From Medicament: “Re: Epic UGM. Announced attendance is 5,500 vs. 3,800 last year. Surreal. This panorama is from the auditorium just after Judy’s keynote.” If you are there, send me a report of any newsworthy developments. Sorry the pic is small, but that’s the point: the meeting isn’t.

From Neils Bohr: “Re: Accenture. I heard they got the HHS contract for use case for the Standards and Interoperability Framework last Friday.”

From Epic CoOp: “Re: Epic consultants. Given the huge demand, 20 of them are forming a consulting co-op to keep the cut that temp agencies take.”

From Blue Danube: “Re: video. Even though it’s an ad for Centricity, it paints a pretty accurate picture of primary care and the need for EMRs.”

Listening: new (released just today) from John Legend and The Roots, a collaboration between the modern R&B/hip hop singer (John Legend) and the Philly funk band (The Roots), updating socially conscious soul songs from the 60s and 70s. I can’t describe just how awesome this album is, sounding as fresh and uncomplicated as Motown circa 1968. If you don’t like soul or hip hop music because it’s over-produced, non-melodic, and fixated with trite subjects like lust or fame, let this rekindle your hope for the genre. I usually condition my recommendations knowing they aren’t for everyone, but this one’s for everyone.

UnitedHealth Group makes another buy, announcing plans to acquire coding vendor A-Life Medical. I covered it in a news blast here. UnitedHealth Groups is obviously on an HIT tear, bagging four companies so far this year. That’s a good reminder to sign up for updates using the Subscribe to Updates box on the upper-right of this page and/or to Friend/Like us on Facebook since I usually post new stuff there too.

The San Diego office of the FBI announces that El Centro Regional Medical Center (CA) will pay $2.2 million plus interest to settle Medicare fraud allegations brought forward in a former employee’s whistleblower lawsuit.

Rothman Healthcare hires Richard Sommer as CEO. I hadn’t heard of the company, so I checked it out. It markets products based on The Rothman Index, an automated system that collects 26 observations and results for each patient every hour and graphs the score so caregivers can quickly see who’s crashing. The trial was at Sarasota Memorial (FL). The Rothman brothers found the company after their mother died after post-surgical complications that were subtle and therefore undetected in the hospital. According to the company’s site, nurses at its first hospital site identified a patient going bad within five minutes of bringing the system up in test mode, reacting to a patient whose pulse-ox had dropped from 98% to 85% over two days without alarming anyone.

Jewish General Hospital of Montreal, Quebec will use education and clinical image sharing tools from Aurora Interactive to create an online pathology education network.

McKesson, HP, and Intel launch a site that mixes HITECH resources with preconfigured EHR hardware/software packages.

Transcend Services announces BeyondAlerts, which extracts clinical data from transcribed narrative to trigger provider alerts.

Panasonic will offer data encryption from Mobile Armor in its Toughbook notebooks and mobile clinical assistants. That includes self-encrypting Seagate drives, centralized management, pre-boot authentication, and auditing. Smart.

I made fun of a Brainware sales announcement a few weeks back because it didn’t name the customer (for contractual reasons, no doubt, but I still questioned the newsworthiness of an anonymous customer sale). They sent me their latest announcement this week, joking that this one names names, that being Gundersen Lutheran Health System (WI). Brainware and Ascend Software are providing the Brainware Distiller intelligent data capture tool along with business process automation for the health system’s Lawson accounts payable system. Brainware’s tools pull data out of unstructured sources such as invoices without templates or indexing. For AP, that means speeding up processing and providing a near real-time view into liabilities. It uses fuzzy search to assign GL codes and vendor numbers to non-PO invoices. Its Gateway product is a portal for vendors to check the status of their invoices online.

Since I shamed Brainware, let’s move on to the next poster child for bad press releases. Does this headline roll off your tongue? The Institute for Transfusion Medicine(SM) (ITxM)(SM) Deploying BIO-key(R) Fingerprint Search and Identification Solution for Donors and Patients. Marketing people can’t even introduce themselves without holding up little trademark and service mark signs. I guarantee that nobody could read this even 2-3 times and have the slightest clue what it’s about with all the unnecessary, lawyer-paranoid clutter.

Covisint, the portal vendor owned by Compuware, acquires DocSite of Raleigh, NC, which offers PQRI, registry, decision support, e-prescribing, progress notes, and integration tools. Roger Sterling tipped us off in the 9/1 HIStalk, although Inga couldn’t get Covisint to confirm.

Children’s Boston will use Allocade’s On-Cue Operations Management software in radiology. It pulls data from existing systems to create a rule-optimized patient itinerary and provides caregiver collaboration tools and business intelligence.

New Jersey’s HITREC contracts for physician practice consulting services from Nit Health. Being a hospital guy, I couldn’t help but think of small combs and Kwell shampoo.

Maimonides Medical Center (NY) goes live with InterSystems Ensemble for rapid integration and development, using it to develop new interfaces to/from Sunrise Clinical Manager.  

An interesting debate at the VA: should tech-savvy doctors be allowed to store limited patient information using cloud-based Web tools if they appear to be secure and if the VA’s systems can’t meet their needs otherwise?

A study finds that a heart attack risk calculator used by consumer health sites is not very accurate, misclassifying 15% of patients as needing medications when they really don’t (check out the screen shot I took above from the American Heart Association’s version of the calculator to see why that’s not too shocking). Epocrates is mentioned as offering physician treatment applications based on the flawed formula.

E-mail me.

HERtalk by Inga

From Heresay: “Re: certification pricing. I’ve heard CCHIT is charging $40-$60,000 for EHR certification compared to Drummond’s $20K.” If anyone thinks they have a solid handle on the pricing from the three ONC-ACTBs, please step forward. InfoGard has yet to publish any details, but here is how I am interpreting the pricing from CCHIT and Drummond:

• Complete EHR Ambulatory: CCHIT $34,300; Drummond $19,500.
• Compete EHR Inpatient: CCHIT $32,550; Drummond $19,500.
• If you don’t need testing for the full EHR and just need individual modules tested, CCHIT has assigned a per-module fee for testing that ranges from $650 to $2,000, depending on the module’s complexity, plus a $7,000 base fee that includes the mandatory security criteria.
• Drummond charges $11,500 for up to 19 modules, include the mandatory measures, or, $16,000 for 20 or more modules, including the mandatory items.

To summarize: Drummond is less expensive if you need complete EHR certification and testing. If you need module testing only, CCHIT could be less expensive. The CCHIT folks would probably add that their fee includes a comprehensive testing and certification toolkit for vendors, which they will sell to non-applicants for $1,000. Also, vendors with CCHIT 2011-certified products will not need to pay additional fees for the ONC-ATCB certification through CCHIT, though additional testing is required.

