From Friend of Tim: “Re: Yale New Haven. They’ve signed with Epic and the CIO is out.” Verified. Health system SVP/CIO Mark Andersen confirms that YNHH signed a contract with Epic this week (no surprise there – I said months ago that they were going Epic if they could find the money and Mark confirmed). They just brought up Eclipsys Sunrise CPOE and pharmacy a couple of years ago and were also running nurse and physician documentation, so Eclipsys loses a high-profile customer. With the Epic deal done, Mark will be leaving in a couple of weeks after 13 years there. He’s always been gracious and quick in responding to my questions. I wish him the best.

From CP Uh-Oh: “Re: Chicago CPOE error detailed in a Friday happy hour e-mail blast.” The purported e-mail from a Chicago hospital radiologist:

We have discovered a systems issue that may convert CPOE orders for CT examinations without IV contrast into CT examinations with IV contrast in Radiant. I have asked all Radiology Faculty and trainees to be particularly cautious in protocoling CT contrast examinations, and would like to enlist your assistance in carefully checking contrast CT orders. In addition, until the problem is solved, it would be prudent to call CT to verify that contrast will not be administered to at risk patients. Your support is appreciated.

From CPAhole: “Re: Allscripts MyWay. I heard they’ve said they won’t support ICD-10 in MyWay since it will be sunsetted in 2012.” Unverified. I’ll be incognito at the Allscripts user meeting August 5-7, so if I don’t hear anything before then, I’m sure I will there in Las Vegas. Inga and I speculated when the merger was announced that MyWay was the square peg in a round hole, but we were just guessing then, too.

From A Once-Burned Skeptic: “Re: IBM’s $100 million healthcare investment. This strikes me as funny. Didn’t IBM invest roughly the same amount a few years ago by buying Healthlink, which had doctors and nurses focusing on healthcare transformation? If IBM would have simply retained the talent they had from that acquisition, they would be well positioned to do exactly this right now. Call me a skeptic on IBM’s interest in healthcare.” Everyone should be skeptical since companies like IBM and Oracle are always immersing themselves in healthcare for a couple of years, then losing interest after spending a ton of money with little to show for it. IBM couldn’t keep Kaiser as a customer for its expensive custom software development once Epic got traction, blowing through $400 million of Kaiser’s endless fortunes before they were replaced with Epic for $2-4 billion. I’m not sure how its $400 million deal with UPMC turned out. Healthcare IT is one of those things that seems to work backward from nearly every other product: the bigger and more diversified the company selling it, the less impressive the result.

HIStalk readers would have voted Don Berwick into his CMS administrator job given the chance, but only barely. New poll to your right: are the final Meaningful Use requirements for providers too easy, too hard, or about right?

Ed Marx has added his responses to your comments on his Strategic Plans – Getting to 2.0 post from last week. Want him to write about something specific? He would be pleased to hear from you.

CapSite will announce Monday that Saint Like’s Health System (MO) has subscribed to its service, which offers line-item pricing breakdowns from healthcare IT contracts and proposals in 60 categories.

Everybody, me included, is sick of hearing about Meaningful Use now that the regs are final. I think a few more practices in the 1-5 doc range might be interested with the bar lowered a bit, but I’d still bet most of them will run the numbers and pass, at least for now. The final MU requirements, as flexible and less demanding as they may be, still aren’t worth meeting in strictly financial terms, so that means hospitals, large practices, and tech-savvy small practices will get most of the checks. The great majority of practices and hospitals are small (1-5 docs and <100 beds, respectively) and I expect they’ll look at the ambitious timeline, the cost, and the stress on already-stressed doctors and simply say no to Uncle’s strings-attached cash (I’ve always called that my “Free Kittens” theory). We’ll see how accurate all those surveys have been that claimed the only thing holding docs up was upfront EMR cost.

Another new Epic site: Hurley Medical Center (MI).

Apple’s response to its embarrassing Antennagate iPhone 4 problems have been quite un-Apple like. I can imagine an HIT vendor faced with angry customer backlash over a CPOE bug reacting the same way in sequence: (a) it’s your fault for using our product incorrectly; (b) it’s actually not a problem, but a minor bug that makes it look like one and we’ll fix that eventually; (c) we’re not really sure if it’s a problem, but the best option is for you to spend your own time and money adding on a third-party solution; (d) OK, it might really be a problem, but it hasn’t been reported much, so it’s not a big deal; and (e) OK, it’s definitely a problem, but it’s the entire industry and not just us and everybody needs to do a better job.

GE’s Q2 numbers: revenue down 4%, EPS $0.30 vs. $0.27. Jeff Immelt says healthcare orders, along with oil and gas, were “particular bright spots.” GE Healthcare’s revenue and profit were up, at $4.1 billion and $661 million, respectively.

Verizon announces the Verizon Health Information Exchange, offering a clinical dashboard, patient index, and secure messaging. The MedVirginia RHIO has signed on, presumably meaning that its original (struggling) vendor Wellogic is out. Verizon’s offering runs on the Oracle Healthcare Transaction Base, which I thought had fizzled out years ago after the usual big splash followed by corporate indifference. Just in case it isn’t obvious, Verizon’s healthcare interest surged recently when taxpayer wealth was redistributed to make it more lucrative. Since HITECH, the company has announced services for security, telehealth, and physician data sharing.

A fun story: the guy responsible for killing a proposed Anthem Blue Cross 39% medical insurance rate increase in California is a work-from-home actuary who did part of his analysis from a hospital bed. California law requires the state to accept insurance rate hikes as long as the company proves it’s spending 70% of the premiums to pay medical claims (obviously that idea contains endless misaligned incentives that help keep healthcare costs rising). Hired by the state to double-check the insurance company’s numbers, the actuary found obscure mistakes in some of its inflation projections. Anthem and its corporate parent WellPoint claim appreciation for his diligence and express their relief in being able to hit the state up for less money (anybody buying that?) They resubmitted an increase request for half the original amount and then tried to hire him. A consumer group said, “He slew the giant. It was David versus Goliath, except David was armed with a calculator rather than a slingshot.” His tiny company also offers hospital services, including provider contracting and medical management reviews.

