Nancy Ham is president and CEO of MedVentive of Waltham, MA.

Nancy Brown, formerly senior vice president of business development and government affairs for athenahealth until July 1 of this year, has been named chief growth officer of MedVentive, where she will head up the company’s sales, marketing, and business development efforts.

Tell me what MedVentive does.

Nancy Ham: MedVentive provides a physician performance management solution for whoever is clinically at risk. Traditionally in our industry, health plans have been at risk, but there’s a huge trend towards providers taking risk and becoming more directly responsible and accountable for both the quality and cost of care.

One thing that we think is interesting about our company is that we support providers and health plans, and in fact are trying to bring them together into a more collaborative environment around managing populations and managing the cost on top of those populations.

Our passion around this springs from our history. In the mid-90s, here in Boston, we started as a mega at-risk provider organization affiliated with CareGroup, which is an integrated health system with eight hospitals and 3,500 physicians. At the time, it was the leading marketplace around providers assuming risk. We were bearing full global capitated risk for about half a million patients, managing about a billion dollars.

Everything that we have today, that we believe today, was really forged in that real-world environment managing our own patients, managing our own data, engaging our own physicians, and trying to learn how to do that successfully in a provider-oriented environment. The challenge was that model was really prevalent only here in Massachusetts and in California.

What’s so exciting about today for us is that we see the whole market opening up and moving away from payer-side risk, fee-for-service risk — which hasn’t served our industry well — and into these new risk models. We’re here with 15 years of experience and a very mature product to bring to that problem.

It seems like that whole assumption of risk idea has come and gone for practices. Do you think this time they’re ready, both organizationally and technologically?

Nancy Brown: No, not generally. There have been a number of organizations who have grown up in this model. The one that Nancy Ham has just described. I grew up professionally at a staff model HMO called Harvard Community Health Plan, which is very similar to Kaiser, where we were totally at risk for a population of patients and everything about our work, our DNA, was all around thinking about populations — how to keep them well and how to deal with their illnesses in the most efficient and effective way.

The vast majority of organizations are not incented that way, are not aligned that way, and don’t have that DNA naturally. This is a major shift, meaning a shift in the industry, where more and more risk is being pushed back down to providers.

I would say the answer to your question is no, they are not generally prepared for this. Just imagine doing work the way you do it every single day being more and more oriented towards seeing the patient who’s sitting in front of you, getting paid for each encounter, and then going to a model that is really completely different. That is exactly why tools and services need to be brought out to these provider organizations to ensure that they won’t hurt themselves in the process of converting over.

Nancy Brown, let’s talk about the announcement that you are joining MedVentive. What discussion did you have with Nancy Ham about her long-term plans for the company and your contribution to them?

Nancy Brown: It’s been a really exciting couple of months, to say the least. I’ll answer that question directly, but let me start by saying that what really motivated me to go back out into the market and to leave athena was this trend towards what has really been established by all the work being done through Obamacare or the Healthcare Reform Act, which is to really think about how healthcare is delivered and to really think about how to change incentives in order to get people to think about cost and quality.

Having grown up, as I said, in a staff model HMO, it was a little bit counterintuitive to me that the management of patients was being carved out and handed to payers and third-party organizations when in fact, there’s no one better than the physicians who are in front of the patients, who really know what care should be delivered, to be the ones that think about the approach to patient care and to think about quality and cost.

I am absolutely thrilled that the country is moving away from fee-for-service and moving back towards accountable care or sharing risk and putting risk and quality back into physician hands.

I was approached by a number of people who knew my background who wanted me to either join large companies who are thinking about establishing toolsets to serve this market, or venture capitalists who were thinking about starting brand new companies that would serve this market. Honestly, the entire time I was going through that process, I thought, well, there is actually an absolutely fantastic company that has been around for over a decade that not only has come up with tools, but has lived and walked in the shoes of at-risk providers, and who has been through many, many cycles of the product. We all know, those of us in healthcare IT, that products all need to go through at least three or four life cycles before you get it right.

The conversation I had with Nancy and with Dr. Jonathan Niloff, the founder, was perfectly aligned with what I thought the market needed. I thought, here’s a company that has existed, that has had terrific tools. The market has not been huge, quite honestly. They’ve taken care of probably a lot of West Coast and East Coast clients, and now they’re perfectly positioned to fully take advantage and really educate clients as to what the needs are to take on risk.

What lessons would you say you learned from your time at athena that will be useful to you at MedVentive?

Nancy Brown: I was at athena for six years and it was a wonderful experience. I consider them to be the closest of friends. I learned about a service model. I think a lot of what we talked about in my conversations with Nancy Ham and others is that you cannot just hand a toolset to an organization — in this case, an analytics toolset — and expect them to do everything that they need to do perfectly.

What I hope to bring to MedVentive that I’ve learned — and actually, it’s really part of my DNA now, based on my time at athena — is two things. One is that we’re going to have to get even more involved with our clients to really help them through these significant transitions.

A specific example of what I mean is when you give them dashboards and toolsets, which MedVentive does now, and you point them in the direction of where they are in terms of a red zone around a particular business problem, I think we hope in the future to be able to actually be in there with them, almost as a virtual chief medical officer, to be able to get them through the ongoing change or the overall change; and then the day-to-day work that they need to get done.

Nancy Ham: Nancy’s experience — her whole career — is of incredible relevance and resonance, as you’ve been hearing. We’re very excited about the service model coming into greater use among our customers because we are very focused about real results in the real world.

We don’t build software for theoretical purposes. We’re not an IT company who’s just building something because we want to sell it for revenue. We’re a healthcare company that forged everything we do in the crucible of the real world. That meant moving the needle on cost and quality. Whether it’s pretty dashboards or beautiful analytics was really irrelevant unless we accomplished the business goals.