I happened upon this blog post by an Epic User Group Meeting attendee. He shares details of Sunday night’s round-the-campfire wienie roast, complete with s’mores, dogs, and employee-provided entertainment. Very cool. Epic is expecting over 5,300 customers to hit Verona this week for this year’s theme, “UGM: The Musical.” In addition to 300 educational sessions, the meeting will  feature Epic staff singing Broadway tunes, Les Feud game show, and a tug-of-war tournament.

KLAS finds that nearly 70% of new 2009 hospital EMR purchases were for an Epic or Cerner integrated solution. Overall EMR sales nearly doubled last year in the 200+ bed hospital market. Meditech and Siemens saw limited growth and McKesson’s Paragon product outsold McKesson’s Horizon solution.

RCM company NHPN appoints David Garber SVP of managed care. Garber has held leadership positions in a number of managed care organizations, including CompServices and Coventry Health Care.

A third of office-based providers are now e-prescribing, according to Surescripts. However, only 12% of all prescriptions were written electronically last year. The number of providers using electronic prescribing grew significantly from 2008 to 2009, from 74,000 to 200,000, while the total number of e-prescriptions jumped from 68 million to 190 million. Massachusetts had the highest e-prescribing rate at 57%, followed by Rhode Island and Delaware.

Corey Hall joins REACH Call as EVP of medical informatics, coming over from the College of American Pathologists.

Sponsor Updates

• iMDsoft and Medical Web Technologies (MWT) partner to integrate their technologies. iMDsoft will offer MWT’s One Medical Passport pre-op workflow solution as part of its MetaVision AIMS product.
• Greenway Medical Technologies introduces its Allergy Module for PrimeSuite EHR, which includes injection record tracking, allergen testing, serum development, and lot administration and reporting.
• API Healthcare says that 35 provider and contingent staffing clients have gone live with its workforce management solutions this year.
• NextGen Healthcare provides VHA members special pricing on its clinical and financial software.
• Vanguard Health Systems deploys Medicity’s Novo Grid HIE technology to 850 physicians across four states.
• Parkview Medical Center (CO) selects RelayHealth’s RevRunner to improve its revenue cycle performance.

E-mail Inga.

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Jessica Wilen Berg, JD is a professor of law and bioethics at Case Western Reserve University of Cleveland, OH, with joint appointments in the Schools of Law and Medicine. She conducts research and publishes in the areas of informed consent, human research, reproductive law and ethics, confidentiality, mental health law, professional self-regulation, and e-medicine.

 

Hospitals have transitioned from the charitable care model to a purely business model, some of them with hundreds of millions of dollars in annual profits and paying multi-million dollar executive salaries. How has that changed healthcare for better and for worse?

On the plus side, I think we’ve seen a lot of innovation. I think that’s commonly what you see in a business model, or hope to see in a business model, which is a lot of different attempts to try things in different ways — take on a new technology, try different models of providing services, and in theory, be fairly responsive to the market. Ideally, a business model is set up entirely to be very responsive to the market.

The downside … I don’t think we’ve ever really reconciled ourselves as a society to the notion that healthcare, of all things, is a business. It comes along with all the things that come with the business model. And that is profit motive: there’s a bottom line, you want to stay in business, you want to do better than others, you want to make as much profit as possible.

For people that can’t pay, a business model doesn’t incorporate into it, naturally, anything that affords you a mechanism to offer services for free.

There is no other business model that expects the people who are able to pay to subsidize those who can’t. How are hospitals effectively, or not effectively, meeting that need?

I don’t want to say there’s no other business model that doesn’t assume different sliding scales, because on an international market level, for example — although this, again, is a healthcare example — pharmaceutical companies do somewhat assume that they will make more money in some countries, like this country, to subsidize less money they can make in other countries.

I’m not familiar enough with lots of other business models to say that there aren’t other ones that do that. That being said, it is not typical that a business model always incorporates the fact that there are sliding scales. That some people are going to pay more, and that subsidizes the people who pay less.

Is the hospital industry effectively meeting that need as an efficient arbiter that says, “We can efficiently transfer money from those who can pay into those who can’t and it will all work out?”

It’s not, because it’s not a whole system. I think if it was a system, you might be able to do that, but the people who can pay are not always located in the same areas, either geographic areas or with the same problems, as the people who can’t pay. Within a system, you might be able to do that as long as you cover a large enough area that you’re getting both sides of it.

That’s a fundamental flaw of the way healthcare delivery is organized in the country overall, which is we’ve known for a long time — and this is true of any insurance market, for example — that what you ideally want is a wide mix of problems, and from that perspective here on the payment, you want wide mix of ability to pay in order to get an adequate subsidization.

You’re not going to get that, necessarily, in one inner-city hospital. It could be that your hospital in the high-income suburb has the ability to pull in people who have health insurance, or even out-of-pocket ability to pay for some things that they’re doing, and your inner-city hospital doesn’t have that at all.

The term has been to create hospital systems, so more and more you see hospitals merge together. You may have the satellite units in the suburbs and you may have the one inner-city unit. Usually, your inner-city hospitals are just going to lose money, and a lot of money. They’re dealing with a generally poor population. They’re dealing with significant health problems, a lot of chronic conditions.

Just, as a general rule — this is not always true — they’re going to lose a lot of money. Not to mention, of course, emergency rooms are huge cost losers, basically. Emergency rooms do not even break even. They cost institutions enormous amounts of money.

A hospital network I used to work for had a motto of, “We serve all, but market to few.” Does marketing and competing for paying patients raise costs?

It can drive up costs, and I think there are more fundamental flaws in the system that are really driving the costs than just concern about marketing or the few that can pay. There are lots of debates about what’s driving the increase in cost. The vast increases in new technologies, the fact that very rarely do we get rid of an old technology and add in a new.

Say when you come in, maybe it used to be that all we could do was a direct physician exam. Then, maybe we could do an exam and an x-ray. Now, maybe we could do an exam and x-ray and an MRI because now, if it’s not a bone, maybe it’s a soft tissue injury. Maybe beyond that you could then do a PET scan. I mean, we add technology. We very rarely replace it or get rid of some of the earlier ones.

The technologies, as a whole, do not tend to be things that drive the cost down considerably. Unlike in other fields where you’re saying, “Well, we used to have this way of doing it and it cost this much money and this much time. We found a new, very quick way to do it now, and it’s much less expensive.” That’s rarely what occurs in the healthcare field. Usually the new technology is very, very expensive and doesn’t drive the cost down at all. It drives it up.

