From Buck Dharma: “Re: CIO salaries. Are you still keeping a list? Long time reader — appreciate the effort you take to keep this thing fresh.” I stopped running CIO salaries a few years ago when it became kind of a pain to dig them up from tax records, but I’ll try to do some every now and then when I have time (remind me or tell me the ones you want to know). Here are a few new ones for you: Partners Healthcare, $803K. Sentara, $692K. Memorial Hermann, $834K. Detroit Medical Center, $391K. Adventist Health System, $774K. Centura Health, $468K. Children’s Dallas, $635K. University of Maryland Medical System, $569K. Suddenly I’m feeling poor.

From A-Rod: “Re: Audax Health Solutions. One of few healthcare firms to be selected by Google to beta test a unique machine learning algorithm. Audax plans to use it to tag and sort healthcare content to predictively suggest it to the Careverge user.” I’ve read the buzzword-oozing About Us page for Audax and I still have no idea what exactly they do — something to do with social networking and benefit management (you would think they could be succinct being that they apparently worship Twitter and Facebook). Google or not, I ran out of interest before I ran out of prose.

From Elsie: “Re: UPMC. These are the folks whose $5 million CEO earlier this year closed the only hospital in Braddock, one of the nation’s most underserved cities, and are now rushing to demolish the building. UPMC rationalizes saying they want to turn the site over to Allegheny County for ‘future development’. Anybody who’s seen Braddock, the embodiment of poverty and urban decay in America, knows it’s just block after block of boarded-up storefronts and empty lots. Taking away that community’s only healthcare facility is the antithesis of humanitarian.”

From K-Rod: “Re: anesthesiologists. I agree that they are on the edge for patient safety. Wonder when (or if) surgeons will get there? What you may not know is that these talented nurse anesthetists can sing!” I’ve mentioned these amazing guys before — The Laryngospasms. They’d make great entertainment for an HIStalk event, right?

From WillOurSoftwareEverWork: “Re: McKesson Horizon Enterprise Revenue Management. Implementations have been suspended and Release 2.0 is delayed until next year.” Unverified. I e-mailed a CIO who should know and I think Inga tried an informal company contact, but we haven’t heard anything so far. Consider this false until someone confirms.

From Careener: “Re: DHIN. I don’t know if you saw this Delaware dust-up (no, not former witches as US Senate candidates). The Republican candidate for US Representative took a shot at his opponent over the Delaware Health Information Network, saying it is ‘mismanaged … with no tangible benefit.” I was involved with DHIN as a provider and it was, and is, an unqualified success, with Delaware being the first state to have statewide results delivery, HIE to EMR integration, and public health integration for pandemic and reportable results reporting. It is the model other stares are following. Love reading your updates, please keep up the good work.”

From Lady Pharmacist: “Re: National Hospital and Health-System Pharmacy Week, October 17-23. It’s that time of year again. Can you kindly give a shout-out to pharmacists and pharmacy technicians? If you’re thinking that hospital pharmacists and pharmacy techs are like the drugstore ones that Jerry Seinfeld makes fun of above, you couldn’t be any more wrong. Imagine a small group of professionals who handle with virtually 100% accuracy the thousands of medication-related orders generated in a hospital each day, except unlike lab and diagnostic radiology orders, any one of those orders could kill a patient because of an incorrectly prescribed dose, method of administration, allergy, or conflicting therapy. Pharmacists and techs prevent untold errors every day as unchallenged medication experts whose only interest is patient safety. The hospital pharmacy is a complex, demanding environment involving drug procurement and distribution, clinical monitoring, professional consultation, heavy duty informatics, significant clinical and research work, and careful monitoring of the use of high-risk meds that cure when used correctly and kill when not. I’ve worked in hospitals for quite a few years and watched the transition of hospital pharmacists and techs from the lick-and-stick pill pushers that Jerry skewers to professionals adding indisputable value to patient care with their brains and not just their hands, quietly and unassumingly preventing innumerable bad outcomes without much glory. If you look at the most tragic medication errors (see: Quaid babies), you will nearly always find a situation where doctors and nurses mishandled drugs without pharmacy involvement. My hospital is featuring Pharmacy Week in the lobby display case, so maybe yours is, too.

Listening: Bad Religion, prototypical SoCal punk for over 30 years. Strong harmonies, angry but literate lyrics (the lead singer is a Cornell PhD and UCLA college professor), and a hard rock edge make them better than the Ramones if you ask me. I played a few seconds of two songs from Stranger than Fiction and instantly bought it for my gym iPod. Love it.

Encore Health Resources is named to Modern Healthcare’s 2010 Best Places to Work in Healthcare, which I’m sharing since they sponsored last year’s HIStalk reception at HIMSS. They just hired their 100th employee. That’s Dana and Ivo above, of course. HIStalk sponsors making the list: maxIT Healthcare and MEDecision.

ThinIdentity changes its name to Aventura. They need to learn to write more disciplined press releases — this one prattles on without giving even a hint at what they sell until the final “About” paragraph (answer: some kind of logon/logoff tool). Their Web site is much better at using the few precious seconds of the average Web attention span to get to the damned point.

Grady Memorial Hospital (GA) chooses Apollo Health Street to convert its legacy patient accounts to a new PA system. 

How do you tell when a CEO is lying? (no, smart aleck, not when his or her lips are moving). According to a researcher’s algorithm, lying CEOs tend to overuse words like we and our team to refer to the company in presentations, also showing fake exuberance with words like fabulous, fantastic, and extraordinary. Honest ones say I, me, or mine to indicate that they take ownership of their claims. That’s until this article came out, of course, which will tip off CEO media handlers to coach their lying executives better.

Cerner will become a reseller of address checking and patient classification software from SearchAmerica, which is part of mammoth credit scoring vendor Experian.

Former Cerner LifeSciences CMO Robert Dubois MD, PhD is named chief science officer of the National Pharmaceutical Council. Their mission statement sounds noble, but based on their sponsors (drug companies) and their emphasis on innovation and value (the “we have enough scientists to sort of prove that our unbelievably expensive drugs are actually a good value” approach), I’m guessing the scientific aspect mostly involves marketing.

Illinois Bone & Joint Institute chooses the SRS Hybrid EMR for its 242 Chicago-area providers.

Weird News Andy awakens from apparent dormancy with this offering, which he titles “Smurfitis?” Police in the Baltimore area are called to check on an 89-year-old woman, who they find blue, motionless, and smelling of decomposition on her bathroom floor. Instead of checking for a pulse, they call up her son and tell him she’s dead. Three hours later, a guy sent over from the State Anatomy Board to transport her body for use as a medical cadaver notices that she’s breathing. She is rushed to the hospital and discharged to hospice a couple of weeks later, where she died for real shortly afterward. The police chief says the case is “deeply disturbing.”