We have a very strong ROI story for our customers today. Along the way, for example, we were profiled by the US Department of Health and Human Services as one of the five best national practices in pharmacy cost control. Last year, we were honored to win the Microsoft Healthcare User Group Award with a lovely customer of ours, Northeast PHO, for driving breakthrough levels of quality while reducing costs.

So to Nancy’s point, we have customers today who are independently very capable-mature in their ability to take risk and to execute on risk. But as that model broadens across the country, marrying that proven experience in that ability to drive an ROI with more supportive service capabilities, I think, is going to be key.

Nancy Brown mentioned that venture capital wants to get into this and other companies want to start something up. Who would you say is the competition now and what are the barriers to entry going to be for someone who wants to be in the position you’re in?

Nancy Ham: The barrier to entry is the relevant domain expertise. Not from reading about it, not from going to conferences about it, but from living it. There is no substitute for the fact that for ten years, we were the customer. We were in the real world bearing risk for almost half a million patients and driving positive changes against our budget and our risk and our quality and our population.

There is just no substitute for that. So in one sense, unless you’ve come from that environment, it’s really hard to say you have the same relevant experience and DNA that we bring to the opportunity.

That’s what differentiates us with our customers. They come and they see and they listen to it and say, “You guys really get it. You understand what we need to do, and we take comfort in the fact, frankly, that you’ve traveled this path ahead of us and you can share with us the lessons learned — good and bad. And you can share with us how you engaged your physicians in a way that they found appropriate and relevant and caused them to change behavior in a positive direction.”

Nancy Brown: I would just add to that what I observed is this practical-tactical way of thinking about how to deliver information to physicians. But this is all about helping physicians understand what’s going on with their population and guiding them toward the right decision. That’s not easy to do. A lot of the information that comes out of these analytic tools, generally, can create a lot of noise that they tune out.

I’ve been very impressed in the exposure I’ve had from MedVentive to see what Jonathan Niloff and the team here have done to really make sure that they’re getting the most important information to the physicians and making sure that the feedback loop is staying intact. And, that it’s a practical tool that can be used versus just one of these things that the administration has bought, but that in no way, shape, or form will ever be useful at the point of service.

When you talk about the business model as a service, is there any contemplation of selling service as a percentage as athena does?

Nancy Ham: I think it’s a great question. Historically, we have been focused on wrapping services inside of our software subscription fee. Lately, we’ve been really dialing up our capabilities around clinical consulting. We just hired a new senior director to lead our practice. In there, we are starting to go at risk for the actual results that we’re able to drive.

How that evolves towards a different model or towards the athena model, I think, is something that Nancy Brown and I will be working on and thinking about over the upcoming months and quarters.

Everybody wants to talk about Accountable Care Organizations. What technologies do organizations that want to go in that direction need?

Nancy Ham: To start on the journey of taking risk, organizations need a lot of things. They need a culture of quality. They need a transformational ability. They need to think through physician alignment and reimbursement. There’s a lot they need to think through from a services and strategy perspective.

When it comes to technology, there’s really two ways that an organization can begin to assume risk. One is if they’re already financially integrated, they can jump into becoming an Accountable Care Organization. There you need a suite of tools to manage for cost and utilization and quality from a whole new perspective because it’s not about fee-for-service now, it’s around episodes of care. This was a heart attack, not a series of disconnected claims. This is a population of diabetics and I need to be able to look at them as a population — cost utilization, quality, and engagement — because I’m going to be reimbursed on it as a bundle.

If you’re going into true global capitation, you need to be able to look across the entire spectrum of care no matter where delivered, no matter whether it’s in your network or out of your network, ambulatory or inpatient, and budget it and predict it and price it and manage it very differently than what you’re doing today.

If you’re not already financially integrated, then you actually have a step before that, which is to become clinically integrated, which gives you a safe harbor, if you will, from the Federal Trade Commission. There, you really need an intelligent, patient-centered disease registry that can be distributed across the community to promulgate your quality program and to engage physicians in an interconnected network focused on driving guideline-compliant care.

We’re fortunate at MedVentive that we offer them a spectrum of solutions no matter where you are on your journey to risk. We have a technology and a capability that matches up to where you are and what you need to do next to move forward.

Who helps organizations are assess their capabilities to enter into these agreements? Are they going to become standalone at some point, or are they always going to need some sort of support — technology or otherwise — to have ongoing success in being part of an ACO?

Nancy Brown: What I’ve observed in my journey over the last few months in looking at a lot of organizations focused on this market — there’s an equal number of consulting firms that are spitting up new practices to focus on all of the human capital issues. So if you parse apart everything Nancy Ham just said, underlying it is that technology is important. MedVentive has done fabulous things, but I’m sure if Jonathan Niloff was sitting here, he would tell you that it was the people side of it. Once you get the information in front of you, it’s really getting the teams built and the mindset in place to do the right thing.

So to answer your question, I think hand-in-hand with the technology will be folks who come in — and I already see it happening — that will work a lot on everything from organizational design to organizational behavior and the creation of probably all-new incentive plans beyond the medical incentives. I think it will be ongoing, absolutely.

I also think, as I talked a lot about during my days at athena, that there will be an ongoing evolution of these reimbursement plans over time. This is yet another set of ideas that people have, from Medical Homes to P4P to accountable care. Somewhere in all of this there will be a model that begins to effect really positive change. What I mean by that is it will incent providers to actually go in and make changes to workflows and to their approach, which is what Jonathan Niloff probably observed at CareGroup and I observed at Harvard Community Health Plan.

That it is an ongoing journey of give me the data, let me observe. Then, what’s going wrong? Let me improve my processes. Give me the data, let me observe what’s wrong … it’s an ongoing effort that never ends.

The HITECH Act has stolen everybody’s attention, so everybody’s focusing on EMRs or HIEs or whatever it is. How do you expect the vendor landscape and organizational strategic priorities to change as we get past that first total focus on just EMRs?