More only-in-California goofiness: 1,000 nursing union members picket the $3 million house of billionaire Meg Whitman, former eBay CEO and current candidate for governor. They’re upset at her promises to cut the state’s budget (including their pensions) even though it’s running a $20 billion deficit. She’s even in the polls with Jerry Brown even though she’s never held office and doesn’t even vote all the time. She’s spending up to $120 million of her own money to gain the seat.

St. Luke’s Health System (ID) loses power for 24 hours, forcing it to go to paper when its backup power systems also fail. My experience with backup generators is about the same as with data backups: they work about 80% of the time, which means IT is going to look really stupid in 20% of the unexpected disasters.

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Rick Stockell is president of Stockell Healthcare Systems of Chesterfield, MO.

Tell me what Stockell Healthcare Systems does.

We write software for patient access and revenue cycle management. By patient access, that’s the registration and scheduling components. The revenue cycle is all of the regular registration, ADT, charge capture, medical records interfaces such as a 3M encoder, a collections module, and the 837 and 835 back. Eligibility checking, medical necessity checking, and those types of things.

Our roots are all the way back to McDonnell Douglas Healthcare that was here in St. Louis. We’ve been in the healthcare market for quite a while. We were a contract programming group from McDonnell Douglas. We did a lot of development for McDonnell Douglas and their mainframe and minicomputer lines.

We go back to the original UB-82. We were writing that, so we’ve been in the patient accounting and billing space for years and really understand how it’s changed and how it’s evolved. We’ve got a tremendous amount of experience in the patient accounting area and we’re going to use that to our advantage as we pull this product together. We’ve been in the business a long time, so we’re not an upstart.

Maybe everybody’s more familiar with the company than I am, but I mostly remember back in the days where 3M used your order entry system for Care Innovation, if I recall.

That’s correct.

Who would be most familiar with the company today?

We typically partner with electronic medical record companies. We’ve partnered with, like you say in the past, 3M. Until GE bought IDX, they used us for the same thing — order communication and order management. We also partner with Medsphere, with OpenVista. DSS is another one. They tend to be in the government space more than others.

They don’t have revenue cycle solutions. When they compete against the other healthcare vendors in the marketplace and to have complete solutions, they need an answer for patient access and revenue cycle. We’ve partnered with them. We’ve done that multiple times with them.

Also, some new ones that are international. Alert is one out of Portugal. We are also partnering with Eclipsys internationally. We closed a deal in Kuala Lampur, Malaysia — Pantai Health System.

I saw that. How did that come to be? You don’t think of revenue cycle when you think international, yet you’ve got this string of hospitals in Malaysia.

It has to do more with the footprint of the product. It’s all on a Microsoft technology, so it doesn’t require mainframes or any of that type of thing.

A lot of the older patient accounting and billing systems — ones that have been in the market for years, really, 25, 30, maybe even 40 years in the case of the Invision product line — most of them came from batch-oriented systems. They require a lot of hardware, a lot of software, layered products, and bolt-ons for them to be useful. It’s just not conducive to the international market because there’s such a large amount of the architecture dedicated to third-party reimbursement here in the States and the regulatory environment here, so it’s a lot different there.

It’s a real-time system as opposed to batch. The footprint’s smaller and it’s easier to use. It’s very user-friendly. It makes sense really quick. It’s got a complete relational database designed underneath it. To configure it for different needs is relatively easy to do. We’re in a lot of different market settings — behavioral health, long-term psychiatric, government, all kinds of different reimbursement models.

At Indian Health, we have three sites. We’ve gone independent from the Indian Health Services and we’re opening our own facilities and they’re like a commercial private/public consortium. We’re very, very flexible in our abilities to implement different revenue cycle designs, Because of that flexibility, it lends itself to the international market.

You mentioned the Alert product and a couple of variations of the VistA product. How easy is it to coexist with those applications?

It’s actually very easy. I think we’ve integrated now with interfaces to about eight different clinical information systems; including Cerner and Eclipsys. We did it with GE as well, their original Centricity line. I think they re-labeled all that. Now it’s really the IDX product, but we haven’t integrated with the IDX system. But the precursor, the original versions of Centricity, we’ve integrated with. So, yes, we’ve done quite a few. In the behavioral health area, Sigmund, MindLink, and Sequest. 

We’re really, really good with HL7. You recalled we did order communication for 3M — their Care Innovation suite. We also built the order communication component for the original Centricity product for GE. Since we’ve had so much experience with HL7 integration with these electronic medical records and departmental systems, it’s really pretty straightforward for us to do integration to a clinical suite.

It sounds like you could either be the revenue cycle component for a vendor that has only the clinical and departmentals; or you could be the clinical component for someone who has the revenue cycle.

No, normally we’re really the revenue cycle. We’ll do some order communication if they don’t like order management. If they’re not really good HL7, bi-directional — you know, orders in and out and ADT and all that — if they’re really not good with HL7 or have limited capabilities with HL7, we can stand in as the order management system for them until such time as they can get that on board. Principally, we’re patient access and revenue cycle.

It seems like a lot of companies are either offering revenue cycle services or software, or both. What trends are you seeing out there since you’re the independent among that group?

The traditional revenue cycle sector is a lot of bolt-on technologies. They’ll work well or co-exist with Epic, Siemens, or McKesson and do a lot with the output of the bills. UBs and 1500s are produced off the primary patient accounting system. They do contract management, for example, a standalone; and then the 837 and 835, some of the electronic claims, and that type of thing. Maybe eligibility checking on the front end, that they just offer services that are really kind of bolt-on. They’re really integration-oriented, just in different pieces of an existing patient accounting system like the older ones.