A Claremont Graduate University research team introduces the HealthATM, designed to give low-income health clinic patients access to their health information anywhere. It can be used to schedule appointments, request prescriptions, look up lab results, and review medical content. Community clinics enrolled up to 100% of their patients, 75% of whom wanted to use it regularly. What a fantastic idea – not everybody has Internet access and PC knowledge.

Lake Health (OH) introduces digital way-finding to its all-digital TriPoint Medical Center. It offers visitors a kiosk-based virtual guide that helps them locate their destinations, including the ability to have directions sent by text message. That makes me reflect on the odd design of hospitals compared to other public buildings, where visitors (many of them first-timers) are expected to traipse around back hallways and through multiple buildings to find lab, radiology, registration, and all kinds of other departments, often within a single visit and involving visitor-unfriendly jarring architectural change along the way since hospitals are often expanded patchwork over decades without any obvious continuity (“take the Red Zone elevator to seventh floor and then follow the blue stripe, then make the first left through the closed double doors marked ICU Waiting …” Clearly the unspoken paradigm is: you may be our customer, but it’s your job to come to us, no matter how hard we make that task. I confess that I can and do easily get lost in my own sprawling hospital campus, hoping that nobody notices my backtracking and frequent “where the heck am I” cognitive dissonance pauses until I finally give up and ask whoever’s at the nearest nursing station.

In Canada, Queen Elizabeth Hospital (PEI) warns of ED delays due to the implementation of Cerner’s FirstNet and PowerNote, which the assistant medical director says have a steep learning curve.

Bartron Medical Imaging wins FDA approval for its medical imaging software, which uses image segmentation algorithms developed by NASA for analyzing satellite images to find abnormalities in diagnostic images, such as those for mammography. I snagged the knee slice above from the company’s sample image database (you can log in as user guest and password guest).

The FDA issues urgent Class I warnings for the recalled CareFusion Alaris PC 8015 smart IV pump, saying its intermittent wireless network lockups prevent nurses from making programming changes, with the resulting runaway pump potentially causing serious patient injury or death in some circumstances.

A 21-year-old computer technician hired to fix a Georgia doctor’s computer uses the doctor’s password to sign on to a hospital’s computer system. He’s arrested and charged with computer theft, computer forgery, password disclosure, and “theft by taking.” The hospital’s HR VP says he thinks the man was trying to show off his computer knowledge to get a hospital job offer. Doh!

Doctors in Taiwan say their counterparts in China want to work with them on telemedicine and preventive medicine programs via cloud computing, given Taiwan’s superior capabilities in IT and medicine.

An investigative article by ProPublica finds that hundreds of doctors shilling drug company products have been accused of professional misconduct, have been disciplined, or don’t have adequate credentials. They created an online database that lets you look up any doctor to see if they’ve been paid promotional fees for any of seven big drugmakers.

In the UK, the Cambridge University Hospitals trust will take a pass on the defunct NPfIT’s Cerner Millennium or iSoft Lorenzo offerings, choosing instead to do their own system selection.

East Tennessee Children’s Hospital releases its iPhone app, which offers hospital information, maps, directions, parking information, health articles, and a place to store medical information.

E-mail me.
 

HERtalk by Inga

David Blumenthal calls on HIT vendors to “include providers who serve minority communities in their sales and marketing efforts,” expressing his concern that EHR adoption rates are lower among providers serving Hispanic or Latino patients who are uninsured or rely upon Medicaid. Having once made my living making sales, I can assure Dr. Blumenthal that salespeople (and their bosses) are happy to sell their EHRs to just about anyone who will buy them. If this segment of providers isn’t buying EHRs, I doubt it is because vendors aren’t knocking on their door, but because these doctors don’t have the money. These are the physicians who have forgone the bigger incomes to treat the uninsured/underinsured and who rely on reimbursements from Medicaid, not the higher-paying commercial carriers.

Philips Healthcare posts a 14% increase in revenues to $2.67 billion for the third quarter. North American sales grew 11%.

Emdeon wins a subcontract from CSC to perform IT services for the Department of Defense Pharmacy Operations Directorate. As part of the 51-month contract, Emdeon will develop interfaces for immunization tracking and lab systems.

Nebraska Medical Center subscribes to the CapSite database to improve its capital expenditure process.

Marion General Hospital (OH) pays a $1.2 million fine for self-reported Stark law violations that occurred between 2003 and 2009. The hospital’s president says it failed to do the proper paperwork for several physician-related matters, including payments to to independent physicians who saw indigent patients and provided emergency room call. The hospital also did not properly document providing office space and services at below-market rates. If I didn’t know better, I would think the US attorney handling the case is running for re-election. In a statement that seems to ignore the fact that the case was self-reported, he remarks, “This is a significant victory for taxpayers and another step in our efforts to protect the Medicare Trust Fund.”

Texas Health Resources and Alliance HealthCare Services (CA) contract with Sy.Med to provide credentialing software.

Union Hospital of Cecil County (MD) selects Wolters Kluwer Health’s ProVation Order Sets as its electronic order set solution.

The Scarborough Hospital in Toronto picks Access Intelligent Forms Suite to integrate with MEDITECH Magic. The Access product will improve forms management by pre-filling forms with patient information and auto-index barcode forms into the EHR.

Audax Health Solutions appoints Henry DePhillips MD as president of healthcare operations. He was previously with McKinsey and was chief medical officer of MEDecision.

RCM software provider Avisena hires Timothy Mills as VP of sales and marketing. He’s worked at NaviNet, Spheris, and CareScience.

Healthcare and financial transaction provider TransEngen appoints Mike Pileggi as EVP of sales. He was previously in sales roles with mPay Gateway and Misys Healthcare Systems.

Shareable Ink launches Shareable Ink Analytics for Anesthesia, a business intelligence module of its anesthesia record.

The American Hospital Association extends its exclusive endorsement of AT&T’s HIE services. AT&T Healthcare Community Online enables the secure exchange and sharing of patient data across multiple health systems. AHA also endorses AT&T’s voice and data networking services and wireless services.

Management Health Solutions, a provider of supply chain software for healthcare, acquires Hospital Inventory Specialists, which offers inventory management solutions and analytical services.

Eight of Minnesota’s largest healthcare organizations connect their Epic systems to electronically share patient data. All are members of the Minnesota Epic User Group using Epic’s Care Everywhere software. The network includes access to estimated 3.6 million patients, or 75% of Minnesotans.

The CDC awards CACI International a 10-year contract to support the CDC’s IT infrastructure. The contract has a ceiling value of $1 billion.

The board of directors of the Perkins County Hospital District (NE) approves a $1.5 million allocation to implement an EHR at the 20-bed Perkins County Community Hospital.

Xerox expands its healthcare footprint with the acquisition of pharma tele-services company TM Health.

