female furtively taking notes for her daily recap on HIStalk Practice. Inga and Dr. Gregg Alexander have conspired to produce some fun HIStalk/HIStalk Practice magnets that some of the sponsors will be giving away in their booths (the booth list is here). 

Speaking of conferences, the American Academy of Pediatrics one starts Saturday in DC, where I’m one sponsor of the Pediatric Office of the Future exhibit (divided into sections: Patient Access, Enhancing Workflow, Advanced Communications, and Care Management and Quality). I made a primitive and snarky PowerPoint to run on my little display that hopefully Dr. Gregg Alexander can turn into something presentable that won’t embarrass him as a Pediatric Office of the Future team member. I had an unworkably last-minute brainstorm that we have a little meet-and-greet with Dr. Gregg, but our day jobs don’t leave much time for event planning. At least give him a little nod if you see him around.

Jonathan Bush red shorts at Health 2.0 mystery solved, courtesy of Matthew Holt. Jonathan heard that Glen Tullman of Allscripts would be appearing remotely on huge video monitors, so he re-enacted Apple’s brilliant 1984 commercial where the runner shocked the mindless drones to life by hurling a hammer into the video image of a thinly disguised IBM overlord. Now that’s funny.

Speaking of Glen Tullman, Forbes chats him up. He predicts Allscripts will double its count of doctor users next year, observing that “We are watching what will be the fastest transformation of a major U.S. industry in history”. He observes that it took ATMs 10 years to proliferate while EMRs till take only three, but he didn’t mention that banks paid for their own ATMs as their own rational business decision and that EMRs have been around for decades with minimal user interest until taxpayers were volunteered as their underwriters.

I like to Google HIStalk occasionally to see who’s talking about me. I ran across this nice mention on The Huntzinger Management Group’s site. “The Huntzinger Management Group is a Platinum Sponsor of the HIStalk Web Blog and supportive of the interactive communication among healthcare organizations. HIStalk is a fantastic place to read the most up-to date healthcare IT news.” I appreciate the sponsorship, but the kudos are even better and I appreciate them. I know it’s hokey, but when I write HIStalk the picture in my mind is of a bunch of us (providers, vendors, consultants, etc.) standing around swapping stories with beers in hand. That quote gets the “interactive communication” part right since I’m even happier sharing the ideas of others than I am my own.

An article covers the cash flow improvement at Kentucky Medical Services Foundation in its use of the Professional Intelligent Charge Capture application of MedAptus.

Apelon releases the latest version of its open source Distributed Terminology System on SourceForge.

Korea IT Times is running a series on what it calls u-Health, which means ubiquitous technologies that improve health and well-being of the general population. I like the term. This is another international example where you could read the whole article without realizing it’s not talking about the US. “Information system analysts and Web developers may also feel threatened when u-healthcare consumers and u-healthcare providers dictate specific information management functions and requirements instead of relying on the experts. Poor and inadequate ubiquitous technologies and interfaces will not be tolerated and will fall by the wayside.”

Speaking of EMR problems that are international, Finland is behind on its legal mandate to roll out EMRs and e-prescribing by 2011 because expanding it to a national level exposed problems with incompatible software. They’ve decided it’s easier to change the law.

Another doctor who’s not afraid of using a computer: this cardiologist made $40 million day-trading his way through the late 1990s, but gave only the losing trade information to his accountant. When the market collapsed, he had to underreport IRS losses to avoid triggering an audit for the gains. He’s looking at big fines and jail time for $16 million worth of tax evasion, not to mention the $476K he already paid for Medicare fraud.

University researchers in Canada say their open source OSCAR EMR, used by 600 doctors so far, could be rolled out a heck of a lot cheaper than the widely panned $1 billion eHealth Ontario project. One reason, its physician developer says with a straight face, is that “we don’t have very many high-priced executives and consultants”. I found the user group page here and also this video demo.

Mediware’s CFO quits to become CFO of an IT security firm.

The good times just keep rolling for eHealth Ontario. CTV News finds that $2.1 million of severance was paid to seven executives fired from its predecessor, Smart Systems for Health, when the new political administration took over.

eClinicalWorks will include Healthwise patient instructions and online health information library with its EMR and patient portal, respectively.