Our approach is that we’ve built everything into the products, so contract management is part of the product. The eligibility checking and medical necessity checking is part of the product. We don’t need a bolt-on to do that. The 837 processing, 835 processing is embedded in the product so there’s less of a dependence on bolt-on technologies.

We find some of the bolt-on players are trying to get into where they can start to integrate more directly with the electronic medical record to increase their value. We can already do that, and have done that for about a decade now, plus, the order communication piece.

What would be the attraction for customers to look at your solution?

If they are in the market for a new electronic medical record system and they don’t have a good solution or it doesn’t integrate well. Their traditional system, their registration and patient accounting and billing systems — if they don’t integrate that well with the new EMR or if the vendor doesn’t have a good solution for that, then what we are is a replacement opportunity to replace that older patient accounting system with something that works more seamlessly with the electronic medical record. That’s so we can capture charges at the point of care if the electronic medical vendor that they choose doesn’t do charging very well. It handles the clinical components for orders and those end results, but it doesn’t do charging very well.

We can interface at the order level and convert those to charges — charge on order, charge on result — and map those orderable items to the appropriate charges. Then, of course we have a charge master and we can have the HCPCS codes and modifiers imbedded in the charges and make that a little bit more seamless, which reduces the batch charge entry requirement and less manual entry of charges.

I can see, with one of the VistA products or with Alert, they would probably bring you in as an option, but it must be tough if you’re trying to get replacement business. You’re competing against the vendor who’s already in-house. Is that difficult?

It can be because they’ve been in place for long periods of time, maybe 10 years or longer, that they’ve been working on the patient accounting system. But some of the problems with that is that they can’t get the reports they need. It’s difficult to get the information out of the system. They don’t have as good a control over the revenue cycle. Either their AR days are longer or there’s more leakage of cash or reimbursement because of all the integrations they have to do to the bolt-on products.

We can build a pretty good business case that it’s more seamless, it works better with the clinical information system, reduces the amount of staff that’s required versus a lot more automation in our solution. Where a lot of the other systems require a lot of manual touching — they’re more like inspection-based instead of exception-based — so there’s an opportunity for operational efficiency with using our system over some of the older mainframe or batch-oriented systems that have been in the market for years.

How do you think the Meaningful Use and the whole healthcare reform change is going to effect the revenue cycle side of everybody’s business?

It seems that regulatory compliance is one of the big change agents that are always in healthcare. With Meaningful Use and ICD-10 and some of those things, I think it’s going to have an impact on the back-end systems as well. I’m not sure that the clinical information systems just on the front end are going to be adequate to address all that successfully.

I know that in the case of ICD-10, specifically, you’re talking about a larger field length because it’s a larger coding method than the ICD-9; like six or seven digits versus like four or five. So then that’s a change of storage location. That’s got a lot of different places to go and fix that because they’re on traditional file systems where the applications were originally written. We’re already ready for ICD-10 because ICD-10 is what’s being used right now in Malaysia, so we have an advantage there.

I think that all these regulations, as they come along, are going to put a lot of pressure on the older systems. It may be the cost of making changes to those systems may be more than the vendors that own those products are willing to put into them.

I think with all the excitement about clinical systems, maybe people have forgotten about things like ICD-10. What are your thoughts on how that change is going to affect everybody?

There’s the coding. I think, in the medical records area particularly, where they’re coding; that there’s so many codes that coding method’s going to cause a lot of change for all of the medical records departments. With the Correct Coding Initiative, that’s a lot to learn. Everybody’s been on ICD-9 for quite a while and ICD-10 is a lot different.

Then, all those codes will have to filter through for the claims and the edits that come along with those. New codes are going to be a little bit more complex. I’m not sure what impact they would have, specifically, on the bills themselves, but that would open it up for a lot more rules. There may be a lot of gaps in the older systems that might take quite a while to fill when they move to ICD-10 and I think we’re ready for that.

What do you think about ERP systems?

That’s a very mature market. In the US, it’s Lawson, which seems to be the one that has most of the market share.

We are integrating with Oracle in Malaysia. That is an opportunity. Oracle had a couple of tries at trying to get into the healthcare vertical and hasn’t really had much success with that, especially in the US. I think that an opportunity to get into the healthcare market, probably internationally, is what we’re going to see more with Oracle.

We don’t run into PeopleSoft or SAP very often. Those seem to really high-end and geared more towards the manufacturing environment than healthcare, but I think they’re going to continue to do all right.

I think that most people have made decisions for the ERP system, but again, traditionally, accounts receivable would be part of that solution. But when you’re having to do everything down at the encounter level and case mix and all those types of things in healthcare, it really strains the architecture of those ERP systems, which seem to be much better suited for direct customer-vendor relationships as opposed to this third-party and multiple payers and coordination of benefits.

One of the other things that everybody’s paying some attention to, at least, is data warehouse, data retrieval, and business intelligence. What are you seeing in the marketplace for that?

That’s another bolt-on opportunity, it seems, in healthcare. That’s another thing that’s embedded in our products.

Since we’re on a Microsoft environment, you have the whole Analysis Services that’s part of SQL Server 2005. And now, 2008 is even stronger — we’ve got scorecards and analytics. The warehousing is built right into the product, so the detail source that’s coming from our applications feeds the warehouse directly. We’ve got some pretty good score-carding and reports right out of the application set that makes BI a lot easier.

For us, it’s not a bolt-on. The product automatically can see it’s a warehouse that has a lot of those key performance indicators and scorecards and analytics built right into them. For example, we have one for denial management because we get the 835 detail back. We post the details from the 835 so you can drill all the way down to the level of detail of a line item that would be on a bill. If that detail was passed from the 835 from the payer, we can capture all those details and report on that.

