News 2/27/13

Top News

Telus Health will acquire MD Practice Software, which will make Telus the largest EMR vendor in Canada. The deal is scheduled to close Monday.

Reader Comments

From Spell Checkeroff: “Re: HIPAA. The Miami Herald did something you don’t see often – spelled out the law’s name correctly, then derived an incorrect acronym!” I’ve noticed that as newspapers continue their slow swirl down the toilet, they keep losing their better people who might be able to actually investigate a story, proof read, or write editorials that express original thoughts. About all they’re good for now is sports scores, Hollywood gossip, and funny stories with zero news value. On the other hand, that’s about all their declining audience wants to read anyway.

From NoPhone: “Re: Booth etiquette. Last year you ran an article about HIMSS booth etiquette and we would love to share it with our sales team.” The Readers Write by Rosemarie Nelson offers tips for vendors on the trade show floor.

From Moe Money: “Re: PQRS submissions. See forwarded e-mail.” Above.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Ping Identity, also known as “The Identity Security Company.” Its identity and access management platform provides one-click access to any application from any device, with over 900 enterprise customers including 45 of the Fortune 100. The company’s health solutions make it easier to run cloud-based applications and to meet compliance requirements, offering single sign-on to improve user satisfaction. They also provide a seamless, secure platform for internal and external collaboration and customer engagement. Ping Identity’s solutions help protect PHI and allow users of federated applications to be quickly disabled in the event of a breach. A free trial of PingFederate is available for download. Pay them a visit at HIMSS Booth #2470 and tell them you read about them on HIStalk. Thanks to Ping Identity for supporting my work.

My YouTube hunt was successful, turning up this educational Ping Identity video on Identity Management 101. It’s a really good and easily understood overview.

HIMSS Conference and Social Events

I have been hunting for a HIMSS mobile app that includes the schedule and meeting rooms. Has anyone seen one?

If you signed up to attend HIStalkapalooza before registration closed on Monday, February 11 and did not receive an invitation by e-mail, drop me a note by Thursday and I’ll check your status. Otherwise, we are totally full even though Medicomp doubled capacity to 1,000 this year, which means we unfortunately can’t invite you even if you’re one of the folks who are pleading that your HIMSS experience might be a bust if you are unable to participate in the “Inga Loves My Shoes” contest, drink Hurricane IngaTinis and Typhoon Janes, and hobnob with the coolest folks in HIT.

For those who received HIStalkapalooza invitations, here is transportation information:

• The good folks at Medicomp have put together a pocket-sized card with transportation details. You can pick it up from their Booth #3068 on Monday or get one from one of the human directionals that will be in the main hallway of the convention center starting at 5:30 PM on Monday. Look for the HIStalk/MEDCIN Engine tee shirts and signs.
• Buses will leave convention center for HIStalkapalooza from 6:15 p.m. through 7:00 p.m.
• If you are driving, Rock ‘n’ Bowl is located at 3000 S. Carrollton Avenue and has plenty of free surface parking.
• Return bus service to specific downtown hotels starts at 9:00 p.m.
• Bus service is complimentary, as is coat and bag check at the venue.
• A Transportation Concierge will be located at the front of Rock ‘n’ Bowl to answer any questions. They can help you get a taxi if you’re in a hurry to leave and don’t mind paying.

Inga, Dr. Jayne, and I (Mr. H) will be covering HIMSS in great detail starting this weekend. Let us know if there’s anything you would like is to report on beyond the obvious (booth snark, making fun of people who deserve it, spilling the dirt we overhear in coffee lines and restrooms, and our jaded assessment of what’s important and what clearly isn’t). We intentionally avoid one-on-one appointments and demos since those are usually a waste of time, preferring to do our reporting from the ground as regular, anonymous attendees. Contact us from there if you run across anything interesting.

HIStalk’s Guide to HIMSS13
HIStalk’s Guide to HIMSS13 Meet-Ups
HIStalk’s Guide to HIMSS13 Exhibitor Giveaways

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Shares in Accretive Health drop 20 percent in after-hours trading Tuesday after the company announces that it will delay reporting Q4 and FY2012 results while it evaluates its revenue recognition policies for its revenue cycle management agreements. Any change might require restating prior-period financial statements, management added.

Cerner announces that it will acquire PureWellness, which offers a health and wellness platform for corporate wellness programs and insurers, strengthening its position in the population management market.

Craneware reports half-year profit of $0.12/share compared to $0.10/share a year ago. Revenues were up seven percent.

OCHIN, which operates Oregon’s REC, acquires the Oregon Health Network, a non-profit focused on improving quality and access of healthcare through HIT and other initiatives.

Informatica acquires process automation company Active Endpoints.

Sales

Graham Hospital (IL) selects Merge Healthcare’s iConnect Enterprise Clinical Platform and Honeycomb Archive solution.

Summit Healthcare Regional Medical Center (AZ) chooses Ingenious Med’s impower charge capture solution to improve documentation and communication.

People

Vocera Communications appoints Sandra Miley (Juniper Networks) VP of corporate marketing.

Elsevier names Jim Nolin, MD (Ascension Health) editor-in-chief of InOrder,  an Elsevier order set solution that’s scheduled to launch in March.

Beacon Partners promotes Kevin McKittrick (above) and Scott Freeman to principal.

Cornerstone Advisors Group names Kristi Lane (Stage 7 Consulting) VP of talent management.

Charles C. Corogenes (Toshiba) joins ChartWise Medical Systems as VP of sales and marketing.