Nancy Brown: You couldn’t have asked me a better question. I won’t get on my soapbox for too long, but I often said in Washington and other places that I felt like the HITECH Act was a little bit of a distraction. While people were busy looking at it and going out after their $44,000 and had their backs turned, they’re going to get hit by a train and the train was going to be changes in reimbursement, as well as other major changes to how people are dealing with the administrative side, such as ICD-10.

It’s very interesting because it’s very hard right now to quantify how much business is shifting from fee-for-service to these quality contracts. What I say to anyone who will listen is don’t worry so much about the percentages because right now it’s definitely a very, very high percentage still in fee-for-service.

But let’s look at the reality. You can’t bring all of these uninsured into that coverage to have insurance coverage, and then also — simultaneous to bringing this new population of patients in that will now have insurance coverage — mandate that the insurance companies cannot increase premiums and then not expect that the costs are going to go somewhere. Those are going to be really put onto the backs of the providers. The insurance companies really don’t have any other way to get the money other than to assert change reimbursement.

The accountable care concept is owned by Medicare, but I think we’re already seeing a rapid acceleration of a risk shifting by commercial payers. As that risk shifts, people are going to have to be prepared. Compared to taking on an EMR, that’s child’s play in my opinion. This is very, very serious. Meaning you have to have a lot of information, a lot of guidance, and a lot of change in behaviors to be successful.

The other thing I’ll add about the EMR side, which was a big focus at athena, is that the EMRs need to be prepared to take the information that comes out of systems like MedVentive. These are things, to be specific, like gaps in care, for instance. When they tell you that Nancy Brown has not had a particular test or is at risk for a particular disease state, that information needs to be showing up at the point of service, ideally.

Many of the systems, most I would say, the majority of them do not have the capability to take that in and haven’t even reformed themselves in a way to think about population.

I think it’s going to be a very exciting time for those EMR vendors who really step up and think about themselves as being in a continuum that starts with taking risks, managing populations, and then intervening at the point of service.

You’re right, it’s an EMR-centric world out there, and those vendors typically don’t like to acknowledge that there may be contributions from other systems or other vendors. How do you intend to work around that, from the MedVentive standpoint, to convince them that it’s in their own best interest to collaborate?

Nancy Ham: We see, in our current client base, a very interesting spectrum of organizations. We have clients today who are 95% deployed on single EMR, so they’ve already climbed that mountain. But what they have found, to Nancy Brown’s point, is that the EMR does not provide them this horizontal capability to look across their population, to manage populations in an episodic or disease-centric way. It does not allow them to look at their cost in a capitated fashion; to look in-network and out-of-network to control all the levers they need to control to be financially successful.

We have in-the-middle organizations, those who are building broad-based networks in which their physicians are on many EMRs. So there, you have a bit of a Tower of Babel approach where there’s no source of truth, no central view, no view that goes across the continuum of care and across the community.

And then we have customers who have said that $44,000, frankly, is not compelling. We’re looking for tools that we can acquire and implement rapidly to allow us to step into risk because what we hear is forward-thinking organizations know fee-for-service is dying. So whether it dies tomorrow or dies two years from now or four years from now doesn’t matter.

They know now they need to get control of their data. They need to start measuring themselves. They need to get ready so that whatever form risk takes in their market — it could be heavy pay-for-performance, it could be episodic or population, it could be true global cap — that they can’t be ready overnight to spring into that environment.

They have an urgency about that to get started now, and that’s very exciting for us as a company because as we said, we started — Nancy and her path, and MedVentive in ours — in provider risk organizations more than a decade ago. It’s exciting to us to see that model, which we know works in improving quality and reducing costs, spread across the country. We couldn’t be more excited about the possibilities in front of us to help organizations learn how to do that and to be successful.

What are the long-term plans for the company?

Nancy Ham: With Nancy coming on board as chief growth officer, our plan is clearly to execute on our growth strategy and to leverage the fact that we think we have a very unusual capability born on the provider side, but ambidextrous, if you will, because we can serve whoever’s at risk — the self-insured employer, the health plan, the provider — and bring them together on a collaboration platform, a much-overused term that rarely exists in the real world. We think it’s the right model, which is we need to be sharing and looking at the same data with a focus on changing what is a societal ill at this point.

Our collective failure to create a universal model that reduces the healthcare costs in this country is impinging our growth as a society. Really, the ability to bring that all together, we think, is unbounded in terms of size. Our focus is just on getting the word out about what we’re able to do and to do it for more people. And with Nancy Brown on board, I’m sure that that’s what we’re going to be able to do.

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From Redzenskyca: “Re: Allscripts/Eclipsys merger. New company name: Allscripts. New color: green.” The announcement is coming tomorrow, reliable sources tell us (nobody official, but people who should know). Green is my favorite color, though. Here I was criticizing the sea of orange at ACE and now it’s going to be a collector’s item or something (or sold on eBay just in time for hunting season). UPDATE: the Allscripts site has been updated with the logo above and a welcome to the merged companies.

UPDATE 2: The company’s leadership team is listed as Glen Tullman as CEO (Allscripts), Lee Shapiro as president (Allscripts), Bill Davis as CFO (Allscripts), Eileen McPartland as COO (Allscripts), John Gomez as president of product strategy and development (Eclipsys), Jeff Surges as president of sales (Allscripts), Diane Adams as EVP of culture and talent (Allscripts), Laurie McGraw as chief client officer (Allscripts), Dan Michelson as EVP and chief marketing officer (Allscripts), Kent Alexander as EVP and general counsel (Allscripts), and Joe Cary as chief of staff (Allscripts).