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From Bush vs. Tullman: “Re: Health 2.0. Was at Health 2.0 for the Jonathan Bush and Glen Tullman panel. Bush came out in red boxing shorts and a blazer! I will say Bush and Kibbe made some good points. Was disappointed that Tullman didn’t even show and came via teleconference.” Maybe Glen shares my belief that if it’s really 2.0, it shouldn’t require hauling in a ton of carbon-burning attendees to sit in a room together to watch oddly named startups hoping to find buyers for their no-revenue companies —  err, helping empower patients via the Internet. Still, it sounds like fun. I’d rather have the noobs pitch their businesses to a panel of money guys, like my semi-favorite show Shark Tank (“You’re dead to me now.”) Maybe I can get rich guys like JB and Glen to be on an HIStalk shark panel at HIMSS and they could actually invest in some HIT bootstrapper’s venture.

The response to a USA Today article on medical scribes is getting me riled up, with smug know-it-alls weighing in with uninformed comments like these: “I guess the older doctors who aren’t computer literate need scribes.” I’m trying hard to censor the profanities that I’m itching to write. Do you think less of your “younger” CPA if he or she isn’t typing into your 1040 form while you’re talking? Would you be happier if your lawyer stared at a PC screen instead of the jury? Does the President tickle the ivories on a laptop sitting in front of him while meeting with heads of state? Do even Steve Jobs and Steve Ballmer type their own meeting minutes while running Apple and Microsoft? Sure, the information needs to be entered into the EMR, but who says the doctor has do their own typing to get it there? Kiss your EMRs-for-everybody plans goodbye if the best method you can come up with is having doctors do all the data entry, the only highly paid professionals shamed into using tools whose benefit they question just because someone else thinks it’s a good idea (why not make patients enter their own information into a PHR? or schedule their appointments and ED visits on the Web? Or, for that matter, eliminate their own financial “scribes” and pay doctors by credit card before leaving the office?)

Law firms chosen to represent the state of New York in class action suits are heavy donors to state controllers. Among the “pay to play” firms is the one that made $80 million in engineering McKesson HBOC’s $1 billion settlement. 

Medical City (TX) goes live with the On-Cue patient itinerary system, a NASA-developed, AI-driven resource optimization system that servers as the “air traffic controller” for getting inpatients and outpatients where they need to be as orders and department backlogs change. I’m impressed with the credentials of the execs (former NASA and Philips people, with even the sales VP holding two master’s degrees from excellent schools).

The VA and DOD have finished the first of three phases of the military’s lifetime record program, the VA CIO says, making their systems interoperable. Phase II is making the records available on NHIN and Phase III involves making all information available during care delivered anywhere and at any time.

A reporter from one of the biggest national newspapers e-mailed to ask if I have examples of vendor non-disclosure contract language as mentioned in Ross Koppel’s interview. I’ll be the anonymous middleman if you can e-mail me examples (or use the Rumor Report form to your right, which accepts attachments like a contract scan).

Cerner keeps getting press for its H1N1 reporting project, which some lazy newspapers are reporting as some kind of exclusive arrangement initiated by Uncle Sam. I had mentioned that the Feds won’t get much data from big academic medical centers unless Epic jumps on board, to which Sunquest e-mailed me to mention that 60% of Epic’s customers and over 70 academic medical centers run LISs from Sunquest, which has been reporting infectious disease data to CDC and states since 2005.

A new HIMSS Analytics report (warning: PDF) says hospitals will struggle to meet ARRA funding requirements, with less than 25% of them live on nursing clinical decision support needed to track measurements such as A1c diabetics under control, smokers offered cessation counseling, and patients receiving VTE prophylaxis. This is an excellent, meaty report that crosswalks system capabilities to ARRA requirements and shows where the industry stands in having the necessary systems implemented. If you are a CIO whose hospital plans to collect stimulus money (or a hospital systems vendor), you should study the expected criteria and how your hospital compares nationally. Some hospital bed ranges have only single-digit penetration of systems that will probably be needed, meaning they had better get on the stick if they want handouts.