Every now and then someone gets the idea of claiming that hospitals are gaming the numbers on the charity care they provide and urge taking away the non-profit status hospitals. What would be the effect if that were to happen?

I want to take a little issue with the idea of gaming. There is a game that goes on, although who set the rules of the game and put it in place in the first time,  it’s not necessarily the hospital. You do have a strange set-up going on where you incentivize the organizations to play a game a certain way, including making sure that their charity numbers become very high.

There’s a lot of debate about what would happen if you get rid of non-profit status. Some of it has to do with, what does it mean when you say you’ve gotten rid of non-profit status? The really quick answer is that non-profit status goes along with some other things, like the ability to get charitable donations from other groups and organizations; and those people, then, to tax-deduct those donations. For people who give money to a hospital, they may not be able to be deduct it if they lose their non-profit status.

I also should say this as a little aside, technically, as a legal matter, non-profit and tax-exempt are slightly different determinations. As a practical matter for whatever we’re doing, you don’t really need to worry about that. But it’s two, slightly different things that are going on here.

The other thing that you might worry about is grants. There are many grant organizations that will not provide grants except to a non-profit. There are some other kinds of things that go along with that. And then, the big part of course is if you take away their tax-exempt status, they’re going to have to pay a significant amount of money out in taxes.

It seems like in hospitals you’ve got these two, polar opposites — big IDNs that make enormous amounts of money and then these tiny community hospitals that struggle to not close up shop because they’re losing money every year. Do you think the larger groups will absorb the smaller ones and would that be good or bad?

I don’t know if it’s good or bad if it happens. Part of it’s going to depend on how we see the evolution of the provision of care, including charity care, over these next few years. But the question of this absorbing the other ones, that’s what’s already happening now if you look at many cities and many hospital environments.

It used to be you had many little hospitals, and by and far, the vast majorities have been absorbed into major systems. Most places have now, two, sometimes three hospital systems rather than many individual hospitals.

On the plus side, as I mentioned before, that does give you some ability to spread across the institutions between some of your hospitals that have the ability to make more money versus some of them that don’t have that ability. On the downside, you do have then, fewer choices of smaller community hospitals. You might get less in the way of unique ways of doing things.

It’s not clear what the overall effect will be of that, but I think we’ve seen the consolidation of hospitals now going on for quite a bit of time.

It’s interesting too, the recent case that came up where the hospital in Marin County is suing Sutter, claiming that Sutter basically pillaged the hospital for $120 million before they walked away and turned it back over. Is that going to be a concern when you’ve got hospital systems that, overall, have a fairly equal balance of income to services provided, but yet maybe not geographically equal?

It’s always a problem and it’s always going to be a hard thing to think about. If you look into the idea behind this, it’s that if you’re a business and you have a manufacturing plant that’s just constantly losing money, or an arm of your business is losing money, as a business, you’re inclination is to say, “Well, we no longer want to have that particular arm. That’s where we’re losing all our money. That’s what we have to do, we have to close that.”

And hospitals, even internally, have started to think that way when they say, “Look, we’re losing all our money on our prenatal care, “ or, “We’re losing all our money on our emergency rooms.” These are areas that don’t tend to be moneymakers. They’re pretty much just not. They’re areas where you lose a lot of money, and so the tendency’s to say, “Well, that’s where we’re losing money, that’s what we close.” The difficulty and the tension, I think, continues between this idea — even as I said in the beginning — that it’s a business model.

In a healthcare model, we’d say, “Well, that’s ridiculous. You’re open because you need those services. That’s the whole point. We need an emergency room. We need those things. You have to stay open.” Even though what we’re saying to you is, “You have to do that, although we know you’re losing money.” That’s the same thing that happens, just on a larger scale when you look at a hospital system that looks around and says, “Well, this hospital’s losing all the money.”

But one response to that might be, “Well that’s how it’s how it’s going to be. The system is that you have to have that there, we need this service. As a community, we need this service.” So then the question is, have we done something wrong in setting up our delivery system that creates this tension?

We told them that they’re a business, even a non-profit business, and then said, “Oh, but we expect that you’re going to provide these services we need for the community,” and created this very uneasy feeling where companies come in, or hospitals systems come in, and they have to say, “We’re going to accept that we’re losing enormous amounts of money on this institution or on this service,” as opposed to really thinking how we’re supposed to fund this in such a way that they don’t feel that degree of pressure. That either we don’t survive at all as a hospital system unless we get rid of this and there’s some other way to maintain the things that the community thinks that it needs.

It hasn’t been too many decades ago when hospitals were mostly run by nuns or by people who were trained in healthcare administration or by doctors. Now they’re mostly run by people who have mainline MBA-type training. Could it be that people trained to think in terms of cost centers and widgets and market share don’t see healthcare as all that different from other businesses?

I don’t know. I mean, some of the people who work and have the degrees have health sciences backgrounds or health administration backgrounds. It’s not like they’re completely foreign to the notion of delivery of health systems versus the business of health, versus the business of anything else. I don’t think you see a ton of transplants across fields, for example. You know, someone who ran Ford and General Motors suddenly running a hospital system. It is a fairly unique and specialized area that people get in to.

It could be different, although there are some great studies that show how horrible physicians are as business people. There’s the same with lawyers, so I can’t say much on my field either. There are studies that show it’s a skill. Management’s a skill, administration is a skill. You might need some more specialized information, and there are degrees in those. There are business degrees in health administration.

But maybe you should have people running an organization whose degree is in running organizations, not in caring for patients. That’s not to say you don’t need some level of communication. You need some way to bridge the gap and we’ve seen that problem. We’ve seen it at its worst in institutions where you have no communication and you really feel like people are making business decisions without thinking about the patient decisions.

It could be that the best model here is some combination of people who have some understanding about how to run and administer a healthcare organization, and people who have understanding about direct patient care.

Hospitals are spending all these millions to implement electronic medical records, subsidized by the government stimulus money. How do you see that changing the hospital business?

Ideally, it reduces cost. The wonder of the electronic medical record is supposed to be that it has all these benefits in terms of actual care to patients, as well as reducing costs, reducing medication errors. Maybe even the ability to engage in some kind of comparative effectiveness research on broad scales if you gather enormous amounts of patient data.

The problem is that it can take many years before it’s actually implemented. In the mean time, you have compatibility issues, you have learning curve issues. You have enormous cost outlays if you do this.

I think, in the end, it’s still the best place to be heading, but it’s hard to say in the short term whether we’re just not going to see a lot of growing pains.