From Curious in Texas: “Re: MD Anderson in Houston. I’ve heard they will be installing Soarian Financials. This surprises me because I thought the UT hospitals were all converting to Epic. Can you verify this rumor?” Verified. MD Anderson hasn’t signed the contract yet, but they are planning to migrate from Invision to Soarian patient accounting, ADT, and scheduling. Their primary motivation is its service-oriented architecture.

From Boomer Later: “Re: Maine Medical Center. I heard its board will meet Wednesday on a proposal to migrate from Eclipsys to Epic on a 20-month timetable. Approval is expected. It’s a blow for Eclipsys since MMC is one of their most progressive and active customers and was customer #6 on the old TDS product.” Verified. They were already using Epic on the MaineHealth ambulatory side, so this will be the next step toward their “One Patient, One Record” philosophy. Epic Enterprise will be implemented in their six member facilities in addition to Maine Med.

From Lizard King: “Re: HITECH. AAOS average member salary: $$$$. GP in private practice: $. Meaningful use is the gateway to federal $$$ to pay for HIT that providers might not otherwise be able to justify as an ordinary practice investment. Generalizing, specialists have more profitable operations and seem to have much better ROIs on HIT than GPs, so it is no surprise that MU is headed this direction. Which seems about right to this taxpayer and consultant.”

If you’ve been following the current poll and comments on Ed Marx’s Blessing of the Hands post, you may wonder why the comments suddenly turned ugly. An atheist blogger linked to it and his followers dropped by to vote and opine. Since the point was to find out what industry people think, here’s the stat that counts: the poll was running 50-50 when it was just real readers voting.

Inga interviewed Chet Speed of AMGA about Accountable Care Organizations on HIStalk Practice. It’s a hot topic, so we’ll have more soon from the hospital point of view. Hats off to her for drawing readers to HIStalk Practice, with visits up 50% or so compared to a year ago.

A Member of Parliament in England wants to know if BT was paid hundreds of millions of pounds to persuade it to stick around with NPfIT instead of bailing out like other companies did.

In the News of the Obvious, a small study finds that Facebook is a big draw for narcissists prone to encouraging shallow relationships by carefully controlling their image, bragging on themselves in their Info section, and in the case of females, posting revealing and/or doctored photos (not that there’s anything wrong with that). The conclusion is somewhat profound: “As we abandon the fake avatars and cryptic usernames of years past and begin associating our online identities with our real-world lives, our online activities begin to have more relevance to our true personality traits.”

Mike Cannavo, the one and only PACSman, cranks up a blog: The PACSman Pontificates. He was darned funny, irreverent, abrasive, and always informative when he wrote for a rag-sponsored blog, but says he got tired of being forced to change his posts every time an advertiser complained. I can only imagine what he’ll say unmuzzled. Also in the PACS and radiology world, Mike’s occasional partner in crime Doctor Dalai celebrates 200,000 blog visits. I like those guys.

Newly named EHR certifying body Drummond Group releases testing guidelines and cost (warning: PDF): $19,500 for inpatient or ambulatory remote testing, $23,500 plus travel for on-site testing.

In Australia, iSoft CEO Gary Cohen will resign after the company posts a $383 million fiscal year loss and a 20% drop in revenue. Shares are down 83% year to date to around 12 cents. I interviewed Gary in April.

WellStar Health (GA) will pay $2.7 million to settle Medicaid fraud claims, admitting no wrongdoing and blaming its claims processing software.

Ambulatory EMR vendor iSALUS names (warning: PDF) Richard Noe as president and CEO. I don’t see any mention of previous healthcare-related employment. He says he’ll double headcount there.

Retired Army General Hugh Shelton, the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a Special Forces veteran of the Vietnam War, is named chairman of the board of Red Hat.

Detroit Medical Center says its EMR saved it $5 million last year, $4.5 million of it coming from reduced length of stay related to pressure ulcers. That’s not a great ROI for a $50 million system, but it’s a good start.

I don’t look at LinkedIn often except to verify where someone works since it’s kind of junky looking and always trying to upsell additional features. Still, I was happy to hear from Dann that the HIStalk Fan Club he started there has 1,088 members, some of them spamming my hard-won audience with their own pitches, I notice, which seems kind of tacky but common for LinkedIn. Anyway, since I seldom mention LinkedIn, feel free to add Inga or me to your network (just search for HIStalk). I even added a spiffy new photo since they removed my old one. We’re more Facebookers these days (there’s that narcissism thing), so ditto: just search for HIStalk and you’ll see individual profiles for Inga and me plus our HIStalk page. I’m feeling loserly since I have only 89 friends (although I appreciate every one) vs. Inga’s 112.

The CEO of Naples Community Hospital (FL) writes an editorial bragging on the hospital’s use of its Cerner EMR. Actually he mostly seems to be bragging on the possibility of getting taxpayer money for using it, saying the hospital will be an “early applicant” for money and hopes to get nearly $12 million continuing to do what it was already doing. He says Cerner told him Naples is the second most MU-ready Cerner site.

Markle Foundation assembles (warning: PDF) 45 organizations who advocate that HIT vendors offer the “simple, but rarely offered” ability for people to download their own health records, the so-called Blue Button.

The SVP/CFO of Danbury Health Systems (CT) is charged with defrauding his employer of more than $140,000 by directing health systems payments to a software company he ran out of his house.

IBM and Dell chase the Chinese equivalent of HITECH money. Interesting: one hospital has more than 10,000 patient visits per day.

Bizarre: an auto accident patient says he awoke in Prince George’s Hospital (MD) and asked for food, only to be told by a nurse that he was NPO for cancer surgery, which was news to him. As he was being prepped, he noticed that another patient’s wristband had been placed on him. His wife helped him pack up with intentions of getting out fast AMA, but he claims two hospital security guards beat him and advised him that “Hell, no, he don’t come up in here and be telling us what the f*** to do.” He says a hospital manager acknowledged the incorrect wristband and invited him to have “any type of drug he wanted, just to name the painkiller.” He was diagnosed with broken ribs, a sprained shoulder, a ruptured spleen, and a concussion. He’s suing for $12 million.