Lots of events have been posted to the HIStalk Events Calendar, which also lists events on the main page of HIStalk. You can add yours (free).

Like today’s posting? Add your e-mail address to the Subscribe to Updates box to your upper right and you’ll be the first to know whatever’s important. You might be surprised by the number of e-mails I get from people who thank me for (a) giving them an intense introduction to how the healthcare IT industry really works; (b) reporting some piece of information that made or saved them millions; or (c) making them feel more connected to the industry while traveling. You would spend hours a day to get the information you get here in minutes (and some of what’s here isn’t available anywhere else). The downside is that you may find me annoying, but hopefully that’s a trade worth making (and there’s always Inga as the sweet, sexy one in any case).

Speaking of handouts, they’ve driven us to this kind of headline: Kidney patients, job creation are focus of e-records initiative. University of Buffalo’s practice plan and Computer Task Group embark on a $29 million project ($7 million coming from the state), that “should improve health care.” It sounds like a separate project from the HIE announced there a few weeks ago, but I’m not sure since the practice plan is involved with both.

A hospital in Wales selects a Web-based diabetes care management tool from Hicom Technology.

The Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, TN licenses EMBOS, an EMR developed for its 4,500 employees, to Healthcare Technology Partners LLC. The system was developed for Y-12 to help the Department of Energy meet the government’s EMR push. I found nothing on the company, other than it was started by former Y-12 executives. 

The mysterious HisserVideo e-mailed to say that he (or she) posted two more funny HIT cartoon videos. CIO: “Didn’t you just send me a press release about a 30-hospital group implementing Super-2000? How could it work for them?” Sales Guy Steve: “Those hospitals are in El Salvador and we sort of just gave it away to get a tax break to offset profits on our Salvadoran coffee business.” He worked my Vision Center observations into the third video, with Sales Guy Steve explaining its expansion: “We are taking over the space where we used to have the QA team.” Sales Guy Steve responds to the product expert’s observation that he knows little about his client except their bed count: “Because I was once having dinner with Bob [the CIO] and the bottle of wine was $414 and Bob said that was funny because they have 414 beds. Pretty neat that I remembered that, huh?” You can add comments to the YouTube page suggesting future installments.

Sentillion is placed in the “visionaries” quadrant of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for User Provisioning, even more impressive considering that Sentillion was the only healthcare-specific vendor evaluated. That jogged my memory to go back and re-read my interview with Sentillion co-founder and CEO Rob Seliger from two years ago. “People often say that healthcare is slow to adopt technology, yet you can look at the amazing equipment from imaging systems to robotic surgery that is used. I don’t see a fear of technology in healthcare, just an avoidance of technology that’s an impediment to healthcare delivery. Vendors often miss that. We work really hard to get that right.”

It’s a good time to be an HIT vendor shareholder, at least if you bought at the right time. Above is a chart comparing Cerner (blue), Eclipsys (red), Allscripts (green), and the S&P 500 (gold) for the past 12 months. If you had the foresight to buy at the lowest price in the previous year and sold today, your money would have more than doubled with Cerner, nearly tripled with Eclipsys, and quadrupled with Allscripts.

The Toronto Star dissects the ambitious Smart Systems for Health initiative, which started out with grand ideas that turned into a money pit. By 2005, the agency had spent $260 million but accomplished little, triggering an operational review that characterized it as poorly regarded, short on strategic direction, and subject to inadequate oversight. By then the tab had run up to $458 million and the agency had over 300 employees. A year ago, it was dissolved and replaced by eHealth Ontario, now the subject of its own accusations of bloat, wasteful spending, and underachievement. The total now stands at over $1 billion. On Wednesday, Health Minister David Caplan resigned the day before an auditor’s “scathing” report criticizing the project was released. The auditors also uncovered government executive pay problems, where salaries were funneled through local hospitals to bypass government salary limits. Former CEO Sarah Kramer provides a statement that says, basically, that she was on the hook for quick results, the board knew exactly what she was doing, and, while people think a lot of money was wasted under her watch, it was a fraction compared to the amount that was blown before she took the job.