You would think that the for-profits, especially the investor-owned chains, would be the most aggressive in their adoption of information technology like any other industry. And yet in healthcare, they’re probably among the most backward outside of tiny, standalone hospitals. Is that surprising to you?

Not necessarily, because it’s a long-term investment issue and it can be very difficult to do long-term investments. You’re balancing bottom lines at different points. You’ve got to somehow be able to deal with the fact that you have a certain amount of money outlay that you’ve got to do to put in place an electronic medical record system, and the cost estimates are enormous. Somehow you have to then — when you balance your books that year when you’re showing your profits and losses, that’s going to cut into your bottom line significantly — you have to be in a position where you can look long term. And to a certain extent, non-profits have a slightly better situation in doing that.

They’re not quite as focused on the bottom line. They’re not going to have some of the same pressures, or shareholders looking at things going, “Wait a second. What happened here? Why did you authorize this giant outlay that we’re not going to see the effects of for 5-10 years down the road?” They also have possibly the ability to take advantage of, as I said earlier, some grant organizations will give grants to anything but non-profits. The non-profits have the ability to take advantage of some of the grants and such that are out there to encourage the adoption of some of these records.

To the extent that some of them are government institutions — not all non-profits are government institutions, but the ones that are government institutions can have an additional impetus that are getting pushed on from the government itself saying, “You need to go ahead and implement records.” The Veterans Administration hospitals are far ahead of the game in the electronic medical records world, and much of it is because basically, word came from above: “This is what you’re going to implement and what you’re going to do,” and they didn’t have anybody going, “Well, we’re worried about the bottom line in the end.”

I was interested in your research with e-medicine and its impact on the healing aspects of physician-patient relationships. What were your conclusions?

That there are some excellent, excellent tools out there in e-medicine if you use them appropriately and carefully; and there are some that can cause significant problems if you’re not careful. But like anything else, it can be used very well.

Any concluding thoughts?

I do think we’re going to see some movement around this. There’s certainly a lot of interest in it, and at various times we get a lot of political interest and concern about non-profit hospitals and charity care and tax-exempt basis. I think we’ll see something, and we’ve seen some states start to put in place, creative mechanisms to deal with it. I’m not sure if we’ll see something on a federal level, but I do think that we’ll see additional state movement. We’ve already seen localities, as you have already noted, remove tax-exempt status from hospitals where they say, "You know what? You’re not really fitting the model of what we thought we should be using for tax-exemption."

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From Tobias Funke: “Re: interesting billboard. This is from Avera Health in Sioux Falls, SD.” That’s pretty cool – the billboard has a smoke machine behind it to extend the smoke into the sky. It drew lots of attention, both from passers-by who checked out the site afterward and the local fire department, who shut it down.

From The PACS Designer: “Re: Windows 1E9 beta. Just like Mr. H, TPD loves Firefox and avoids Internet Explorer. Well, now we have the Windows IE9 beta release, but you won’t be able to use it for Windows XP! It looks like a move by Microsoft to push more of us XP users to upgrade to Windows 7.” I’m still holding Vista against them. The decades-old Windows pattern is obvious: one really OS good release alternating with a bad one that causes endless frustration. My preferred browsers, in order, are Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and then IE (I don’t use Safari, so I don’t know where it would fit). Windows 7 is a winner, though, which is still not great consolation given that I paid for Vista instead of jumping right from XP to the next good version. I don’t think anyone would complain about moving up to Windows 7 if it didn’t require starting over for XP users — you have to have wasted your money on Vista to do a simple upgrade, or at least that’s what I recall when I last considered it. I suspect I’m like the typical XP holdout — not cheap, just not finding a good reason to risk problems knowing that Microsoft offers no help (in other words, have lots of time and a second computer to Google your problem just in case the first one is trashed because you’re on your own).

Former McKesson Provider Technology CFO Craig Niemiec is named EVP/CFO of US Preventive Medicine. I checked out that company’s prevention program and it sounds pretty cool: you pay $229 for the first year, complete an online health risk questionnaire, and then go to a local lab to have a panel of blood tests. The company sends your lab results to a PHR, you and your doctor get a custom prevention plan, you gain access to online dashboards and action programs, and a nurse advocate is available to help with health maintenance. Since it’s not tied to insurance or employment, nobody sees the information without your approval.

Job candidates with a CPHIMS credential would impress one out of five HIStalk readers if they were hiring. New poll to your right: would you use an free, ad-supported EMR?

Sonney Sapra is promoted to CIO of Tuality Healthcare (OR).

iOptimal announces the beta of iPad Hospital Toolkit, which it says requires no iOS programming and connects to standard databases to convert legacy apps to run on the iPad.

A third organization is approved by HHS to certify EHRs as an ONC-Authorized Testing and Certification Body: InfoGard Laboratories of San Luis Obispo, CA. They have many certifications and list extensive internal expertise (cryptography, security, systems architecture, etc.) that makes CCHIT’s credentials look a little anemic in comparison.

St. Edward Mercy Medical Center (AR) will go live on Epic September 26. The local paper’s article says Sisters of Mercy Health System, of which St. Edward is part, spent $450 million on Epic.

Siemens will make its IT Solutions and Services unit a separate company on October 1, having previously announced plans to cut 4,200 jobs there to set up a spinoff. That business covers a bunch of industries including healthcare, but I wasn’t familiar with the healthcare parts: content management, PACS data storage, identity management, and RFID. I assume this has nothing to do with Siemens Healthcare.

Cardinal Health sells its remaining shares in its CareFusion spinoff for $706 million. Some of the CareFusion medical device and technology brands include Pyxis, Alaris, AVEA, Jaeger, SensorMedics, V. Mueller, and MedMined.

England’s Connecting for Health wants NHS trusts to report their inventories of Microsoft licenses by October 1. Since CFH didn’t renew its Enterprise Agreement and their license count is fixed, that means trusts are own their own to budget and pay for their Microsoft licenses.

I’m not sure how this qualifies as defense funding, but Assistant Senate Majority Leader Dick Durbin brings home the Illinois bacon in getting $3.6 million in funding through the Senate Appropriations Committee for Children’s Memorial Hospital of Chicago to study regenerative genes. It’s great for wounded soldiers, so I guess you could squint a little at the tumescent federal budget and make it so. The Senate has to approve, but I think they are battle-weary themselves from approving endless federal handouts that, if you continue squinting, only slightly resemble a robust economy.

An interesting and cheap idea for practices interesting in reducing missed appointments: sign up for a Web-based virtual phone service and use it to send SMS reminders to patients.