KLAS reports that vendors offering integrated workforce management solutions are winning more deals than companies offering standalone staff scheduling products, even though providers prefer the functionality of stand-alone products. The top rated vendor was McKesson, followed by Clairvia, Concerro, API, and Kronos.

Evangelical Community Hospital (PA) commissions Keane Optimum as its financial, clinical, and EHR solution.

A reader sent me a note last week, noting that my avatar depicted “a very sweet young lady worthy of my attention strictly in a fatherly way.” A lovely and I am sure well-intentioned comment. A question to my fellow female HIT-types: why do you suppose that that statement leaves me disappointed and reminiscent of my early teens, when only the Ted The Geek-type boys noticed my existence? 

E-mail Inga.

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Leland Babitch, MD, MBA is chief medical information officer at Detroit Medical Center, Detroit, MI.

Tell me about yourself and about your job.

I’m chief medical information officer for the Detroit Medical Center, an eight-hospital system in the city of Detroit and surrounding suburbs. We have both academic hospitals and also more community-based hospitals. About 1,600 beds total, and I think about $3.6 billion in revenue.

I’ve been in the position of CMIO for two years. Prior to that I, was the medical director for information services at the Children’s Hospital of Michigan, and worked closely with our CMO — because we didn’t have a CMIO prior to myself — on the rollout of CPOE, nursing documentation, and closed loop med administration from 2006 through 2007 at our eight hospitals.

DMC tried CPOE in 2003 and said it would regroup and try it again. What lessons were learned from that first attempt?

In 2003 we did try at one hospital — a more community-based hospital — on two units. We did it on our rehab unit, the psych unit. I think the first lesson we learned there was that it was really just designed as, or worked out as, an IT project. I mean, it was really IT-led and there wasn’t clinical involvement from the get-go.

There wasn’t really a leadership pattern that had physician and nursing components to it. There wasn’t a design phase that included a lot of clinicians. There wasn’t leadership buy-in from the hospital. We took the product from the vendor and implemented what they gave us. It was really doomed to fail from the start.

How would you compare Cerner and Epic?

I think they are very similar corporations. We do not have Epic at any of our sites. We’ve been with Cerner since 1998. I think at the time that we were making the decision around CPOE, we entertained the option of switching from Cerner to somebody else, including Epic.

As we looked at Epic, especially back then, the problem was that Epic didn’t scale very well. So whereas it might do well in a large clinic setting, or even in a single large hospital, going up to the scale and size of the database that we had — and it’s continued to grow — was not something we were convinced they could do well. I am not a technical person, I will warn you. That’s what I’ve been told by our CIO and other IT people. It really was an issue of scalability.

If you look at the two vendors competing head-to-head, people talk about the usability of Epic maybe being better. I think they will spar back and forth with each other and the other large vendors in terms of usability, and there are places were each vendor excels.

At the end of the day, the success of a CPOE or EMR launch is partially dependent upon the technology and the vendor, but really it comes down to the team that’s implementing it. It’s the experience and the policies that are in place around it. The clinical transformation is really what makes it work.

We are soon becoming part of the Vanguard System, and Vanguard does not have Cerner. They’re primarily McKesson and Meditech at their existing sites. We are far more advanced than they are at any of their hospitals right now. We’re at HIMSS Level 6 at all of our sites and they just finished nursing documentation at their last site in the past couple of months. They won’t have CPOE in any of them until 2011.

They’re looking, nonetheless, because there’s a lot we’ve learned, in terms of infrastructure and lessons learned, that are applicable regardless of the EMR. The things that we’ve done will work just as well in a McKesson and Meditech environment as they did in the Cerner environment.

How do you think it will change selling out to an investor-owned chain, which are usually less far along in informatics?

It’s not going to change the mission of Detroit Medical Center, especially in the medium run. We have guarantees built into our contract in terms of what we do with the community. We will not close any of the hospitals for the next ten years. We will not change our policies on charity care for the next ten years, at least.

I think in a lot of ways, just because of where we are, we can’t change that significantly. I mean, they can’t come into the DMC in the middle of one of the poorest inner cities in the nation and expect that they’re suddenly going to turn us into a Mayo Clinic where we’re getting tertiary referrals only and picking and choosing patients that come our way. We’re always going to have a base of taking care of our community at the core of what we do.

It makes us think of financials in a different way. There’s really no difference between a for-profit and a not-for-profit. If there’s no margin, there’s no mission. Before, we didn’t call it a profit, it was technically that we were retaining earnings. But nonetheless, if we were losing money, we were in trouble.

At least now we will have some capital that’s put into to allow us to do some of the things that we haven’t been able to do for years and years, in terms of improving our infrastructure. Things that put us at a competitive disadvantage with our suburban counterparts in the same area who had a better payer mix or may have had some reserves that they were able to put away and were able to build the hospitals with Zen gardens. I don’t think we’re going to be wasteful with our money, but it will give us the opportunity to take some of our infrastructure and make it better than before.

From an EMR perspective, I think Vanguard is expecting us to continue along the same path. We fully intend to meet Meaningful Use at the very first opportunity to report, somewhere around April 1, and to receive the first round of checks. As far as Vanguard is concerned, we will take our lessons learned and share them with them and help them to get there, too, so that they don’t miss out on their opportunity.

We’re lucky because out of our eight hospitals — seven separate physical buildings — we have six provider numbers. A lot of the institutions that have the problems of going under one provider number, we don’t have as much. Vanguard in San Antonio, I believe, is all under one provider number. There’s less incentive for them and other hospitals systems right now the way they designed Meaningful use because the dollars just don’t scale to all the separate buildings that they may have.

If Vanguard were to ask whether you could demonstrate higher quality or lower cost since you reached Stage 6, could you?

The press release that got us to this conversation points specifically to pressure ulcers and saving money, and being able to document our before and after because we went into it with that goal. It was part of our launch of that project. The Cerner Lighthouse project was a profit-sharing model, so they went at risk with us. We implemented it, and therefore, we can demonstrate an agreed-on return on investment.

The lessons learned are diffuse. They’re hard to measure. What we want to point out is that this one case, we’re saving $4.5 million. With CPOE and closed-loop medication administration, we had a 75% reduction in medication errors.

In other areas, it’s much harder to put a dollar price tag. We do know, for instance, compared year over year if you look at our Blue Cross perfect scores on core measures, $2.5-3 million increase on quality outcomes, and measures for Blue Cross / Blue Shield reimbursement initiative. How much of that was because of the EMR? Likely a significant portion. I mean, a lot of the changes we made to our EMR in 2008 and 2009 were focused on Core Measures.

There are lots of returns and I think Vanguard realizes that our quality metrics are very good. To a large extent, that is because of the EMR.

Tell me how the Lighthouse Project works.