Elimination of denials is something that’s much easier for us to do. It’s integrated right into our collections module. If you get a denial, if it’s something that’s workable, we will map that denial right into the accounts receivable system. The user knows that there has to be some action item to clean that up or address that denial. We’re using the business intelligence and warehouse for operational efficiency and management insight.

Does that complement or compete with Amalga?

I don’t know if it competes with Amalga. I guess it could complement Amalga, but Amalga seems to be really more of a framework around the whole care delivery delivery model. Ours is operational efficiency — all of the revenue cycles like AR, days calculation ratio, collector productivity. Those types of things are what we’re using for the warehouse, as opposed to trying to capture various points of care. I think Amalga’s got a much broader approach to healthcare than we do. We’re more specific to our area.

You’ve been in the industry for a long time. Looking outside of your company and your products, what’s going to be happening over the next 5-7 years?

I think that moving from paper to electronic, there’s going to be a lot of workflow issues from that. I think the traditional batch system that we’ve had for quite some time –  they’re going to have to have replacements for that. I know that all of them — Siemens, McKesson, Eclipsys, etc. — have large revenue cycle systems that they’re trying to bring to market to replace those older systems. They’re usually larger. I think they’re really aimed up-market more than they are mid-market or even down-market.

I think there’s an opportunity at the community hospital level, for certain, because they do have money and they’re the ones that haven’t been able to automate like the larger institutions. They have more wherewithal to spend on electronic medical records. A lot of them already made decisions on what they’re doing. Then they’ve got those vendor relationships that probably are going to go with their revenue cycle solutions.

But you get into the community hospital space — the pressure to have an electronic medical record in place for Meaningful Use and all these other things — I don’t know that the revenue cycle systems are going to be able to keep up with the older revenue cycle systems that some of the smaller vendors have. They’ve got to be able to keep up with all that.

One that comes to mind is QuadraMed. QuadraMed’s had a difficult time trying to handle both the clinical R&D and the revenue cycle side, which is a tremendous amount of R&D. They’re kind of caught. They can’t go up-market very well; that’s pretty much saturated by the larger vendors. I think the community hospital space is underserved and I think it’s a great opportunity for us. In that real small footprint, we’re more affordable, easier to use, and have less moving parts when you start looking at all the bolt-ons that have been traditionally required. I think that’s an advantage for us.

Any concluding thoughts?

I think that we’re going to continue to see what we can do in the international space, continue to partner with clinical information system vendors that don’t have a revenue cycle component. There are people looking to get into the electronic medical record, but outside vendors that are taking a look at the US market and say, specifically for the community hospitals that the vendors served — and there’s a lot of competition out there and there’s a lot of clinical information systems that are already written and up and operational around the world — they’re looking at the US market, maybe, for an ability to expand for them. They won’t have a revenue cycle solution with the US regulatory and third-party. A company like ours that’s independent would be a good partnership opportunity for them.

We could help bring some competition into the US market, maybe, from overseas that hasn’t been here before.

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From Lumpy Rutherford: “Re: Kate Kervin. Moved from Siemens to NextGen as SVP of marketing and project management, started this past Monday.” Unverified. Neither her LinkedIn profile or the NextGen executive page says so, but that doesn’t mean much.

Listening: Margot and the Nuclear So and So’s, polished, sweeping indie rock (or Indy rock, since that’s where they’re from). They are amazingly good.

IBM will spend $100 million over the next three years on healthcare transformation projects: creating evidence-based protocols, simplifying healthcare delivery, and studying the shift to an outcomes-based reimbursement model. The company says it will hire new people, among them doctors and nurses working on the front lines.

Fujifilm will commercialize the iPhone-based stroke diagnosis application developed by a hospital in Japan. Physicians are using it to review CT scans remotely.

I was talking to the new crop of residents at my hospital, most of whom were unimpressed (justifiably) with our clinical systems. I asked three of them which systems they had used that were better. Two said Epic and one said Eclipsys. I didn’t disagree.

OB-GYN EMR vendor digiChart brings on former McKesson sales VP Bob Allen (sales) and former Healthgate CTO Stephen Faris (R&D).

The number of Americans who support President Obama’s healthcare reform package: 36%.

Camden-Clark Memorial Hospital (WV) signs up with Eclipsys for what sounds like all Sunrise modules plus EPSi. Camden-Clark is also connecting its 70 owned or affiliated physician practices, which run the Allscripts Professional EHR, using Eclipsys HealthXchange (which is Medicity).

Scottish charge master software vendor Craneware says its sales reached a record $54 million in the year ended June 30.

Healthcare Growth Partners releases its Q2 report covering HIT-related capital markets, mergers and acquisitions, and capital funding.

Weird News Andy delivers this story about a woman pregnant with two babies that aren’t twins. She has two uteruses (uteri?). Or as WNA says, quoting Homer Simpson, “It’s uterus, not uterme.”

Dan O’Neil let me know that he’s taking a job with consulting firm Arcadia Solutions, leaving his CIO slot open at Quincy Medical Center in Boston just in case you’re interested.

Eclipsys shareholders will vote on the company’s planned acquisition by Allscripts on August 13.

Jobs: Senior DBA and Storage Engineer, Web Application Developer, Lab Systems Project Manager, Project Manager – Meditech Conversion.

Australia’s Lingo Systems will give away $1 million worth of software licenses as a promotion for its SMS message-based hospital staff scheduling system. Nurses indicate their availability on a Web page and are texted when the hospital needs one of those shifts covered. The first nurse to text back “yes” gets the shift.