Vecna Technologies signs a marketing deal with Cycom Canada to sell its QC PathFinder real-time hospital infection monitoring system to hospitals in Canada. The company, whose offices are in the DC area and Cambridge, MA, also offers a Web portal and patient self-service kiosks. Also, the medication delivery robot above. Their stuff looks pretty cool.

Former treasury secretary Paul O’Neill questions David Blumenthal after the latter’s EHR-love keynote speech at a patient safety meeting, asking him (I’m paraphrasing): if the government is so hot to spend billions on EMRs, then why not design a prototype and then refine it, creating a national standard? Blumenthal’s answer, also paraphrased: there’s a debate about whether the ideal approach is like the Internet, where competition took the basic structure of the Internet and turned it into something amazing, or should someone just set detailed standards centrally? He also touted certification. An interesting quote from the excellent Mass Device article, from Atul Gawande at an August meeting talking about reducing medical errors: “Ignorance remains, but we have a new kind of human failure that has emerged as important and that is what the philosophers call ‘ineptitude,’ meaning that the knowledge is there, but the individual or group of individuals fail to apply that knowledge correctly.”

A former Medco pharmacist nears the 80th day of his hunger strike protesting the mail order pharmacy’s requirement that pharmacists fill at least 50 prescriptions per hour, saying it causes medication errors.

The VA and DoD launch a fourth records-sharing pilot, this one involving the Spokane VA, Fairchild AFB, and Inland Northwest Health Services. The first three are in San Diego, Norfolk, and Indianapolis.

California Attorney General Jerry Brown wants to review the salaries of hospital executives, among several public positions that he thinks are overpaid. The healthcare example he gave was the CEO of Washington Hospital, who makes $847K. The hospital gave the stock answer about having to pay market salaries for the best hires, which always sounds lame to me. First, some of healthcare’s hires are clearly not the best people. Second, by that logic, you’d be paying teachers and ministers huge dollars if only they were lucky enough to have higher-paying alternatives. And third, I like the idea of offering less than market salary and seeing who really wants to help patients vs. themselves. If you can’t stand the idea of running a non-profit hospital for a paltry $500K, then don’t let the door hit you on your way out.

E-mail me.

Sponsor Updates

• T-System announces the six winners of its 2010 Client Excellence Awards.
• Medicity announces that Carolinas HealthCare has selected the company as its partner to build a multi-state HIE.
• Nuance will be at AHIMA next week.
• Baltimore-based clinical documentation vendor Salar is recruiting for a number of positions to support its growth: software engineer, RVP of sales, implementation specialist, marketing specialist, and others. I like these guys – their crew was having a blast at the HIStalk reception at HIMSS in Atlanta.
• A good Facebook to follow – NPC Creative Services. I read a lot of Facebook posts and theirs is always on point about HIT.
• HIS vendor IntraNexus will be at HISpro’s seminar for buyers in Dallas on October 13-14. That’s Vince Ciotti, who keeps the registration fees and hotel costs way down ($295 to register).
• I don’t remember if I’ve mentioned this: Quest Diagnostics and Surescripts will work together to create a service that will make lab and prescription information readily available to physicians. Quest is the parent company of HIStalk sponsor MedPlus, which offers the Centergy data exchange, ChartMaxx document-based EHR, and Web-based Care360 EHR that is used in more than 70,000 practices.
• Holon is offering downloable overviews of its offerings: central order entry pharmacy, results notification, workflow scheduling, pharmacy solutions, and others. The company offers the Holon Framework that includes solutions for data exchange, workflow, interoperability, and document management, all designed to enhance rather than replace existing systems.
• International informatics and medical terminology vendor Apelon will be at AHIMA, where Kathy Giannangelo will present on the state of standardized terminologies. The company’s expertise is in terminology asset management, data interoperability and integration, and data warehouse content and consulting.
• If you’re going to the Virginia MGMA fall conference in Virginia Beach next week, check out DIVURGENT’s presentation on tactical approaches to HITECH, delivered by partner Colin Konschak and client services VP Shane Danaher. The healthcare consulting firm will also be at the CHIME Fall Forum and VAHIMSS in October.
• Stockell Healthcare Systems offers several success stories about its InsightCS solution for patient registration, ADT, and revenue cycle management.
• Precyse Solutions will oversee transcription, medical records processing, coding, and storage for Benefits Health System (MT), taking over its 60 employees.
• Rechargeable workstations from Enovate are highlighted on the Web page of Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota, which shows the amenities and benefits of its patient rooms. Cool idea: each room has a caregiver window so that nurses can check on the patient and perform documentation from the hallway without barging in.
• UC Irvine Medical Center gives credit to Surgical Information Systems for its best practices in patient handoff and communication that led to a successful Joint Commission survey.
• Order Optimizer has added a very well laid out Web page on Meaningful Use. It says its SaaS-based CPOE can be live in nine weeks with no capital investment and no impact on legacy systems, making it feasible to meet Stage 1 incentives within 90 days.
• MED3OOO offers free electronic newsletter subscriptions covering coding and compliance, clinical tools, and developing healthcare news.
• SRSsoft publishes its online EMR Straight Talk, with the latest entry being EMR Purchase – Caveat Emptor.
• Cumberland Consulting Group is growing and therefore looking for candidates at these levels: consultant, managing consultant, and executive consultant.
• Regulatory compliance consulting firm The Anson Group will present at the 2010 RAPS Annual Conference in San Jose next month. The company also offers technology commercialization services that can include licensing, sale, and partnerships, particularly with regard to products involving FDA approval and the resulting regulatory risk.
• I like the people at electronic forms management experts Access, being among the very few sponsor folks I’ve actually hung out with non-anonymously here and there. I’m still trying to get them to bring their award-winning Texas barbeque team to HIMSS in Orlando for your benefit as an attendee, since that part of the world struggles by with pathetic chain barbequed chicken of no particular regional specialty and therefore is generally unaware of the glories of Texas brisket and sausage (although I do like that of Cecil’s Barbeque on Orange Avenue even if they smoke it over hickory instead of post oak and/or mesquite). Anyway, Access has a blog here, which coincidentally gives HIStalk a shout-out in the latest entry.
• Informatics Corporation of America is offering an October 21 Webinar entitled Sustaining HIEs Through Leveraged Infrastructure – A Multi-Community Approach.
• Sunquest is at the pathology informatics conference in Boston this week and will head on over to CAP ‘10 in Chicago immediately after. Stop by and tell them you saw it on HIStalk.
• API Healthcare launches its Client Connections site, providing easy access to support materials, manuals, and training materials. It also offers clients the ability to network with each other and with API’s experts on workforce management technology. Clients can search the support database, review and enter support tickets, and receive e-mail updates when the status of their ticket changes.
• Enterprise workflow vendor FormFast offers a Webcast library covering EMR maturity and adoption, RAC audits, workflow applications, prescription printing, and others.
• The Sentinel RCM application 340b drug pricing application from Sentry Data Systems will be integrated with Omnicell’s WorkflowRX 7.0 software.
• EDIS vendor EDIMS will be at ACEP 2010 in Las Vegas next week. I’m sure they would appreciate a howdy from HIStalk readers also at the Mandalay Bay.
• Culbert Healthcare Solutions just won a “fast growing” award, so it stands to reason that they might want to talk to you if you’re an ace consultant (Allscripts, Epic, GE, integration, revenue cycle, PM, etc.) Info here.
• Interesting in outsourcing revenue collections? AdvancedBiller, a service of AdvancedMD, will match you with up to three AdvancedBiller partners, who will provide needs analysis and price quotes. Register here.
• TELUS Health offers an online demo of Telus health space, its HealthVault-powered consumer platform for Canadians that is the first to achieve Canada Health Infoway pre-implementation certification.
• SCI Solutions is making customer reviews of its access management services freely available online via Customer Lobby, including KLAS-like commentary and star ratings. I believe you can infer that they have little to hide about their ordering, patient scheduling, and revenue cycle applications. SCI was one of the first HIStalk sponsors and doesn’t really advertise much, so thanks to John Holton, Cindy Dullea, and Hans Morefield, some of the folks there that keep in touch regularly.
• Wellsoft announces that CCHIT has certified its EDIS v11 emergency department EHR, making it one of the first.
• EHR consulting experts Enterprise Software Deployment (Allscripts, Cerner, Epic, McKesson, Meditech, Siemens) brings on David Tucker as national sales VP. The company is growing like weeds and is on the lookout for both salaried and contract consultants – check out their job board.
• Software Testing Solutions has posted fun photos from their creative booth activities at SUG 2010. You can sign up for a variety of demos and classes for their application testing solutions for Sunquest, Eclipsys/Allscripts, and Epic.