Cerner essentially packages together a bunch of components. They may be PowerForms, which are for nursing documentation. Parts may involve physician documentation or M pages, which are Millennium pages, an HTML-based view of data from around the EMR, and physician documentation is a component of that. All of those can be packaged together into a Lighthouse. There’s a few dozen of them now. They focus on things like DVT, stroke, and community-acquired pneumonia.

When you look at your key patient priorities, what supporting technologies do you think you’ll need?

Right now we’re really focused on bloodstream infections. We are looking are looking to implement the Cerner Lighthouse for that. We are also interested in the early identification of sepsis and have just put in some tools to alert users of patient status changes for the worse. I also want to take pieces from a Lighthouse that focus on transfusions because I think there’s some low-hanging fruit there in terms of our utilization.

I think that we have a lot that we can do in terms of nursing satisfaction and nursing productivity if we can continue to roll out our automated infrastructure and bring data from monitors and other integrated devices directly into the EMR. We trialed the technology on a few of our floors with success. The problem there is the upfront cost of connecting and/or upgrading the devices so that they can interact with the system.

We actually demonstrated the technology for getting floor vitals into the EMR last year at Cerner health conference. We’re going to be demoing and trying newer units internally over the coming months.

I think we are getting to the point where we will have the luxury of starting to get information out of the system rather than just feeding it all the time. We have some rules and alerts that we’ve gotten from another Cerner client around sepsis.The rules take existing data and report concerning trends and then present those to end users, allowing them to activate rapid response teams faster and earlier.

I think that’s really what the future’s about. It’s the system giving us much more clinical decision support aside from just drug-drug or drug-allergy alerts. At the end of the day, we want the computer to do some computing. You want it to some of the thinking for you. That’s something I’m very excited about.

I’m presenting on the use of the iPad and iPhones at their health conference. Between Android and iPads and iPhones and whatnot, I think that there’s a lot of opportunity to view and enter data and interact with the EMR aside from using WOWs or fixed desktops, depending on what situation the end user is in because those aren’t all the available resources for them.

If you look out five to ten years, where do you think healthcare IT will change the most?

I think that it’s going to stop being about entering the data and it’ll become more about using the data. I think that what we have to get over is the CPOE, the nursing documentation, the physician documentation. All of which, quite honestly, especially in today’s systems, are a little bit harder than to do it the old-fashioned way.

I believe that there will be convergence in functionality and usability, so that the need to train end-users will diminish. I have looked at examples of workflow and screenshots from multiple vendors for the same process and it is remarkable how similar they look.

I think it was and article from the 1830s in The London Times where they said, ”This device is getting in the way of the physician-patient relationship and will never be widely accepted.” They were talking about the stethoscope. I tell people all the time that I am a stethescopist. Early on, you’ve got to convince people that the tool is safe, effective, and useful. Eventually, they accept it, bring it into their regular routines, and even ask for innovations around it.

But by the time I retire, I anticipate that my job will be obsolete. You will be able to move from one hospital system to one down the street and there won’t be a large learning curve in using the EMR. There won’t even really be a thought process in it anymore. There will obviously be enhancements, upgrades, and constant innovation, but it won’t be about the type of sales and promotion that I have to do today.

Any concluding thoughts?

I think this press release on our savings has gotten a lot of air play — you know, bloggers and others. I’m a little surprised by it. Our goal was really to do a little to counteract the New England Journal article from Boston where they were saying that there is no good evidence of real savings from an EMR implementation. It shows there are real examples of real returns and aside from the monies that the Feds are going to give us, which will not quite match what we’ve spent so far.

There are immeasurable returns, and those that are more measurable, and all of that will be considered. This is a process that we undertook, not because of dollars and cents, but because of the common sense behind it. It’s about patient safety at the end of the day. I really do believe that we are adding to the patient’s safety.

We are seeing improving financials year over year for the past several years, and that was part of what attracted Vanguard to us. We were using it as a cornerstone of our profile. We were one of the first on the block. Maybe the first, really, using the EMR as a marketing tool and leveraging it in that way, saying, “We have100% CPOE at our hospitals. Does your doctor do that?” or ” We scan all of our meds before we give them to you or your mother or your kid. Does your hospital do that?”

We see it as a differentiator. We know in the long run it won’t be. It will become something everybody has. But we saw it as important for the physician and the goals of the organization, such that we really turned on a dime.

From our CIO walking through the door and saying, “Our first and foremost goal right now is system stability” to saying, “System stability is key, and critical, but our first and foremost goal is to get the most advanced and safest EMR and systems that we can have.” That was in a very short timeframe that we went from one mandate to another because our CEO and our board really had made the decision to move forward with it.

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From Improper Setting, Here: “Re: CVS is caught stocking meth labs.” A $75 million software bug? Drug chain CVS is fined that amount for illegally selling pseudoephedrine (generic Sudafed) from its stores in California and Nevada. The congestion remedy had been moved to behind-the-counter sales since it’s used to manufacture methamphetamine. Meth makers found that they could simply make repeated buying trips to CVS to accumulate enough of the drug, made possible by a CVS software bug that couldn’t detect repeat sales. The apparent personal best: one customer bought the drug 10 times in 53 minutes from a single CVS store.

From Alicia: “Re: IntraNexus and biometrics. A big piece missing in medical device integration is patient identification, where this might be useful to bind patient ID to medical devices, especially if what they say about vein print is true. Right now you need a myriad of systems such as RFID and/or bar code and it’s usually done indirectly by bed number association.” The shots above from Fujitsu’s PalmSecure illustrate the concept.

From The Purple Computer: “Re: UPMC. Say it and people will come. How many nurses are they giving up?” UPMC rolls out a $16 million “branding campaign” centered around bold, humanitarian healthcare thinking — a purple logo (“fresh and progressive, yet warm and feminine … distinguishes us from the sea of blue in the academic medical center and health insurance space.”) Obviously they’ve let the marketing people run wild. Non-profit hospitals have gone over the edge when they start throwing around terms like “space” to refer to healthcare delivery. If their hospitals aren’t already full, I doubt there are enough patients will switch just because they’re tired of the blue-logo places. Maybe their competitors (if any are left other than West Penn) should run their own UPMC ads during Unemployment TV hours (daytime judge, talk, and soap programs) to dump more uninsured patients onto the newly purpled.

From Jailbreak: “Re: EMR vendor VP. I wrote you before about a sales VP with a criminal record and am amazed his new EMR employer didn’t check references. Here’s a threat to me from the VP, who can’t even write.” I’ve omitted names and details, but the purported e-mail from the VP, nearly unintelligible, is kind of fun in an illiterate, ransom note kind of way: “Why are you such a [genitalia synonym omitted] and hide you indenty .. Law suit coming … You dam well i never stole nothing from you … I will make sure I get on EVERY doctor website (EMRUPDATE) for example to let them know how bad and far back the [company name omitted] technology is … will not even get a whiff of 2011 cchit and over the EMR SUCKS The statements will come from various doctors … NOMATTER what you do I survive.”