Disciplined nurses are using multi-state licensing agreements to keep delivering care after misconduct. Recordkeeping isn’t up to date, so nurses disciplined in one state sometimes have clean multi-state licenses. One Wisconsin nurse who was fired and later convicted of stealing Dilaudid said, “When I went to go for the job in North Carolina, looked at the status of my license, and it was still active. That kind of surprised me, so I figured I would take it."

HHS launches a Meaningful Use Web site that includes the final EHR incentive details and final EHR standards and certification criteria.

Hospitals in Greece were overcharged for medical equipment by Siemens, prosecutors say, with some hospitals paying more in annual maintenance than the equipment was worth.

The iSoft tailspin continues: two of its Australian executives quit and the company downgrades its expected revenue based on NPfIT delays. Market cap has shrunk from $1.5 billion to $170 million and an Australian publication says iSoft has cut 600 jobs and will eliminate another 500 by the end of the year. Private equity firms are poking and prodding, of course (who wouldn’t at that price?)

Announced this week and darned cool: Google’s App Inventor for Android lets non-programmers build apps for Android phones using predefined controls. Some of the available tools can access a GPS sensor, automatic texting, and interact with Web sites. Brilliant. Somebody build something cool for healthcare and write up your experience – I’ll run it here.

E-mail me.

HERtalk by Inga

From Ed Marx: “Re: final Meaningful Use regulations. I am pleased with the compromise reached by CMS/ONC. The program remains as designed, an incentive, not a give-me. It strikes a strong balance between a stretch goal while being realistic with industry current state.” I had asked Ed to share his initial, high-level impression of the final rules. It’s interesting to note that several months ago, Ed expressed concern over the preliminary measurement requirements, believing they represented a “high hurdle” for many organizations. 

From Really?: “Re: final regs. They lowered the bar so much that my four-year-old could achieve Meaningful Use! The government might as well hand out money to everyone.”

From Chicago Skyline: “Re: The fine print. In talking to a few folks, vendors seem to worried that they will need to include in their software the reporting tools for the meaningful use metrics. In other words, the software must have a report that shows what percentage of all meds were electronically prescribed. What do you understand?” Just when I thought I was nearly an MU expert, I have to punt. I didn’t have time to look through the fine print today, but maybe someone who has can chime in.

From CheerLeader: “Bravo! Hurrah! Well done, Inga! Great work on your synopsis — I actually have something to pass along to by C-levels that they will understand.” You would think that after 3-1/2 years of doing this I would no longer be surprised that people really do read what I write. If you are more interested in how the final regs affect Eligible Providers, check out the summaries posted yesterday on HIStalk Practice.

Wellsoft wins a couple of EDIS deals in Canada. Kingston General Hospital and Hotel Dieu Hospital, which share hospital information systems and IT support, will jointly implement Wellsoft.

Westbury Hospital (TX) is implementing ChartAccess EMR from Prognosis for is new 137-bed facility.

Healthcare providers are generally still confused about certification requirements for ambulatory EHRs, according to a recent CapSite survey. Two-thirds of providers consider certification to be a very important element in their EMR evaluation process and more than half think that CCHIT certification is a requirement to receive stimulus funds. Sixty-nine percent weren’t aware the feds would be accrediting other organizations beside CCHIT. If I handled marketing for CCHIT, I’d figure out some sneaky way to leverage this last data point with vendors. Nothing like a little fear to scare a physician away from an otherwise good purchase decision.

Sharp Healthcare (CA) selects Allscripts Community Record, which is provided in partnership with dbMotion. Sharp uses Allscripts EHR for its employed physicians and has deployed Allscripts’ Care Management and Referral Management applications. The Community Record will connect the Allscripts systems with third-party clinical applications to create a single community patient record.

CAP STS signs a collaboration agreement with the Barcelona-based healthcare consulting firm Gesaworld. The two organizations will provide consulting, training, and implementation services for HIT standards.

Trace Devanny won’t be unemployed more than a weekend. The former Cerner president is taking over as CEO for The Trizetto Group, effective July 19th. Trizetto founder and current CEO Jeff Margolis will remain chairman of the board. Devanny will be based in Greenwood Village, CO, which will also become Trizetto’s new headquarters.

Home health and hospice software provider HealthWyse partners with ZirMed. HealthWyse will combine ZirMed’s claims management tools into its clinical and financial information system.

IOD Incorporated, a provider of release of information services, is infused with $35 million of growth equity from LLR Partners, a PE firm.

A reader sent over a note suggesting he had some “scoop” from the AMDIS Physician-Computer Connection Symposium, which is going on right now in Ojai, CA. Unfortunately he was in a hurry (something about a blackberry martini reception) and so far all I’ve gotten was this picture. I’m not sure who the speaker is, but the crowd looks totally engaged. I await rumors and/or martinis.

E-mail Inga.

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Achieving EMR Usability in Today’s Complex Technology Market
By Odell Tuttle

As HIMSS began recognizing the importance of human/computer interaction, its EHR Usability Task Force developed the 11 principles of usability — a framework which provides methods of usability evaluation to measure efficiency and effectiveness, including patient safety. This framework is invaluable as many of today’s clinical systems do not provide adequate support due to poor interface design.

From multiple data interchange and reporting standards, to formatting and encoding standards, to clinical processes and procedures — not to mention the government organizations and legislation — the EMR domain is vast and complex. For hospitals looking to implement an EMR, it is important they choose a technology partner experienced with proven, tested, and used systems. For rural community hospitals, it becomes critical, because their needs are so unique.

The HIMSS 11 principles of usability is a valuable tool in the EMR selection process. A summary of the HIMSS usability principles include:

Simplicity
Everything from lack of visual clutter and concise information display to inclusion of only functionality that is needed to effectively accomplish tasks.

Naturalness
This refers to how automatically “familiar” and easy to use the application feels to the user.