E-mail me.

HERtalk by Inga

From Roger Sterling: “Re: DocSite. News has it that Covisint is buying DocSite. Covisint wants to add it to the AMA portal project being rolled out in Michigan.” Unverified. I have a message out to the Covisint folks.

HealthInfoNet, the HIE for Maine, partners with Health Language to provide clinical content integration.

EDIMS licenses First DataBank’s National Drug File Plus database to integrate into its emergency department EHR.

Quincy Valley Medical Center (WA) commits $200,000 for computer hardware in advance of selecting a an EMR application. Software finalists include Meditech 6.0 and CPSI.

Sisters of Mercy Health System launches a $60 million data center in Washington, Mo. The 42,500 square-foot center will host EHR and other applications for all of Mercy’s sites. The regional business journal also points out that the medical information is secure, as it relates to “HIPPA.”

The 16-hospital system IASIS Healthcare selects QuadraMed’s coding, compliance, and reporting tools in preparation for the transition to ICD-10 code sets.

St. Mary’s Medical Center (WV) contracts with Wolters Kluwer Health for its ProVation Order Sets.

Matt Grill, Sunquest’s former manager of technical training and publications, takes over as VP of Global Client Support for MRI Software, a developer of real estate management software.

Patient education material from Thomson Reuters and its Micromedex CareNotes system is available in 15 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Russian, and Turkish.

On HIStalk Practice: an interview with 20-year-old Greg Waldstreicher, founder of DoseSpot. Everyone who was running a viable business at age 20 while going to school full time, please raise your hand.

Sutter Health (CA) activates iTriage, giving consumers the ability to check systems and find out detailed information about doctors, hospitals, clinics, and ERs via a free mobile application.

The average American hospital barely breaks even, but some have operating margins of 25% or more, according to a Forbes survey of the country’s most profitable hospitals. HCA owns 11 of the top 25 hospitals; two of Mayo’s main facilities make the list as well. Flowers Medical Center (AL) topped the list with its 53% operating margin. Fifteen of the 25 hospitals were for-profit.

Baptist Medical Center (MS) lays off 186 workers, including 14 in management. Laid off workers are being offered a chance to apply for the 136 current openings.

Sponsor updates

• Greenway Medical Technologies says four additional HIEs, IPAs, and regional medical centers have selected its PrimeSuite EHR/PM solution.
• Cumberland Consulting Group has been named one of the 2010 Best Small Firms to Work For by Consulting magazine, having made their list every year since it was started.
• For the second year in a row, the Central Penn Business Journal names MEDecision to its 100 Best Places to Work in Pennsylvania.
• Sierra View District Hospital (CA) hires MEDSEEK to develop and deploy its Web site and clinical portal.
• Access has a new Web site at accessefm.com.
• MaxIT Healthcare makes the Inc. 5000 list, as well as being named #56 on the HCI 2010 Top 100. The company has over 430 consultants.

A baby in Italy suffers heart problems and possible brain damage after two doctors involved in his birth get into a fist fight in the operating room over the appropriateness of doing a C-section. The mother had to have her uterus removed. The region has a 60% C-section rate.

E-mail Inga.

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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!

Meaningful Use:  Specialists Still Not a Priority
By Evan Steele

The HIT Policy Committee’s creation of a new Quality Measures Workgroup last week is the most recent in a string of actions confirming that meaningful use has not been defined meaningfully for specialists — and that it is not likely to be. Despite the fact that this new workgroup is charged with prioritizing Stage 2 quality measures and analyzing gaps in Stage 1 criteria, the 18 physicians selected for the 24-member group are primary care providers* — a fact that surely raises concerns among specialists.

The appointment of this workgroup comes on the heels of a growing response to the Stage 1 definition of Meaningful Use from specialists and their professional organizations, commenting on the lack of fit with the way specialists routinely practice. Every one of the six core clinical quality measures are primary care-related, and many specialists will be hard-pressed to identify three of the 38 additional clinical quality measures that are relevant to their practices.

At last month’s HIT Policy Committee meeting, committee member Gayle Harrell commented that much of the input gathered from the specialist panels convened last October seems to have been ignored, She contended that in the final rule, CMS made it more — rather than less — difficult for many specialists to comply with Meaningful Use.

This position was echoed by Thomas C. Barber MD, EMR project team leader of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) in discussing the Academy’s EMR position statement in the most recent issue of AAOS Now:

Orthopaedic surgeons will have great difficulty in meeting the current 25 Meaningful Use standards. Orthopaedics would derive greater benefits from standards promulgated by our medical specialty society rather than a set of generic requirements that mostly do not apply to musculoskeletal patient care.

This is not a new issue. The primary care focus of the legislation and regulations has been intentional from the outset. President Obama appointed an internist, David Blumenthal MD, to spearhead the program. There was only one private-practicing specialist among the committee members that crafted the recommendations to CMS.

It is not surprising that the Meaningful Use criteria do not reflect the practice patterns of specialists. Federal funding to assist physicians with EMR adoption has been directed towards primary care. The $357 million allocated for Regional Extension Centers, for example, was earmarked to “provide outreach and support services to at least 100,000 primary care providers and hospitals.”

The definition of Meaningful Use is not the only obstacle for specialists. The EMR products themselves are not tailored to the needs of specialists. The AAOS EMR Position Statement correctly suggests that in developing certification standards, it is essential that “the different needs and uses of EHR by disparate medical specialties should be recognized. In particular, the differences between surgical specialties and primary care specialties should be acknowledged.“

Unfortunately, because the certification criteria are linked to the Meaningful Use requirements, they are similarly primary care-driven. The EMRs most likely to be certified for Meaningful Use are predominantly those that were created and developed for primary care physicians — those of vendors that, from 2004 until recently, have devoted their development resources to meeting CCHIT’s 467 largely primary care-focused criteria. The AAOS statement continues: “Many systems are geared toward primary care medical practice, which can limit the utility of EHRs for specialty surgical practice.”