From DyingToKnow: “Re: HCA. Persistent rumor in KC this week – HCA is switching from Meditech to Cerner. What’s the real scoop?” I mentioned from a sound inside source that HCA is doing a small Cerner pilot, facing an extensive effort and cost to move to Meditech 6.0 and figuring they might as well explore their options. I think that’s the limit of HCA’s commitment so far.

From Volare, WoOh: “Re: Moses Cone. They had a 1.5 hour recorded demo of Epic on their physician page, but it looks like it’s been taken down. There is also a CEO video talking about the $80-120 million Epic investment over the next five years.”

From Yosemite Sam: “Re: Most Wired award. I heard that AHA is discontinuing it. Maybe the commentary on HIStalk made them see the light.” Unverified. It can’t be because the award is pointless since that’s always been the case, so I’ll go with the obvious: with Meaningful Use, who cares about a phony award sponsored by skin-in-the-game HIT vendors and magazines trying (but failing) to perpetuate the myth that more HIT is always better? If the rumor is true, the CIO dilemma begins: should you leave the Most Wired vanity entry on your resume once the award is sunsetted? Here’s the award that actually means something: use IT to improve patient outcomes and/or reduce your costs, in which case your reputation will precede you without your having to wave flimsy evidence of it around. Too bad there’s no profit involved in that to attract the interest of AHA, HHN, CHIME, McKesson, and the other Most Wired conspicuous HIT consumption cheerleaders.

From HIT Geek: “Re: Siemens layoffs. The timing of Siemens layoffs follows the fiscal calendar. They are often announced on or shortly before the fiscal year-end (9/30). This year’s round is no exception. It is numbers-driven, with no concern for holidays or employee morale.” You would think well-educated MBA-type VPs could use their legendary quantitative skills to look forward more than one quarter, but that never seems to happen with any company. It’s like, holy crap it’s year end and the numbers suck, so start dumping people.

From Hogs Get Slaughtered: “Re: Cerner and Ingenix. Gonna take on 3M’s monopoly and crazy, hostage-style pricing.” Cerner will integrate coding and PPS solutions from Ingenix with Millennium.

From Kay: “Re: patient estimation tools. Patients want to know what the cost of the service will be and how much they will owe. The time of ‘wait and see’ is over — not just what it costs, but how much they will have to pay. Thirty states require the hospital to provide cost information. Vendors that provide a quick and easy 270/271 transaction code check based upon the hospital’s charge master cost for the service and the patient’s insurance plan  would be able to provide the most accurate estimate for the patient. A cost estimate at time of scheduling, pre-reg, or registration will meet state requirements and help the hospital compete. Time-of-service collection of the accurate out-of-pocket balance reduces collection expense and bad debt. These tools also allow checking addresses and creditworthiness. With medical identify theft on the rise, being able to immediately know that the ID provided by the patient may be associated with ID theft protects the hospital from lost revenue and also prevents the contamination of the EMR.” Kay works for Iatric Systems, which offers this kind of solution.

From ePatient Advocate: “Re: PracticeFusion. The ad-supported vendor said at Health 2.0 that they are the largest and fastest-growing EHR. No breakdown on how many are getting ‘free’ (aka pharma ad-sponsored version) and if patients want their docs to be getting drug rep visits via their EHR.” There’s an overview and demo above, just in case you’re interested. I didn’t watch it all, but ads and patient data sales didn’t seem to be emphasized.

I’m back from a break. Thanks to Inga for capably covering while I was away. I’m sure I’ll inadvertently repeat some of what she wrote about last week, but I’ll catch up eventually. That wasn’t really me in the picture she ran, by the way — that was just some sly Inga impishness. And thank God she didn’t sent out minute-by-minute Chilean miner updates since apparently the entire world had two full days to ignore pressing problems while watching feel-good bios of oppressed miners now turned instant but probably short-lived superstars (the most interesting aspect of that story is that the mining company is too broke to even pay their wages, much less the dozens of millions it cost a previously safety-indifferent government to get them out to create the mother of all political photo opportunities).

I bet not many people can say they couldn’t wait for vacation to be over to get back to their jobs, but I can (especially my HIStalk “job”, but I even missed my hospital one). I missed seeing people in scrubs and white coats, feeling the on-campus energy, and doing geeky IT stuff.

Readers don’t have a lot of confidence in the ability of Windows Phone 7 to compete with iPhone and Droid, it seems. New poll to your right — another economy check. From your employer’s perspective, how is the economy doing compared to six months ago? All I know is that my IRA value went up 10% last month, which is nearly as fast as it was going down for the past several.

Chuck Christian (Good Samaritan Hospital) and Judy Kirby (Kirby Partners) win the CHIME Collaboration Award for writing the IT internal marketing book that I’ve mentioned here previously. Chuck co-wrote it with Kirby VP Steve Bennett.

Yuma Regional Medical Center (AZ) names pediatrician Bart Bernstein, MD as its CMIO. He will lead the 333-bed hospital’s Epic implementation, which is costing $73 million. I noticed that the hospital has put up a website hoping to recruit candidates for its 40 newly open Epic-related positions. For some reason, they spell Epic as EPIC, which I see often but don’t understand since even Epic doesn’t go all-caps (unlike Meditech or MEDITECH, whichever is correct since I can’t figure that out at all). My rule is that only acronyms get capitalized and neither Epic nor Meditech is an acronym. It‘s usually those UPMC-style run-amok marketeers that demand to capitalize words against all logic or to stick annoying symbols on them like a proud rancher branding his steers.

Getting a local paper Epic mention: University of Colorado Hospital, spending $67 million.

Listening: the brand new debut album from The Band Perry, three young siblings cranking out polished country pop that sounds more genuine than the usual Disney-style, photogenic and overproduced hat-wearing faux cowboys/cowgirls pretending to know who George Jones and Ralph Stanley are but whose impeccable makeup might melt at the sight of an actual mandolin or pedal steel guitar. They’re from one of my favorite small towns: Greeneville, TN.

Stuff you can do if you want: (a) add your item free to the HIStalk Events Calendar; (b) click the Like button on the Facebook widget to your right or friend Inga or me; (c) search the amazingly deep HIStalk archives using the Search All HIStalk Sites box to your right; (d) send me rumors, news, or a Readers Write article; (e) check out the other sites, HIStalk Practice and HIStalk Mobile; (f) support my sponsors by perusing the ads to your left and clicking any of interest to see what’s new with the folks who keep the virtual printing presses running here at HIStalk; (g) thank yourself on my behalf for reading and for telling others about HIStalk.