Consistency
External consistency primarily has to do with how much an application’s structure, interactions, and behaviors match a user’s experience with other software applications. An internally consistent application uses concepts, behavior, appearance, and layout consistently throughout.

Minimizing Cognitive Load
Clinicians in particular are almost always performing under significant time pressure and in environments bursting with multiple demands for their attention. Presenting all the information needed for the task at hand reduces cognitive load.

Efficient Interactions
One of the most direct ways to facilitate efficient user interactions is to minimize the number of steps it takes to complete tasks and to provide shortcuts for use by frequent and/or experienced users.

Forgiveness and Feedback
Forgiveness means that a design allows the user to discover it through exploration without fear of disastrous results. Good feedback to the user supports this goal by informing them about the effects of the actions they are about to take.

Effective Use of Language
All language used in an EMR should be concise and unambiguous.

Effective Information Presentation – Appropriate Density
While density of information on a screen is not commonly measured (though it can be), it is a very important concept to be cognizant of when designing EMR screens.

Meaningful Use of Color
Color is one of several attributes of visual communication. First and foremost, color should be used to convey meaning to the user.

Readability
Screen readability also is a key factor in objectives of efficiency and safety. Clinical users must be able to scan information quickly with high comprehension.

Preservation of Context
This is a very important aspect of designing a “transparent” application. In practical terms, this means keeping screen changes and visual interruptions to a minimum during completion of a particular task.

Reliable usability rating schemes offer product purchasers a tool for comparing products before purchase or implementation.

Making complex things appear simple is a very difficult job.  However, by utilizing the HIMSS 11 usability principles, healthcare providers are armed with a powerful tool in the EMR selection process.

Odell Tuttle is chief technology officer at Healthland.

Tech Talk and Market Strategy – Smart Phones
Mark Moffitt and Chris Reed

Tech Talk – Dictating Reports within an iPhone App

Good Shepherd Medical Center developed an iPhone app that has achieved a very high rate of adoption by physicians (95%) by providing a high degree of customization. The second most popular feature of the app is accessing and playing radiology dictation when a report has not been transcribed and is not available for viewing. Viewing lab data is first.

One reason this feature is popular is that it eliminates the need for a physician to call a dictation system and enter an ID, medical record number, etc., on a telephone keypad. Using the iPhone app. they simply press a virtual button to play a dictation on the iPhone. One less gadget a physician has to futz with.

It seemed logical that physicians would appreciate being able to record a dictation and view clinical results on the iPhone simultaneously without calling a dictation system and entering information on a telephone keypad.

Initially, we planned to integrate our iPhone app with a native dictation app. Unfortunately, this configuration requires multitasking to dictate while viewing clinical information on the iPhone. About one-half of the physicians using the app have the 3G phone. iPhone OS4 (operating system) supports multitasking but runs slow on 3G phones.

iPhone OS3.1.3, the latest OS designed for the 3G and 3GS, supports viewing Web pages while talking on the phone. We used this configuration to provide for the ability to dictate reports and view clinical results from an iPhone. Our iPhone web app uses the URL scheme “tel” to send commands to the iPhone phone app.

tel: <1>, <2>, <3>, <4>, <5> # note: “,” instructs phone to pause

Where:

1. Telephone number for the dictation system.

2. Physician id.    

3. Site id (hospital).  

4. Job type (H&P, discharge summary, progress note, etc.).

5. Medical record number.

The shortcoming of this approach is that the iPhone dials slowly the entries after the initial phone number. However, it is a big improvement over having a physician call the dictation system and enter information manually.

This is not our final solution. Sometime late this year or early next year when most physicians are using a 3GS or iPhone 4, we will switch to using a native app to dictate a report. If we had more resources, we would provide a version for iPhone OS3.1.3 and one for OS4.

Market Strategy – Smart Phones and EMRs

If the battlefield for winning the hearts and minds of physicians using electronic medical record (EMR) systems is shifting to smart phones and iPad-like devices, and I think it is, this trend may open the door for vendors like Meditech, Cerner, etc. to derail the Epic juggernaut.

Newer systems like Epic hold an advantage over older systems in terms of usability and user interface design. Software written for smart phones that operate over an underlying system can hide these flaws. It is possible, I contend, to neutralize Epic’s usability advantage over older systems among physicians using an “agile” smart phone software model. An agile model is one that puts in the hands of the customer the ability to rapidly modify and deploy smart phone software to fit the specific needs of an organization. This approach does not change the functionality of the underlying system.

Customers using agile smart phone software can:

1. Configure the app in different ways to greatly improve flow for different kinds of users, e.g. hospitalists, specialists, and surgeons; and for different types of smart phones.

2. Add data to the user interface to guide users toward a specific objective. For example, display house census, length of stay, observation patients and hours since admission, pending discharge, one touch icon for pending discharge alert, etc.

3. Add features that make the physicians work easier. Examples include one touch icon to call patient’s unit or nurse, play recording or dictate on the smart phone while viewing clinical results; access medication list directly from a PPM EMR without a patient master index between systems; receive clinical alerts; etc.

To compete, smart phone software must be core to your business. Give credit to Epic for recognizing the strategic value of their smart phone software. However, Epic’s smart phone software is “rigid” and that leaves them vulnerable to smart phone software that is agile.

Mark Moffitt is CIO and Chris Reed is Manager at Good Shepherd Medical Center in Longview, Texas.

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From CernerDoesItToAnutherExec: “Re: Trace Devanny. He’s leaving Friday. He was shipped by Neal to France early this year, which is like getting dead fish in the Sopranos. Unlike the last 5-7 execs, it looks like Trace left on his own.” Too bad I don’t usually post news on Monday since that’s when this came and I’d have had a scoop. As I said on February 12 when Cerner announced his transoceanic relocation, “It seems curious that Cerner would allow its president to live and work overseas when only a tiny bit of its business comes from there, so I’m guessing there is more to that story.” It was nice timing to release not-so-positive company news on the day of Meaningful Use’s rowdy debutante ball (and not only just ahead of the earnings announcement, but “to pursue other opportunities” that apparently start just three days from now – hmmm). They’ve already removed him from the Web site. Neal will now hold all the Cerner titles – president, CEO, and chairman of the board. His Pie is secure.