It didn’t take long for the lawyers to jump on the Broward General “reused IV” newspaper article. A personal injury law firm is “taking a proactive stance” to “educate and protect”. Translation: they opened 24-hour-a-day call center offering “free legal advice” from a “legal intake professional” (which I would guess means an offshore call center rep). Apparently the firm is a fixture on daytime TV in South Florida, or as one local puts it, “They are most ubiquitous during Unemployment TV (AKA, the morning talk shows, soap operas, and early afternoon game shows).”

The Wall Street Journal sees opportunity for vendors like Apple and RIM as hospitals replace pagers with smart phones. The article mentions a Stanford trial of accessing Epic on the iPhone, UPMC’s giving doctors and nurses BlackBerrys, and THR Presbyterian’s use of AirStrip OB.

Another Missouri hospital outsources application hosting to Cerner, this time Heartland Health. Eight hospital employees are being canned as a result, apparently.

Forbes profiles Epic. “But the hottest company in the electronic medical records industry is a secretive Wisconsin outfit called Epic Systems. It does little marketing or advertising, shuns acquisitions, never issues press releases and tries to stay out of the headlines. The privately owned company admits it once put up a billboard that said ‘Marketing Sucks … Epic Systems.’” It quotes KLAS as saying Epic is winning 40% of big-hospital sales, which seems low to me since I almost never hear of anyone else selling a big site.

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HERtalk by Inga

From Maathai: “Re: MGMA must-have trinkets. We will be handing out cards for people to ‘Plant a Tree’. They take the card, log on to a Web site, and select one of 16 countries where Seed the Future has a reforestation project going. We are hoping to have 1,000 trees planted before the end of the year. We also have recycled cardboard pens, but I don’t think they are as exciting as planting trees.” I’ll definitely be popping over to The Origins Healthcare Solutions booth (1006) to help make the world a greener place. Maathai also noted they are handing out stickers and will randomly hand out $50 bills to people wearing the stickers. That’s the kind of green I’m talking about.

From Ernestine: “Re: Health 2.0 conference. Lots of payer and consumer market here. So far it is a disappointment. Sitting in a session now and half are gone, even with cocktails to follow, and it is the first full day.”

From Dr. Love: “Re: Health 2.0 and Jonathan Bush. I don’t think we fully understand what he is wearing.  He’s a strange dude.” athenahealth’s Jonathan Bush and Allscripts’ Glen Tullman participated in a “Cats and Dogs” panel, which was suppose to pit “major IT vendors” and Web-based “clinical groupware” vendors. The athena folks tell me that JB was having a little fun with the whole show-down theme and was wearing his boxing shorts. I’m looking forward to seeing the video.

While at the Health 2.0 conference, MDLiveCare announces it will be the first telehealth company to partner with Google Health. The partnership includes the exchange of medical data between MDLiveCare and the Google Health PHR.

Just days after announcing its purchase of Perot Systems, Dell says it’s closing a desktop computing plan in Winston-Salem, NC. Six hundred people will lose their jobs next month, and another 300 by the end of January.

In a more positive announcement, Dell reveals plans for a new smart phone using Google software and running on the AT&T cellular network. The phone will use Google’s Android operating system.

Voalte, our favorite pink pants-wearing vendor, announces the results of its pilot installation with Sarasota Memorial Hospital. Using Voalte’s iPhone-based voice, alarm, and texting product, Sarasota’s nurses were able to provide faster response times for patients and reduce overhead paging by 78%.

CCHIT announces that vendors and developers can start applying for modular certification programs focused on meeting meaningful use requirements. The Preliminary ARRA 2011 program is limited to meaningful use standards spelled out in the ARRA legislation and will provide a certification label identifying which objectives the EHR technology supports. CCHIT is also launching its 2011 Certification program.

MedicAlert Foundation teams with SNOMED Terminology Solutions to provide SNOMED CT controlled medical vocabulary as part of its MedicAlert EMIR service.

David Blumenthal tells an AHIMA audience that the growth of EHR will create at least 50,000 new positions in HIT. 

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