On the Sponsor Job Board: Healthcare Consulting Principal – Washington DC, Allscripts Consultants, McKesson Build Analyst. On Healthcare IT Jobs: Senior Analyst – Provider Integration, Application Specialist, Clinical Sales Specialist, Epic Project Managers.

It’s American Idol, EMR style. Intellect Resources, looking to quickly hire 90 short-term Epic trainers for Mount Sinai Medical Center, is running a one-day audition in New York on November 5. The job pays a fixed rate of $20 per hour and lasts for a maximum of 24 weeks.

The Milwaukee newspaper profiles Epic with some interesting facts, with the most interesting one being confirmation of our June report that Aurora is dumping its $150 million Cerner system for Epic, which will cost them an additional $100 million. A quarter billion dollars seems like a lot for an EMR considering that Aurora showed a $50 million loss two years ago and a $116 million loss last year. For that performance, the CEO was paid $2.3 million last year (including a million-dollar bonus), the COO made $2.2 million (another million-dollar bonus), two other VPs made more than $1 million (both with >$500K bonuses), and the CIO took home $739K (including a $250K bonus). All while laying people off, of course.

That article about Epic values the company at $2.6 billion, or just 3.3 times revenues. That seems about right given that Cerner’s market cap is just over 4x sales and is better diversified, although Cerner is probably less profitable for the same reason.

Gary York, the founder of patient visibility vendor Awarix that was bought by McKesson in 2007 (and who was also founder of imaging vendor Emageon, since acquired by Merge Healthcare) is named board chair of Emergency CallWorx, an Alabama-based 911 and incident management software vendor.

A Florida business paper does a nice profile on nurse communication system vendor Voalte, mentioning its rapid growth (20 clients expected by the end of 2011) and its legendary pink pants. Trey Lauderdale told me that Inga gets some credit for those since he asked us for advice before the company’s first HIMSS exhibit awhile back and joked about needing to stand out among the larger and better located ($$$) booths. I don’t recall the details, but Inga either dared them to wear pink pants or picked up on Trey’s joke that they were thinking about it and she ran it in HIStalk before he could change his mind. The rest is history, as the pink represents the company’s fresh culture. Shockingly, we don’t get asked for advice all that often despite having other colors on reserve for those occasions.

GE reports bad Q3 numbers as it tries to shed its GE Capital baggage. Net income dropped 18% and sales fell short of estimates, although Jeff Immelt says orders are picking up (I’m always wary when the audited numbers are bad but the unaudited anecdotes are rosy). GE says its performance was dragged down by the $1.1 billion it had to pump into a Japanese finance division. GE Healthcare’s performance was the only bright spot, with revenue up 4% and profits up 14%.

Speaking of GE Healthcare, it announces a CCD-powered tool for Centricity that allows exchanging basic patient information with non-GE EMRs.

A veteran is denied his request to return to active duty in Afghanistan when a Pentagon doctor using DoD’s AHLTA EMR sees his post-traumatic stress treatment records from the VA’s VistA system. The VA is treating the incident as a data breach since the AHLTA-VistA interface isn’t supposed to exchange information of that type. VA CIO Roger Baker actually suggested that doctors not enter progress notes into VistA if they can’t figure out how to keep it from being viewed in AHLTA. On the other hand, the VA wants to rewrite/replace VistA at huge taxpayer expense, so that kind of warning would help the argument, I’m just saying.

Speaking of DoD, the GAO says the $2 billion AHLTA EMR (double that cost by many accounts, up to $20 billion by some estimates) is mediocre at best (limited capabilities and performance problems) and will be replaced by 2015 with something called "EHR Way Ahead,” with $302 million requested for FY2011. Northrop Grumman got billions to develop and maintain AHLTA (the EMR formerly known as CHCS II before it was rebranded in a PR-company led attempt to hide its many warts), so I’m sure they consider themselves an obvious choice to take a second uber-expensive swing at the ball. In any case, regional droughts are being relieved by vendor and fat cat contractor salivation. I love these AHLTA comments from student doctors:

• My favorite are the contractors who keep explaining how much easier it is to use than a real chart. I wonder how much medicine they practice.
• They tell you that all you need to do to fix the system, is keep sending trouble tickets in. since when did software testing get added to my job description? i want out, and as far away from AHLTA as possible.
• I remember watching the PGUI instructor (similar to AHLTA) show us how "wonderful" that system was. He pretended the pt was there for an asthma appt. I kept track of the time it took just for him (the specialist) to enter the info and the time the computer was "thinking" (hourglass sign). It took 7 1/2 minutes.
• I was the last holdout and management basically had to come down and hold a pistol to my head to get me to stop writing 600s. I still order things in CHCS and document it later in AHLTA when I get around to finishing notes in the evening. This is the biggest turd of a program I’ve ever seen.
• I haven’t met an AHLTA contractor yet that I would hire to help anybody program their VCR.
• For new users, if you’re trying to add a consult and it keeps kicking it out, 95% of the time you can fix it by adding a med first (I like rectal Tylenol), then adding the consult, then go and delete the med. Ha ha of course the fact that I have to do this to work around the bug lets you know how screwed up AHLTA is in the first place.
• What I hate is that, while psych notes are require a "break the glass" thing to access, the actual psych/counseling diagnoses appear on the front of every note created. Thus some poor kid talks to a social worker about problems with his wife, and every subsequent note has "MARITAL PROBLEMS" plastered to the top of it.
• It’s funny, I think AHLTA is the most universally despised part of military medicine. Anything else: GMOs, Base Locations, volume of procedures, whatever, you’ll find someone who had a good experience. AHLTA the opinions just seem to vary between ‘it’s pretty bad’ and ‘I’m armed and hiding outside the programmer’s house’.

When anesthesiologists talk about patient safety, I listen, because that group is the only one of all medical disciplines that admitted their own problems and went off on their own to reduce surgery-related mortality by a huge percentage (see: Peter Pronovost). The Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation has new recommendations (warning: PDF) for medication safety in the OR, indicating its willingness to surrender anesthesiologist independence in the interests of patient safety: (a) put pharmacists in the OR; (b) use high-alert drugs only as premixed products and administered by smart pump; (c) bar code check meds before administration and with decision support and documentation built in; (d) use case kits whenever possible and do not let providers prepare their own drug doses; and (e) establish a just culture for error reporting. Not to perpetuate a stereotype, but if surgeons weren’t collectively such pouting egotistical cowboys, they might save more patients instead of arrogantly standing in the huge patient safety shadow cast by their anesthesiologist colleagues.

Verizon expands its Medical Data Exchange beyond simple dictated notes to include images and lab results. It also announces new partnerships: MD-IT for applications, Alert Notification for communication, Amaji for clinical documentation, Tolven for applications, NLP for natural language processing, ZyDoc Medical Transcription for transcription. I’ve never heard of MD-IT, but I was interested that one of its founders and board chair is an MD/PhD who founded the company that claims to have developed the first antivirus software, later sold to Symantec to become Norton Antivirus. He also founded Cybertrust, which Verizon Business bought in 2007. I guess he didn’t need to practice medicine.