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From Bama Birdie: “Re: HealthSouth. Trinity Medical Center will relocate to its unfinished hospital on US 280.” This was the endlessly touted digital hospital that was to serve as the flagship for the HealthSouth rehab chain, to have been built by HealthSouth and Oracle. It was called the “hospital of the future” when construction began in 2001, which turned out to be apropos since Richard Scrushy’s $2.7 billion fraud scandal left it permanently unfinished. It was vaporware anyway, said HealthSouth’s CEO last year: “It was a pipe dream and a figment of the imagination. It never had a chance.” You would have believed otherwise given the gushy coverage by the bootlicking healthcare rags back in the day, which were apparently unaware that Oracle had pretty much nothing to offer hospitals despite periodic, uninspired healthcare waters toe-dipping.

From RegularReader: “Re: Broadlane. MedAssets buys competing GPO/services company Broadlane for $850M Tuesday and the Street doesn’t exactly love it. Stock is down approximately 10% since the deal was announced. Only time will tell how many jobs the expected $20M in 2011 expense-based synergies represents.” MedAssets shares closed Thursday at $18.54, down from Tuesday’s peak of $21.50.

From Willie Maquitt: “Re: Adreima. Where do companies come up with these names? How do you pronounce it?” Advocacy for Reimbursement Matters, like George “T-Bone” Costanza in Seinfeld, decides to give itself a contrived nickname, Adreima, maybe to celebrate its acquisition this week of eligibility vendor Hospital Inpatient Services. I’d say it “addREEmah”, but I hate it when companies make up a name of their own free will, then insist on shortening it. Why not just pick a short one to start with?

From Human Error, Here: “Re: Pittsburgh. The executive, who spent $10 million of taxpayer money on an emergency dispatch system upgrade (downgrade) when the county and city can barely afford to patch potholes blames human error for care delays.” The new system was missing addresses and landmarks, so dispatchers got confused when multiple surrounding towns share the same street address. A dispatcher who sent police to a cell phone tower instead of a house to check out a break-in was suspended indefinitely. I’m not sure if that’s better or worse than in Detroit, where ambulances don’t have computers or GPSs, ambulance response times are long, and firefighters and police officers aren’t allowed to help a victim until the ambulance gets there.

From TexLAHawk: “Re: JPS Health Network, Texas. Word is that Jamey Pennington has resigned as CIO. So basically a county facility that has historically had terrible management and clinical outcomes now is set to buy the most expensive, resource-intensive EMR possible without a CIO at the helm. Glad to see our tax dollars are hard at work!” I’ll guess the CIO part is true since JPS IT director Joe Venturelli sent a Rumor Report to mention that the book he wrote, The Informed Patient, is available on iTunes (or at least it claimed to be him) and mentioned his role as interim CIO. They couldn’t force the CIO to stay if he wanted to leave, of course, and I’m sure that he’s as replaceable as any of us.

Inga and I get occasional personal invitations to attend conferences of various kinds. Even though we rarely do so because that means arranging vacation days from work and all that, we do appreciate the offers. Thanks for thinking of us.

Capsule announces Mobile Vitals Plus, part of its Enterprise Device Connectivity solution. It’s a single, touch screen-powered, nurse-friendly device that captures vital signs and sends them to the patient’s electronic record. A video demo is here. Seems cool, but I’ll defer to the nurses (I’ll bet you rarely hear that from an IT person).

HIMSS 2010 Davies Awards winners, just announced: Sentara and Nemours, organizational; The Diabetes Center (MS) and Miramont Family Medicine (CO), ambulatory; Open Door Family Medical Center (NY), community health; and Wisconsin Division of Public Health’s Wisconsin Immunization Registry, public health.

Jobs: Clinical Systems Analyst III, EMR Implementation Specialist, Eclipsys Documentation Consultant, Allscripts Consultant.

I mentioned the Davies winners even though HIT awards are a waste of time if you ask me, so I might as well mention the hospitals just named to the InformationWeek 500: Banner Health (90), Caritas Christi (44), Children’s Omaha (184), Children’s Dallas (187), Cincinnati Children’s (13), CoxHealth (144), Geisinger (243), HCA (213), Heartland Health (118), Lifespan (74), Norton (157), OhioHealth (238), Parkland (143), Poudre Valley (224), Sparrow (22), University of Pennsylvania Health System (54), UPMC (5), and Wuesthoff (172).

The College of American Pathologists contributes to the first DICOM medical imaging exchange standard for pathology slides, a step along the way to full integration of imaging information with LIS information. 