Specialists are no different from other physicians in their desire to participate actively in the evolution of the country’s medical care delivery system. But until Meaningful Use is defined in a way that is applicable to the way they deliver that care, they will participate on their own terms — adopting specialist-focused EMR technology that increases their productivity and enables them to provide the highest quality care and service to their patients.

* Includes internists, family practitioners, pediatricians, preventive medicine, an internist/hematologist, and a psychiatrist.

Evan Steele is CEO of SRSsoft of Montvale, NJ.

Safeguarding EMRs Against System Failure or Downtime
By Arthur Young

Using time-saving information technology and automated patient records management ensures clinicians have faster access to the most up-to-date patient information, enabling timely diagnoses and treatment and maintaining a high quality of care. However, if the network goes down, the system fails, or a planned or unplanned system downtime occurs, clinicians are unable to access critical patient information.

Whether they are planned or unplanned, system downtimes can occur for any length of time — from a few minutes to a few days. Downtimes can also be very costly if there is no system for preserving and accessing up-to-date patient information and maintaining uninterrupted patient care. Healthcare organizations have implemented systems for recovering from disasters, but not for protecting data and continuing operations during downtime. Without such a system, downtime can become more than an annoyance — it can be a life-threatening event.

Distinct from disaster recovery — which helps get systems back up when they go down due to a power outage or property damage — business continuance keeps vital business operations running at or near normal capacities in the event of any network or system downtime. That includes the downtime that occurs while disaster recovery mechanisms are being executed.

There are various solutions available that can help healthcare organizations remain functional during downtimes. However, they have drawbacks. Redundant or fault-tolerant systems can keep computers running and available during a system failure or power outage, but if they are the only system being used for business continuance and the network also goes down, clinicians will not be able to access patient data. Printing patient reports periodically allows clinicians to have the current data on hand, however it is a time-consuming and cumbersome task that diminishes data security, not to mention a waste of paper, ink, and other resources.

To maintain access to patient information from the location its needed, healthcare organizations need to select a business continuance approach that will provide the most protection in the most circumstances. Ideally, a business continuance solution should enable healthcare organizations to do the following:

• Identify critical information and automatically distribute it to areas it will be needed in the event the HCIS is unreachable;
• Ensure the information is secured but available on local machines;
• Maintain seamless operation in the background, notifying administrators of any interruptions; and
• Eliminate the storage of data in paper form, saving paper, ink, and printers.

Intelligent report generation and distribution decentralizes data in the event of downtime by sending the latest reports from the HCIS to its system and creating secure databases in multiple locations. The information is indexed in the database so clinicians can search and find the data they need whenever they need it.

With access to critical data during periods of system failure or extended downtime, clinicians can provide uninterrupted care and healthcare organizations mitigate risks to patient safety. Patients can be assured their health records are up-to-date and secure and confident they are receiving the best possible care.

Arthur Young is the president of Interbit Data of Natick, MA.

Ode to the Dumbwaiter and Robo-Butt
By Frustrated Farmacist (Female)

I saw your blurb about the Aethon TUG delivery robots installed at El Camino Hospital. The old ECH had an awesome dumbwaiter delivery system in place.

It is rumored that the Aethon TUG delivery robot solution was something of an afterthought that came six agonizing months after the grand opening of the $470 million hospital. Apparently earlier plans to integrate a delivery system may have been (ahem) overlooked. You can see from ECH documents that the robot contract was drafted in January 2010, several months after the new hospital opened. Early reports said the robots didn’t work for all departments and some ended up using volunteers, auxiliary staff, temporary workers, and other solutions to get medications and lab materials delivered.

$470 million and NOBODY initially planned an integrated medication delivery and lab transport system for a brand new, ultimate-in-high-tech 400-bed hospital! It doesn’t take too much imagination to extrapolate how important timely medication delivery is in the patient care scheme of things and why it’s the top complaint and employee satisfaction issue for nurses.

ECH’s competitor down the road has been using a similar robot system from Pyxis for the PAST 22 YEARS. It’s on its third generation, fondly named Robo-Butt. He travels in elevators and down halls to six floors and 15 departments. He is guided by sensors in the walls and speaks aloud to nurses to alert them when he arrives and when he commandeers the elevator. He steers around obstacles. His compartments are locked and secure, requiring a numbered password to open. He’s powered by six car batteries that are recharged and swapped for backups 2-3 times daily.

He breaks down every now and then. The elevators break down more often, grounding him on the first floor. Pyxis no longer supports these robots, so parts were scrounged from the basements of other hospitals and from a hospital supply house in Hawaii. But Robo-Butt WORKS. Here’s a picture of this bad boy:

The average hospital pharmacy department dispenses at least 40% more meds than were ordered because of late deliveries or items that are misplaced. The overhead and amount of wasted labor and supplies is unacceptable and frustrating for everyone involved, including the patient, nurse, doctor, pharmacy, and departments like lab and surgery that are held up because of medication delays.

With pneumatic tubes, you place meds in padded bullets and shoot them to the receiving department. Fragile ampules and vials can be broken — think about Epogen, a blood booster whose fragile proteins are destroyed by a violent trip in the tube system. It used to cost $6,000/vial and is still in the $600-900 range. Can I tell you how many bullets have exploded inside the pneumatic tube tunnels? Can I tell you what I think about the ER department tubing patient urine and blood samples to the lab inside this system?