Nurses at Children’s Hospital of Oakland go on strike after management makes them pay 15% of the cost of their healthcare benefits, which have risen 80% in the past five years. The hospital says the nurses all make at least $136K per year and the benefits will cost them only $4,000. Can they really be paying staff nurses $136K?

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From: JimmyJoe “Re: UW Warning on Cut and Paste. In my prior life I became increasingly concerned about the quality and safety ramifications of mindless cutting and pasting. The practice also causes progress notes to grow and grow (due to cut and paste and add), making the record increasingly unwieldy and less useful. I informally polled a number of people in my position and all of them were equally concerned. None of them had an answer other than policies around not doing it without paying attention. It is important to remember that cutting and pasting is not really an EHR function, it is a Windows function. What to do, what to do?” I don’t have an answer either but it’s good to know you can always blame Bill Gates, should an auditor raise concerns about cutting and pasting in your EHR.

From: Bama Bubba “Re: RFID tracked hospital workers. I wonder if RFID-tracked hospital workers feel like cattle, too. Personally, I never bought the ‘inventory tracking’ rationale (excuse) for tagging workers.” Two Houston-area school districts, hoping to monitor the whereabouts of their students, implement “the same technology used to track cattle.” Despite parental concerns about potential health risks, administrators are pleased attendance is up.

From: Weird News Andy “Re: Medicare fraud-biggest ever. Leads me to wonder. . . Medicare get hits with fraud ALL THE TIME. Do private firms get hit with fraud as often and we just don’t hear about it, or is there something about people looking out after their own money that makes them more vigilant?” WNA asks a compelling question, prompted by news of a $100 million Medicare fraud case. In reading details on this case, it sounds as if the art of cheating Medicare isn’t rocket science. Maybe it’s not as easy in the private sector.

When I first read details of this same Medicare fraud case, I thought it had the bones for the perfect modern day Godfather saga. Federal prosecutors have charged a band of 40+ Armenian-American gangsters for billing Medicare over $100 million in fraudulent claims (Medicare paid $35 million of them.) The enterprise has been led by Armen Kazarian, whose role is similar to a Mafia godfather. He came to the US in 1996 and was granted political asylum based on a fabricated story that involved his father being doused with gasoline and burned to death.The fraud operations started with the identity theft of doctors, including their medical license numbers. The accused group then stole the identity of Medicare patients. From there, gangsters created 118 fake clinics across 25 states and began churning out fake claims. In most cases, Medicare was happy to pay. The story includes plenty of infighting, threats of violence for not paying debts, and  untraceable money transfers back to Armenia. The US attorney handling the case calls it the “single largest Medicare fraud ever perpetrated by a single criminal enterprise.”

Not a moment too soon: HHS awards TerraMedica a contract to assess fraud, waste, and abuse in Medicare claims using predictive modeling technology.

The St. Charles Health System (OR) selects Allscripts EHR and PM solutions for its employed and affiliated physicians. The Oregon Community Health Information Network’s (OCHIN) REC will provide implementation and training support for independent physicians. Allscripts, by the way, also announces its 2010 President’s and Circle of Excellence Hospital awards, which recognizes customers with documented strategies and superior outcomes using Allscripts technology.

eHealth Ontario awards CGI Group a $46.2 million contract to develop a new chronic disease management system. The solution will operate on AxSys Technology’s Excelicare platform.  AxSys, by the way, also just secured contracts with North American Management California and MSO of Puerto Rico to develop HIEs running on the Excelicare platform.

The Denver paper highlights the University of Colorado Hospital’s migration to Epic. The hospital says data integration is one of the major benefits of the $67 million project, which is expected to be completed mid-2012.

Halfpenny Technologies, which recently secured $2.6 million in VC funding, appoints four new execs to its management team, including Mitch Fry as EVP of business development, Daniel O’Brien as CFO, Roger W. Newbury, Jr. as SVP of sales, and Jim Sheils as VP of sales. Individually the group has worked for such employers as Sunquest, Misys, TELCOR, Touchstone Health, United Healthcare Group,  US Laboratory and Radiology, and dbMotion.

DB Technology and BridgeHead Software partner to offer a joint content and storage management solution. The combined solution leverages DB Technology’s document imaging component and BridgeHead’s data and storage management tools.

MEDecision earns accreditation from URAC for meeting URAC’s Vendor Disease Management, Vendor Case Management, and Health Content Provider standards.

Vocera Communications acquires voice technology vendors Clinical Health Communications (makers of OptiVox) and Integrated Voice Solutions (maker of VoiceCare.) Vocera also reports a 39% y/y growth for the third quarter.

Catholic Health Partners (OH) claims its saved over $8 million using Kronos’s time and attendance and productivity solutions. CHP attributes the savings to reduced agency and overtime use.

A reader tells me that Advocate Healthcare (IL) is now live on SAPPHIRE for patient registration and accounting in all nine of their facilities.

A class-action lawsuit filed in Arkansas accuses HealthPort of charging patients an illegal fee when requesting copies of their medical records. The lawsuit is not challenging the legality of HealthPort’s basic charge to retrieve/copy/send medical records. However, the lawsuit contends that the $1.71 sales tax imposed by HealthPort is illegal and in-state providers do charge sales tax for similar services.

St. Barnabas Medical Center (NJ) picks Merge’s AIMS, medication management, and patient portal solutions.

UMass Memorial Health Care announces plans to eliminate 350 jobs, or almost 2.6% of its workforce. The seven facility system expects to lay off 130 workers, freeze another 120 vacant jobs, and eliminate the equivalent of 100 jobs by reducing overtime and move employees from full to part time.

Hiring: the Cincinnati Business Courier reports that healthcare systems in tri-state area expect to add more than 100 people to help set up various EMR systems.

Verizon releases plans to expand its Medical Data Exchange platform beyond its core transcription exchange services; members will soon be able to share X-rays, lab results, and other digital records. Verizon will also begin offering IT consulting services for its Exchange members.

This week on HIStalk Practice: KLAS publishes a new report rating ambulatory EMRs by specialty; the Rhode Island Quality Institute picks several pre-qualified EHR and technology vendors for its REC; Ohio State Medical Association publishes a new social media toolkit for providers.

API Healthcare says it’s recently signed up more than 30 healthcare clients for its workforce management technology.

The Chesapeake Regional Information System for our Patients (CRISP) announces its statewide HIE is now live.

Pemiscot Memorial Health Systems (MO) selects Prognosis Health Information Systems’ ChartAccess EHR.