From Jacob Black: “Re: Daniel Barchi interview. I guess Epic has a very closed system like Apple, but the similarities stop there. I think one of the problems with HIT today is that there are too many Microsofts raking in the implementation fees and we desperately need an Apple to shake things up. I think we’ll see one arrive in the next 24 months, and when it does, it will be a game-changer.”

From Dr. Boogie: “Re: Gibson General Hospital, Indiana. Medicare fraud.” The fired hospital CFO goes whistleblower.

From Ms. MarCom: “Re: Meaningful Use. All I can say is WOW. You have totally blown away any publishing competition this morning, both from a posting standpoint and from a speed of analysis standpoint. WOW! Great job!” I replied back to Ms. M that I would treasure her nice words, especially if I got fired for spending a couple of hours digging through the MU rule instead of working for the hospital whose clock I was on at the time. I don’t know if my employer would buy the industry service argument that I had rationalized. Our only plan for the day was that Inga would sit in on the Webinar, so it was impromptu.

From Ivo Nelson: “Re: consulting company life cycle. I’m going to take offense to your comments regarding your life cycle for consulting firm buy-outs. What you failed to mention was that some of us build our businesses on delivering for clients. That delivery creates trust that leads to more business. It takes years, if not decades to build the level of trust needed to be in the ‘inner circle’ of the CIOs. Most of them aren’t stupid and don’t just buy the current consulting fad; rather, they hire firms they trust and respect knowing these decisions can be career-limiting if it leads to a bad implementation. The reality of our business goes well beyond the spin. In my world, there’s an intermediate step that few of the hundreds of consulting firms that start up in this space ever achieve — that is widespread respect and trust that only happens through the grind of delivering on projects year end and year out. Trust doesn’t happen through spin.” Ivo knows I was being tongue-in-cheek. He’s right that a consulting company doesn’t grow enough to be an acquisition target unless they do things very, very well, like he did with Healthlink and is doing again with Encore Health Resources. My ribbing was aimed more at the companies (usually hardware vendors) that buy them thinking it looks like easy, high-margin money compared to moving iron.

And now, the obligatory Meaningful Use news and reaction.

Notice that during the press release (video above) that Kathleen Sebelius started off by botching the name of CMS, calling it the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (backwards). That makes about as much sense as making its acronym CMS instead of CMMS, but I can’t swear I’d say it right either if facing a ton of cameras.

Inga has collected some thoughts and comparisons about the proposed vs. final Meaningful Use rule. She’s Meaningfully Used up, so help her out by adding a comment to that post with anything she missed.

Everybody with skin in the Meaningful Use game will be cranking out press releases extolling their love or hatred for what’s been passed. Thos who love it so far: Allscripts, AARP, UnitedHealth Group, Medsphere, AHIP. Those who hate it: American Hospital Association. I’m sure PR people are proofing a lot more press releases yet to come. In fact, CHIME issued a press release that said they are “actively reviewing the changes” and will publish its summary “once CHIME has thoroughly reviewed the 864-page rule.” I shall alert the media. Oh, wait, they already did.

Don Berwick’s first day on the job involved participating in the Meaningful Use press briefing. He reminded everybody about President Obama’s goal to for every American to have electronic medical records by 2014, which was probably a mistake since, like a lot of other ambitious administration goals, it’s clearly not going to happen just because of some stirring oratory. Inga speculates that the President rushed Berwick’s confirmation through so DB could look authoritative on his first day and use the opportunity to meet and greet. To me, he comes across as likeable and sincere.

Announced: the House Ways and Means Subcommittee will review the guidelines next Tuesday.

Check out Page 34: “We expect to update the meaningful use criteria on a biennial basis, with the Stage 2 criteria by the end of 2011 and the Stage 3 criteria by the end of 2013.”

My reaction to the rule: it’s a nicely done compromise. The really contentious areas were scaled back, and even in areas that weren’t, thoughtful rationale was provided. Breaking out the requirements into the mandatory vs. elective requirements was a great idea. CMS was smart to start tough in the proposed rules and then ease up after taking public comments into account. Some folks will still think the bar is set too high, but nobody’s putting a gun to anyone’s head to take the thousands to millions of otherwise free taxpayer dollars. If you don’t like the gift horse, don’t ride it.

What’s the biggest surprise in the final Meaningful Use guidelines? That doctors don’t have to actually enter any orders to meet the CPOE requirement. Anybody allowed to write orders can do it for them. That should goose the medical scribe job market. I think CMS got a little too user-friendly with that change since the next most important number other than overall percentage of orders entered via CPOE is the number that are entered directly by the physician instead of entered on their behalf as verbal or written orders by nurses (which opens the door right back up to transcription errors – the whole “readback” thing is lame). Also, anybody who implements clinical decision support thinking that the nurse will sift through the on-screen warnings and pass the important ones to the doctor knows how poorly that works.

I loaded the government’s PDF to Scribd as soon as a reader sent me the link this morning (thanks!) I see that file has received 2,177 reads so far. I don’t think HIStalk will set a one-day reader record, but it’s had 6,000 visitors so far (early Tuesday evening Eastern time). Needless to say, MU interest was high.

I e-mailed John Glaser to get his thoughts since he was instrumental in putting MU together. He thinks the best part was that they listened to industry concerns about flexibility and setting the bar too high. I told him he should get a completion bonus of the billions, of which he humbly suggested 1%. He also offered this piece:

The Big Day

On Tuesday (7/13/10) the final Meaningful Use regulation was released as was the final Standards and Certification Criteria regulation.