We still have bullets that wind up in the basement due to malfunctioning suction or drivers. It’s hilarious when it’s a $45,000 rattlesnake venom antidote. But the bad part is that sometimes meds lie in piled up bullets in the tube receiving bin. Worse, the staff goes to send an “empty” tube to lab or ER and accidentally send a bullet filled with meds. The worst part is there is no “track-ability” or accountability — we can never tell whether someone received a bullet. If they “say” it never arrived, we have to send it again.

Here’s why I think dumbwaiters may be the ultimate smart medication delivery system with the fastest turnaround times, the least amount of waste, and minimal lost meds and lost charges. The pharmacy staff places labeled / bagged medications into little sectioned trays (like your silverware drawer’s insert) and leave them in the little locked elevator. The nurse that needs meds comes to her department’s locked elevator door, calls up the tray, and REMOVES ONLY HER PATIENT’S MEDS. She leaves the other meds in their little slots.

Think about this. You don’t have one nurse removing meds for her entire department and then misplacing them, storing them improperly (oops, that expensive IVIG that cost $20,000 belonged in the refrigerator?) or just putting them in her POCKET and forgetting to put them in the med room altogether. Then the Pharmacy can call the dumbwaiter down later and retrieve unused meds, credit them back, and recycle them. 

You can imagine that the number of missing med phone calls drops in half. Anyone in the pharmacy can check the dumbwaiter and see if missing meds are there before re-making them. Can I tell you how much time I waste every day re-doing the same missing med that simply gets misplaced or misdelivered and there’s no way to track it? It’s cheaper to bag up another blood pressure pill with the patient’s name and send it again sometimes. And then we get to retrieve all the duplicates, sort them, and restock them in the pharmacy bins…

I have nightmares about this.

A reliable well-planned medication delivery system is worth $$$ millions and makes up 80% of the nursing / customer satisfaction basis. I swear this is true! Any healthcare organization that builds a state-of-the-art facility without planning a delivery system is completely ignorant.

Done with my rant.

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The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology has named two ONC-Authorized Testing and Certification Bodies (ATCBs). They are Certification Commission for Health Information Technology of Chicago, IL and Drummond Group, Inc. of Austin, TX.

Authorized by the National Coordinator, ONC-ATCBs are required to test and certify that certain types of EHR technology (Complete EHRs and EHR Modules) are compliant with the standards, implementation specifications, and certification criteria adopted by the HHS Secretary and meet the definition of “certified EHR technology.”

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From Packerbacker: “Re: Epic. Wins another one, selected VOC at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin. The contract is not signed, but they have already started planning the implementation.” Unverified, but Epic doesn’t lose many deals in its home state.

From Winston Zeddemore: “Re: clinical data. I lost a lost of respect for Halamka with the whole ePatient Dave mess. As a doc, he should have known better than to inundate unsuspecting patients with a barrage of unchecked claims data in their PHR. Then, he has the audacity to state that the switch to ICD-10 would fix the problem, when ICD-10 has no code for metastasis of cancer to the skull, either. Recall, poor Dave was alarmed to see a diagnosis of mets to the brain, when he had really had mets to skull that had been successfully managed. Well, ICD-9-CM has no code for mets to the skull, so the coders used the closest thing, mets to the brain.”

From Telluride: “Re: HIStalk e-mail list. Since you started telling the numbers, it has grown each month. Do you allow unsubscribes?” Yes, and I get some of those. That’s why I look more at the ratio of new subscribers to unsubscribers. This month, for example, it has been 372:64. Some of those are e-mail address changes, of course. Like everybody else, I’d prefer readers who love me rather than hate me, but it’s indifference that I really hope to avoid.

From Eroica: “Re: Emdeon. I thought you’d like the highlighted reference below. You are now the source for Wall Street analysts!” A brokerage and investment firm’s update cites my Thursday posting about Emdeon and Blue Shield of California, although not by name (“a well read HCIT blog”). The announcement included the same confirmation I used from the reader’s rumor report (Blue Shield’s Web site) and listed the same three of 17 remaining clearinghouses that I did (which I did because those three are HIStalk sponsors and I figured it was nice to mention them, plus I hadn’t heard of most of the rest anyway). Emdeon responded to the firm’s inquiry by saying they may still negotiate a deal and their revenue from Blue Shield of California isn’t that important since “they can shift the cost per claim to providers or obtain rebates from other vendors.”

From Paul: “Re: tube system failure. Shameless plug by a robot vendor – I work for Aethon, a Pittsburgh-based company that makes TUGs, autonomous robots that deliver medications or supplies to any location. Think of it as a tubeless tube system with no fixed infrastructure that works 24/7. We also offer a Chain of Custody solution that uses biometrics and RFID to improve patient safety.” Since Paul made it clear it was a shameless plug, I’ll allow it. I’ve mentioned the company a few times, mostly when execs from other Pittsburgh-area HIT companies ended up there. Above is a video some guy made as he chased around one of the Aethon robots at El Camino Hospital. You’ll hear him say, “Puttin’ Americans out of work,” which may be true at El Camino since the hospital just announced a 140-employee layoff.

From C’mon Man: “Re: tube system at UPMC Shadyside. The workaround to avoid the >90 minute delay after CPOE deployment is marvelous!” CM sent a UPMC internal document describing a quality improvement project at Shadyside. Before Cerner was implemented, the ED stocked 95% of the meds they used in their automated dispensing cabinet and the other 5% were requested by tubing the paper order to pharmacy, resulting in a pretty good turnaround time of 28 minutes. With CPOE, the ED had no good way to alert pharmacy about those 5% of meds, so turnaround time shot up to over two hours. An ED nurse came up with a solution: tubing a yellow “Stat ED Med” card to pharmacy along with an index card listing the patient and med needed, dropping TAT back to six minutes. I was initially appalled at this solution since hand-transcribing an electronic order onto a tubed index card seems fraught with potential error, but pharmacy reviews the electronic order before sending the med and I assume nurses still verify the med electronically in the ED, hopefully with bar code checking. What puzzles me is why the original electronic order doesn’t go directly to pharmacy anyway — surely the pharmacy module should “know” that an order was entered for a non-Pyxis order and should send it to the pharmacist’s work queue for verification and delivery with no manual notification required. That’s what integrated systems are supposed to do.