At a meeting of the Health IT Policy Committee, Epic CEO Judy Faulkner says she is worried that the “government is going to get into the electronic health record design business,” apparently concerned that its future Meaningful Use requirements may be overly prescriptive. Members are also debating how HHS can give the industry a heads-up on the second-stage MU requirements given that they won’t have had time to understand how providers are faring with the first-stage ones by the due date.

LTC Patricia Ten Haaf, commander of the Army’s 452nd Combat Support Hospital in Afghanistan, leads a Lean Six Sigma project to upgrade its MC4 battlefield EMR. ED charting was cut in half when electronic notes replaced paper and nurses created 22 templates that reduced paper forms from nine per patient to two and shaved more than 10% of an admission duration. In the US Army photo above: SGT John Michel, SSG Brooke Stauner.

Free EMR vendor PracticeFusion had two revenue streams in its early business models: pushing ads and selling de-identified patient data. Above is how the first option looks — an ad running at the bottom of a PracticeFusion screen, courtesy of its announcement this week that it has hooked up with an ad company.

Munroe Regional Medical Center (FL) budgets $2 million to upgrade its McKesson Horizon Expert Orders system.

GE Healthcare announces that it’s working with Bassett Medical Center in a Smart Patient Room pilot to develop real-time monitoring of safety protocols such as hand-washing and falls.

Sentara chooses Omnicell for medication dispensing. I assume that means Pyxis was displaced, which is happening pretty often these days.

Teleradiology service provider Musculoskeletal Imaging Consultants introduces Virtual Viewbox, which presents multiple patient PACS records in a single display and allows side-by-side consultations (the company calls that “HITECH Teleradiology”). It runs on an iPad and is free, with a catch: the docs have to ask their imaging centers to use MSKIC for reading.

In England, the Morecambe Bay NHS Trust creates an ambitious improvement plan for its just-implemented iSoft Lorenzo system: “transact a day’s work in one working day.” There’s also a problem in that the system informs users that a patient is dead when in fact they are not.

E-mail me.

HERtalk by Inga

A Boston Medical Center insider confirms that the organization’s recent layoffs included a few IT staffers. However, they added that BMC sees its IT strategy as an integral component of the organization’s overall financial recovery. BMC is on track to implement a new GE revenue cycle system and is working towards qualifying for Meaningful Use incentives in 2011.

Wanted: 13 senior healthcare executives to work for free on CCHIT’s Board of Trustees and Board of Commissioners. Commission chair Karen Bell says CCHIT says participants will help in the development of new business strategies and programs. Application deadline is October 15th.

National Surgical Hospitals contracts  with Summit Healthcare to provide data normalization and clean up following its migration to the Meditech 6.0 platform.

This week on HIStalk Practice: Dell plans to integrate its Android-based Streak mobile device into its EMR technology bundle; providers may one day need EMRs to prove clinical competence when renewing their medical licenses; female physicians are slightly higher performing and producing better outcomes than their male counterparts; and, doctors are more likely to adopt EMR if their physician friends (and not just peers) do.

There’s now an iPhone app for real-time drug safety surveillance. MedWatcher tracks the latest drug safety updates based on FDA alerts, media, and other sources. The bi-directional app also allow users to report possible side effects.

Google unveils an upgraded version of Google Health that includes a cleaner interface and more focus on wellness. I took a five-minute spin, which was enough time for me to conclude that 1) there were lots of new options, nice graphics, and a handy dashboard, and 2) the iPhone app I have been using for tracking calories, exercise, and weight (My Fitness Pal) has more much built-in functionality and requires fewer keystrokes for data entry. Plus, it runs on my iPhone. Overall, Google Health is a more comprehensive tool and would be great for someone wanting to track chronic health conditions, but, I didn’t see enough there to make it worth my time.

Spalding Surgical Center of Beverly Hills installs the web-based MMRPro professional solution, allowing the center to digitize and upload medical records from treating physicians.

Claims clearinghouse vendor InstaMed raises $6 million in a new round of funding that includes both debit and equity capital. Investors have contributed $22 million to date.

Sponsor Updates

• MEDSEEK secures an 18-month engagement to develop and deploy a new consumer Web site for ProMedica Health (OH).
• Keane earns a #70 ranking on the InformationWeek 500 list of top technology innovators in the country.
• CareTech Solutions makes available the recorded Webinars from its eHealth Innovation Series.
• FormFast will demo its HIM workflow and document management tools at AHIMA in Orlando next week.
• VHA, Inc. will offer PrimeSuite, Greenway’s EHR/PM solution, to its affiliated physician practices.
• KronosWorks 2010, the Kronos user conference, will be held November 7-10 in Las Vegas, with former labor secretary Robert Reich as the keynote speaker. The $100 early registration discount ends October 1.
• I see Wellsoft EDIS is heading to the ENA conference in San Antonio Sept. 23rd, as well as the ACEP Scientific Assembly Sept. 28th.
• Voalté brings on five employees to support the success of its Voalté One smart phone system. The company has doubled its headcount so far this year.

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!

Document Management is Good for Business
By Shubho Chatterjee, PhD, PE

Enterprise content management (ECM), also referred to as document management, is a capability with significant potential to centralize content and document storage, streamline and automate processes, and integrate smoothly with other enterprise systems. The business benefits are improved operational efficiency, reduced manual labor, reduced paper consumption, and improved process quality.

ECM consists of a central content or document repository, with indexing and searching capabilities, integrated with automated workflow allowing documents to be routed to appropriate processes and processors. The usage of the system is controlled by access policies at individual and group levels. Examples of use of this system include, but are not limited to, patient admissions, medical records management, invoice and payment processing, finance and accounts management, contract management.

A rigorous vendor selection process is critical to selecting the appropriate vendor. This should include an initial evaluation of functions and workflows where ECM is deemed to impact the most. Additional selection parameters include, but are not limited to, the total future cost of ownership for the proposed system, the projected process improvements and labor reductions, current material consumption, and current storage costs, product functionality, deployment options, and scalability. These parameters should be used to construct ROI scenarios for different options. Both objective and subjective factors should be integrated into the decision making.

Deployment options can be in-house (client server) or SaaS. While the in-house option provides for greater control, it also requires dedicated resources to manage, maintain, and upgrade the environment. SaaS deployment enables access to the system on a subscription basis with the vendor managing and operating the system and associated infrastructure in its data center.

The SaaS option frees IT staff to focus on more strategic tasks that add value to the organization while avoiding the expense of adding more IT infrastructure and resources to manage the system. Key factors to consider here are Internet connectivity and bandwidth and information security. Implementation is also quicker as the vendor completes the system build, configuration, and installation at their data center.