Despite taking some well-deserved vacation, Mr. H did manage to check in with me a couple times this week. Mrs. H apparently took this shot of him taking a moment to ensure the HIT world was still on track.  Maybe he’ll post a few more pics when he posts the Monday Morning Update this weekend.

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From: Penny Chenery “Data Innovations.” Data Innovations is taking on a huge amount of capital from an unknown venture capitalist. It is either an outright sale, or a large infusion of cash.” Investment firm Battery Ventures announces it just purchased the maker of software for managing clinical lab data for an undisclosed sum. Data Innovations also appoints former Lawson VP Mike Epplen as the company’s new CEO.

From: WALL-E “Re: Most Wired. I heard AHA is discontinuing the Most Wired award. Maybe all the commentary on HIStalk made them see the light.” Unconfirmed but I am sure that just reading the rumor will make Mr. H smile for a second or two. WALL-E wasn’t clear if AHA is no longer going to be associated with Most Wired or if the Most Wired award as a whole is going away. Send a note if you know.

From: Bertha Lindau “Re: Moses Cone. In case you’re interested, here’s a PDF where the Moses Cone COO talks about replacing GE with Epic.” The internal newsletter includes details from a brown bag lunch with COO Terry Akin, who has a number of interesting things to say about the transition. He points out that the health systems was unable to develop a fully integrated health record after their “big investment with GE” five or six years ago.  Akin calls Epic the “one company that has emerged head and shoulders above the rest” and claims that 99% of their physicians were favorably impressed with the Epic demo.

As WisconsinBiker shared June 23rd, Aurora Health Care (WI) is replacing its 15-year old Cerner system with a $100 million Epic solution. Aurora CIO Philip Loftus says that one the biggest advantages of Epic over Cerner is Epic’s fully integrated solution for both hospitals and clinics. Epic, by the way, is expected to end the year with $780 million in revenue, compared to $650 million last year and has an estimated market value of $2.6 billion.

Cerner may not be feeling the love from Aurora, but I bet the Kansas City Convention & Visitors Associates are big fans. This week’s Cerner Health Conference will generate $4.5 million for hotels, food, fuel, and related expenses as 6,000 users descend upon the city. Cerner took advantage of the event to announce several new alliances:

• A reseller agreement with SearchAmerica that includes the integration of Cerner’s revenue cycle offering with SearchAmerica’s financial services
• An alliance with Ingenix to  integrate Ingenix’s medical coding and prospective payment system (PPS) solutions into Cerner’s Millennium product
• A reseller agreement with MedAssets to market MedAssets’ web-based revenue cycle services

Here was an odd observation from one of the local papers: Cerner closed many of the leadership forum sessions to the media. Of course now the whole HIT world wants to know what Cerner was hiding.

Also meeting this week: nearly 1,500 Sunrise Enterprise users in San Diego. Attendees had a chance to see the new Sunrise Mobile MD iPhone application, which enables physician to access the Sunrise system. Allscripts also introduced Allscripts Developer Program, which allows clients and third parties to natively integrate their applications with Allscripts’ solutions. In December, clients will be able to search the Allscripts Application Store & Exchange to select or share applications developed through the Developer Program.

QuadraMed’s former SVP of corporate development Steven V. Russell joins digital pathology vendor Aperio as VP of corporate development.

A longtime HIStalk reader asked us to mention the upcoming HIT Leadership Summit in Atlanta November 9th. Silicon Valley venture capitalist Bob Bozeman (of Google fame) is keynoting the event, which aims to highlight Georgia’s leadership in HIT, plus drive statewide HIT revenue and job growth. There’s a pretty impressive list of HIT companies, universities, and medical schools participating in the event hosted by the Technology Association of Georgia (TAG), the Georgia Department of Economic Development, and the Metro Atlanta Chamber. I am happy to make the mention for Marty Mercer, who is on the TAG advisory board and a faithful reader. Plus I have a soft spot for attractive bald men.

So, Mr. H is vacationing this week, leaving me solo. I’m sure I have left out some earth-shattering HIT news, so give me a break and shoot me an email if you have some juicy news to share.

The Camden HIE (PA) goes live this week, connecting Cooper University Hospital, Lourdes Health System, and Virtua Health. Each of the three health systems is contributing $50,000 a year, plus the Merck Company Foundation is donating $50,000.

Vincent Marin joins Huron Consulting Group as CIO following 16 years with McKinsey & Company. Marin most recently served as director of IT services for the Americas region.

Novella Clinical hires Charles Lambert as its new CFO. Lambert had previously served as CFO for RCM provider Capario and Misys Healthcare before that.

Sponsor Updates

• CynergisTek CEO Mac McMillan, who also serves as Chair of the HIMSS Privacy and Security Steering Committee, will be a presenter at the Midwest HIMSS 2010 Fall Technology Conference next week in Minneapolis.
• e-MDs is playing an integral role in the creation of the HIT Certification program at the University of Texas. e-MDs’ CEO Dr. Michael Stearns serves on the curriculum committee and the company has donated their Solution Series EHR/PM system. Of the 34 students eligible for employment from the first graduating class, 21 have secured HIT jobs and seven have been hired by e-MDs.
• Medical Hills Internal Medicine and Pediatrics (IL) selects SRS Hybrid EMR for its 14 provider practice.
• Healthcare Coalition of Texas awards EDCO Group a contract to give its 17 healthcare system members to EDCO’s document management solutions.
• Sunquest Information Systems expands its international operations with the hiring of Dr. David Rossitter as director of customer operations in Norwich, UK. Rossitter most recently served as Interim Head of Operations for Astron Clinica.
• Frisbie Memorial Hospital (NH) contracts with Voalte for its integrated communication solution for the iPhone.
• Lourdes Hospital (KY) is working with Informatics Corporation of America (ICA) and Ulrich Medical Concepts to provide a bi-directional CCR for providers. Lourdes providers currently have access to the ICAare Clinical Portal;  bi-directional capabilities are being introduced for practices utilizing the Ulrich Medical EMR.
• PatientKeeper reports that its customers are processing more than 10 million physician charges annually with its Charge Capture application. PatientKeeper also just added US Memorial Health System (IL) as a new client and expanded agreements with Alegent Health (NE), Boston Medical Center, and the Robert Wood Johnson Medical Group (NJ).
• University Health System (TX) signs an agreement with iSirona to use iSirona’s technology to automate the delivery of patient medical devices to to the hospital’s EMR.
• Memorial Hospital (IL) selects Access Intelligent Forms Suite to complement its MEDITECH 6.0 Advanced Clinical/EMR system.

How does this happen: a Pennsylvania paramedic is charged with multiple counts of felony theft for stealing and re-selling as many as 15 ultrasound machines. Over the past few years, Juan Torres worked for a private ambulance companies and several ERs where various ultrasounds equipment was  reported stolen. The units,  some valued at around $35,000 each, were being offered on eBay for under $7,000.

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