Arriving at the release of these regulations took time and an impressive amount of work. The regulations appeared 17 months after the passage of ARRA and 14 months after the first meetings of the Policy Committee and Standards Committee. Hundreds of hours were spent by volunteers of the Policy and Standards committees and their workgroups. Thousands of comments were written by organizations and individuals and read by dozens of federal staff. Some very large number of blog comments, articles and white papers were prepared by consultants, academics, vendors, practitioners and others. And an incalculable number of hours were devoted by staff at ONC, CMS, OMB and other federal agencies and departments.

All of this resulted in over 1,000 pages of regulations. Regulations that will bring tens of billions of dollars into healthcare and promise to significantly improve the care of patients. Healthcare in this country was forever changed on Tuesday. Those of us who work in the industry have not seen a day as momentous as this and may not see one again.

There are many individuals whose efforts brought us to this point. David Blumenthal. Farzad Mostashari. Tony Trenkle. Paul Tang. Jon Perlin. John Halamka. But I wanted to single out one person – Janet Marchibroda.

Janet was the founding CEO of the eHealth Initiative (eHI). For many years the eHealth Initiative has brought together a diverse group of stakeholders to develop strategies, author example policies, compile lessons learned and provide education to further a vision – significant improvements in care through the adoption and effective use of interoperable electronic health records. Years before there was an ARRA, eHI and Janet were relentless in their pursuit of this vision and they were remarkably effective in bringing their ideas to Congress, the Executive Branch, state governments and the industry. While not the only voice in the early days of this undertaking they were an exceptionally effective voice. You could clearly argue that Janet and eHI are one of the primary reasons that HITECH was included in the ARRA legislation in the first place.

Congratulations Janet. This day must be very sweet.

I hear that Eric Rose, medical director of McKesson Physician Practice Solutions, has signed on with Microsoft’s Health Solutions Group to work on global health technology offerings. 

A reader tells me that a Vermont hospital’s practice EMR has been down for two days so far after its vendor tried to apply an upgrade, apparently mistakenly loading the 64-bit version instead of the 32-bit. They had to go to backup, and everybody could have predicted what happened next: the backup was no good. I guess downtime doesn’t get you Meaningful Use credit.

St. Joseph Health System (CA) chooses periop and anesthesia systems from Picis for its 13 facilities. A couple of readers have sent over positive rumor reports about Picis lately, so without my speculating about the details, I expect to hear news shortly.

Listening: The Doors, because I was watching the mediocre, Johnny Depp-narrated When You’re Strange on Netflix and got stoked about them all over again (actually, it was pretty good other than Johnny). May favorite Doors tunes: Crystal Ship; Yes, the River Knows; Not to Touch the Earth; The Unknown Soldier; and When the Music’s Over. Mr. Mojo Risin’ has been dead for nearly 40 years, but his digital detritus remains vibrant and essential. We should all be so lucky.

Consumer Reports says it can’t recommend the iPhone 4 because of its notorious antenna problems, saying Apple should fix its own phone instead of telling owners to buy themselves a case (or use duct tape like CR recommends) to prevent touching the antenna and thereby drop signal strength. The iPhone scored at the top of its ratings otherwise.

If you clicked the e-mail link to read this post, you’ll notice a single sponsor ad at the very bottom, right before the comments. That was the brainchild of a couple of readers who felt guilty that they don’t always look over the ads in the left column, but who said they’d pay significant to attention to a single strategically placed one. All sponsor ads get an equal chance – it’s a random display for each page view. Thanks for the idea and for supporting HIStalk’s sponsors.

Speaking of sponsors, thanks to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor My Health Direct. You’ll recall that I interviewed CEO and Chairman Jay Mason a few weeks back. The best way to describe the company’s offering is as “OpenTable for Healthcare”, a SaaS application that connects patients (usually ED ones) with provider appointments in the community. The system searches open provider appointments and manages the mix of low-paying reimbursement those providers are willing to accept. It also increases compliance with follow-up visits since patients leave the ED with a firm appointment. Thanks to My Health Direct for supporting HIStalk and its readers. And in case it looks suspicious, I promise there was no discussion about sponsorship when we did the interview. I often interview somebody who is then overwhelmed by the “hey, I saw your picture on HIStalk” feedback they get afterward from the very cool HIStalk readership, so they send the marketing people my way.

Weird News Andy loves his UK stories, of which this one is big: NHS will restructure and take hospitals out of the system, eliminating all 10 strategic health authorities and the 152 primary care trusts in favor of local control answering to an independent NHS board. Their private income was previously capped. From the video: “Our guiding principle will be no decision about me, without me.” Sounds like the opposite of what we’re doing here. I wonder if Don Berwick admires them more or less now?

Interoperability vendor Holon announces GA of its Medication Management Solution, which accepts electronic or scanned orders and routes them via a workflow scheduler.

Healthcare claims processor and cost management vendor MultiPlan will be acquired by private equity investors in a deal valued at $3.1 billion. You just know you’ll see more of this as investors lick their chops at the profitable administrative overhead sure to be introduced by healthcare reform (irony intentional). Surely nobody thinks insurance companies and their lobbyists will voluntarily find another line of work.

Iowa HITREC chooses Greenway’s PrimeSuite EHR.

Dentrix Enterprise Dental Practice Management earns certification as an electronic dental record solution for the Indian Health Service.

Kronos introduces its new Rich Internet Applications. I had to look that up – it means Web apps that work like desktop apps by using browser plug-ins or virtual machines. Gmail is an example.

It’s not exactly poverty-vowing nuns running hospitals: Wayne Smith, CEO of publicly traded hospital operator Community Health Systems, took home $17.8 million in compensation last year.

E-mail me.

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