All this tube system talk stirred up some old memories of a hospital I worked in years ago, where the information superhighway was a dumbwaiter system (“the dummy”, staff called it). It was actually darned useful since the hospital was built around it, so it connected the nursing units with the major departments they interacted with (lab, materials management, pharmacy, etc.) I once dared a small female co-worker to ride it up several floors, where she proceeded to scare the bejesus out of the nurse who opened its tiny door to see what had been sent. All of these “hospitals of the future” with their LCD TVs and room service should have reintroduced the dumbwaiter, an express elevator for stuff.

Listening: I’m still obsessed with the new Iron Maiden, but I took a break to listen to some catchy and refreshingly different alt rock-pop from The Last Goodnight.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it: (a) put your e-mail in the Subscribe to Updates box, just to make sure you don’t miss any news or juicy rumors; (b) speaking of news or juicy rumors, send me some by clicking the ugliest, greenest graphic on the page, to your right; (c) show HIStalk’s sponsors some appreciation by clicking on their ads to find out what’s new with them; (d) fritter away a slow afternoon at work by performing endless searches using the Search function to your right; and (e) Friend or Like Inga and me on Facebook so we can maintain our delusions of popularity. Thanks to readers for reading, sponsors for sponsing, and everyone who takes the time to leave a comment, send an e-mail, or submit something I can use on HIStalk, HIStalk Practice, or HIStalk Mobile.

Epic wouldn’t be a good choice to replace the DoD’s AHLTA EMR system, two-thirds of HIStalk readers say. New poll to your right, since Ed Marx’s “Blessing of the Hands” piece stirred up some heated responses: should hospital IT people be expected to have a higher level of compassion and spiritual beliefs than their counterparts in banking or manufacturing?

A sad medication error at Cincinnati Children’s: a seven-month-old baby dies after heart surgery when a technician apparently infuses an alcohol solution instead of saline.

Welch Allyn announces its Connex vital signs documentation system, a single device that collects automatic instrument readings (heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, pulse oximetry) and manual entries (height, weight, pain level) and modifiers (body position, O2 settings). It also allows alarm management and on-screen documentation right from the device. It’s wireless to the bedside. The company says that an average 200-bed hospital wastes 8,000 hours per year documenting vitals and makes 10,000 mistakes in doing so. St. Joseph’s Hospital Health Center in Syracuse, NY, the beta site, reports a 50% drop in documentation time and 75% fewer errors.

Yale-New Haven Hospital’s new CIO will be Daniel Barchi, who will also serve as CIO for the Yale School of Medicine. I interviewed him a few weeks ago while he was SVP/CIO of Carilion Clinic of Roanoke, VA. YNHH will be cranking up its $250 million Epic project, so I’m sure his experience in implementing Epic at Carilion will be valuable. He’s a good guy, as was his now-retired YNHH CIO predecessor Mark Andersen. Both are fans of HIStalk and have been cordially forthright in responding when I’ve pestered them to verify reader rumors.

Also on Inc.’s list of 5000 fastest growing private companies: Vitalize Consulting Solutions, among the fewer than 10% of companies on the lists that have four-peated since the magazine started the list four years ago. I’d consider Vitalize CEO Bruce Cerullo to be a great friend of HIStalk, having known him for years and interviewed him in 2007 when he was running VCS’s predecessor company Lucida, but even I didn’t know the company had grown this much: 264 employees, $48 million in annual revenue, and three-year growth of 179%.

HIStalk reader and clinical informaticist Lincoln Farnum sent over his exclusive article, Common Knowledge: Clinical Decision Support in the Era of Meaningful Use, a CDS Toolkit. I’ve posted it on Drop.io, hopefully free of the sneaky and unwelcome Facebook tie-ins that keep biting me in the rear when I post files for download. It’s a good overview of CDS, the ethics involved in deploying it, the problems with trying to measure its impact on patient outcomes, usability issues, and best practices in CDS deployment. Give it a look.

I was annoyed by a press release from Brainware that announced a new healthcare customer without naming them (is a sales announcement really news when it omits the customer’s name?), but the company’s Distiller product still sounds kind of interesting. It’s an intelligent data capture platform that “learns” the data fields from scanned documents such as invoices and orders.

New from Japan, which seems obsessed with high-tech toilets: a network-enabled health monitor version that checks blood sugar, BP, BMI, and urinalysis, all stored for a year for a family of four. Plans for the next version of the $5,000 marvel include communicating the measurements directly to physicians. Maybe it can do its own health check and page a network engineer to bring a plunger.

Interesting: McKesson’s only obvious operation in Ireland produces software documentation (check the title page of your Horizon manuals), but McKesson books (no pun intended) $10 billion a year through its Irish subsidiaries. The reason: it routes drug sales revenues from Canada, Israel, and Mexico through Ireland to avoid the higher corporate income tax of other countries, like the one its $35-million-a-year CEO lives in. Blame the politicians, not the company — wasn’t that one of the many populist windmills that President Obama was going to joust at?

Two radiology department employees of St. Luke’s Hospital (FL) are arrested for stealing hospital computers and selling them on Craigslist. Funny that nobody at the hospital missed them until a tipster told them.

A review of computer records leads to a $5.3 million settlement between doctors and Central DuPage Hospital (IL) over a case of untreated clotting problems that may have caused a patient’s death. The radiologist said he never saw the patient’s MRI results, but the computer showed otherwise.

E-mail me.

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