Collaborating to build a solution requires a thorough examination of the current processes across the organization with supporting process turnaround time data collection. This forms a baseline from which process improvements can be tracked in the future. To maximize the impact of the solution, this in-depth, step-by-step process analysis should be used to re-engineer and automate processes using ECM.

Creating efficiencies with this solution is feasible in many areas. After implementing ECM in the admissions department, Miami Jewish Health Systems has a central repository for patient documents. Seamless integration with the EMR application allows authorized users from any location to instantly access the associated patient’s documents from their workstation, eliminating time-consuming manual searches.

Routing documents electronically to employee’s workflow queues allows for faster processing and greater security. Eliminating the need to search for documents or make paper copies frees the admissions staff from tedious tasks and focus on patient care. Medical Records Management workflow has also improved with easy, instant, and effective collaboration across the organization. Medical personnel receive automated alerts for completing charts and associated notes and deficiencies. Previously, this required a visit to the medical records office.

Back-office departments, such as accounting and finance, have a high volume of paper flow and manual process being susceptible to lost invoices, missed bills, overpayment, or underpayment.

ECM deployment at MJHS is automating invoice processing. Invoices are now indexed to payments made and are searchable easily. With this technology, invoice approval is also automated and does not require manual inter-office mailing and completion. Payments are also completed in a timely manner.

As with any technology solution implementation, ECM must be well planned with a cross-functional team. Integration aspects with other enterprise applications must be well thought out. Baseline process documentation and re-engineered processes are also critical for success and before-after comparisons.

Shubho Chatterjee is chief information officer of Miami Jewish Health Systems of Miami, FL.

Regaining Control of Disaster Recovery
By Tony Cotterill

While working with our clients in hospital IT departments, we come across a variety of data backup scenarios. Some hospitals do full backups nightly, while others rely on an incremental/full backup strategy. Some sites exclude specific applications from their nightly backup simply because the volume is too great to complete in a 24-hour period.

Although there’s no ‘typical’ approach to backup and disaster recovery, a hospital’s data is a vital asset that must be protected. Before deciding how to protect it, however, first you must understand it.

The data landscape in the healthcare industry is more complex than in many other sectors, primarily because of the varied data types – namely, structured, unstructured and semi-structured — that are generated by both clinical and administrative systems. The type of data being secured and protected is inextricably linked to how that data needs to be recovered.

Structured data comes from database-driven applications, such as the hospital information system, radiology information system, electronic health record, and accounting systems. These applications typically generate hundreds of GBs, possibly a few TBs in larger facilities.

Unstructured data comes from applications that produce discrete files that are not associated with a database. Examples include word processing and spreadsheet files, which are routinely created by administrative staff and then stored on file servers. Many TBs of unstructured file data can be a challenge to backup and recovery.

Semi-structured data is produced most commonly by picture archiving and communication systems and document management and imaging systems. Both maintain a database of information (structured data) that references large quantities of discrete files (unstructured data). A PACS database may run on Oracle or SQL, and its size may be relatively small in relation to the many TB of DICOM images that database references.

Once you understand the three categories of hospital data, you can determine how much is dynamic vs. static. The dynamic data, which typically comprises 20-30 percent of overall healthcare information, is accessed regularly, and therefore changes constantly. This is the data you should be replicating every day.

Static data, which probably makes up the other 70-80 percent of your storage, should be treated differently. This unstructured and semi-structured data never changes and much of it will never be recalled again. Nevertheless, regulations and/or institutional policies compel hospitals to store it for five years, ten years, perhaps even the life of the patient.

So here’s the good news: once you’ve identified your static data, you can replicate it and move it to a self-protecting archive. Then there’s no need to include it in your backups.

This combination of backup and archiving provides an optimal strategy for treating each data type with the right method. By understanding the nature of the data in the critical clinical systems, the IT team can deliver both realistic and acceptable data recovery objectives to the business. In the event of a disaster, the organization can rest assured that the data can be recovered in a reasonable timeframe, minimizing the disruption to patient care.

Tony Cotterill is president and CEO of BridgeHead Software of Ashtead, Surrey, UK.

RTLS and Temperature Monitoring Mania
By Fed Up with the Fever

Would someone please tell me what real-time locating systems in healthcare have to do with environmental monitoring? I keep seeing all these temperature monitoring requirements pop up in RFPs and press releases. It concerns me that the healthcare CIO (or whoever is making these decisions) doesn’t realize that temperature monitoring of refrigerators has nothing to do with real-time locating, and even worse, is willing to saddle their wifi  system with this function risking QOS-sensitive systems such as POE and VoIP.

Sure, real-time alerts of out-of-range or variable temperatures are important, but unless you’re subject to that old Bart Simpson joke where he calls up the bar and says, “Is your refrigerator running?” followed by Moe’s inevitable “Yes” and Bart’s “Well, then you better go catch it!” — well, your refrigerator is not mobile! There’s no need to locate it, and certainly not in real-time.

The real-time alerts and reports that healthcare needs related to temperatures of refrigeration units can be easily achieved with over-the-counter probes. Then, just as it would with any other DCC-based system (i.e., “dry contact closure” such as security cameras, alarms, doors, or nurse call lights), the RTLS would respond to certain pre-established conditions (i.e., temperature out of range). These other systems do not rely on real-time location except to “trigger” an event condition. That is, if you want a security camera to come on if a certain tagged piece of equipment enters the egress zone, you need the RTLS as it relates to the real-time location of the tagged piece of equipment.

Temperature monitoring requires no such “trigger.” It requires only that you “push” an alert to an individual (or group) when a particular event is recognized within the event software. No location changes are recognized or recorded. If healthcare organizations could recognize this, they would save a tremendous amount of money and not be subject to the heartache of a low-grade RTLS that does only one thing (wholly unrelated to real-time locating) well.

So I ask what RTLS has to do with temperature monitoring even as I understand why temperature monitoring is so prominent in the RTLS space. It’s an easy way for vendors to make money. So long as the company can write some basic rules, they can provide an alert when temperatures are out of range. They can also record temperatures at regularly scheduled intervals without staff ever having to physically approach the unit.

There’s no doubt it’s an important time and money saver for the hospital. And it’s a money maker for the RTLS vendor. They get to solve a problem for the customer and appear wholly competent on this level, so that when it comes to delivering their RTLS with any level of accuracy, there will be a certain level of trust pre-instilled.

Unfortunately, too many hospitals fall prey to the belief that environmental monitoring is a function of RTLS, so if the vendor can do that well, surely they can locate assets and automate patient flow, right? Sorry, folks, but it’s just not so.

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