Announcements and Implementations

Kansas HIN transmits immunization data from the Community Health Center of Southeast Kansas to the Kansas Immunization Registry through the ICA CareAlign HIE platform.

Rockcastle Regional Hospital (KY) goes live as the first user of Patient Logic’s physician documentation system.

You might think managed services vendor ClientFit would spell the name of its new partner athenahealth correctly in its press release announcing that relationship. You would be wrong, although I might be inclined to side with them because their version is at least properly broken out into separate words and capitalized correctly. I grit my teeth and follow The Associated Press Stylebook, which says to use the company’s made-up lower case version except when athenahealth begins a sentence, in which case capitalize it even if they wish you wouldn’t.

Albany Medical Center will become the first healthcare provider in New York to utilize Direct Messaging through the Healthcare Xchange of NY.

QuadraMed announces that Avita Health System (OH) attested for Stage 1 Meaningful Use through its use of the company’s QCPR EHR that the health system implemented last year.

Winona Health (MN) says its implementation of Cerner’s revenue cycle solutions for acute and ambulatory services fueled a 25 percent decrease in clinic coding turnaround time and consolidation of hospital and clinic billing.

Legacy Data Access introduces LegacyCompleteClinicalView and LegacyRemitBank to enhance clinical and revenue cycle functionality for retired healthcare applications.

Jardogs releases version 1.5 of its FollowMyHealth universal health record.

CommVault launches Simpana 10, which offers an open, scalable platform and advances in data and information management.

LDM Group’s ConnectSys 3.0 achieves 2014 Edition Ambulatory and Inpatient EHR Module Certifications by ICSA Labs.

McKesson announces that more than 90 percent of physician users of its iKnowMed oncology EHR have successfully attested for Meaningful Use.

McKesson and Cerner will announce their unspecified collaboration (presumably related to cooperative interoperability in trying to derail the Epic juggernaut) from HIMSS on Monday, March 4 at 11 a.m. Central.

Microsoft-GE joint venture Caradigm will announce next week its selection by Continuum Health Partners (NY) to provide tools that will support the health system’s care coordination and population health strategy. Caradigm’s products include the Caradigm Intelligence Platform (the new version of Amalga), applications from both Caradigm and third parties for population health management, Caradigm Health Information Exchange, and identity and access management solutions.

MMRGlobal, featured in my interview with CEO Bob Lorsch, will launch a health and wellness app at the HIMSS conference that will work with its MyMedicalRecords PHR. The company also says it has started notifying mobile healthcare app vendors that their products appear to infringe on its patents.

MModal and 3M Health Information Systems collaborate to link MModal’s voice-enabled clinical documentation platform with the 3M 360 Encompass computer-assisted coding system.

VitalWare files a provisional patent for Sherpa, a physician documentation ontology engine that automatically presents physicians with clinical concepts and their related categories at the point of care.

Technology

An India-based startup announces Uchek, a urinalysis app for smartphones. You pee in a cup, not on the phone, and then take photos of dipped chemical strips to monitor diabetes, UTIs, and kidney and bladder problems. I might be concerned that its display shows “keytone” since I get nervous when medical software contains misspellings.

I mentioned the Android-only Swiftkey on-screen keyboard and medical dictionary ($3.99) that gets rave reviews for clinical documentation. The company announced Tuesday that it will launch a healthcare-focused typing app for the iPad. Apparently the new BlackBerry 10’s all-touch keyboard runs Swiftkey, although neither company will confirm.

Other

Massachusetts General Hospitals offers its 22,000 employees a $250 bonus for watching an 11-minute video on customer service. About 98 percent of the employees thought it was worth $22 per minute to score some cash, meaning the hospital shelled out more than $5 million to teach them how to be nice. 

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation awards PatientsLikeMe a $1.9 million grant to create the first open-participation research platform for the development of patient-centered health outcome measures.

I mentioned in introducing new sponsor MediQuant in the Monday Morning Update that I was enjoying the Legacy System Blues song on its site. Apparently I caught it early — a new press release just announced it, also mentioning that the band is led by MediQuant Founder and President Tony Paparella, who has had the track pressed on vinyl 45 RPM records.

Security volunteers who find an unnamed hospital’s data exposed on the Web are perplexed when their phone calls, service desk ticket, and e-mail to the hospital’s CEO are all ignored and nobody has taken the data down. A technician at the hospital’s outsourced help desk told them he doesn’t have an e-mail address. The group suggests that hospitals include a dedicated, monitored e-mail address and telephone number on their home page so they can be notified quickly of security problems.

Weird News Andy says he bet the surgeon was heard to say, “Awww, nuts” in this story of a patient suing a British hospital after surgeons removed the wrong testicle. Surgeons performing the cancer surgery realized their mistake 40 minutes in and “tried to correct the mistake in an emergency procedure,” but it was too late.

Strange: police in India arrest the son of a hospital CEO after he threatens to post to the Internet a homemade sex video featuring himself and his wife unless she agrees to pay for the hospital’s new trauma center. Also in India, 35 specialty physicians protest their hospital salaries by threatening to kill themselves.

Sponsor Updates

• The Johns Hopkins Hospital and Levi, Ray & Shoup discuss the simplification of document management processing in Webinars March 12 and 14.
• Hyland Software validates integration between its OnBase enterprise content management and Nuance Communications’ eCopy ShareScan scanning and workflow solutions.
• The AMA and McKesson agree to a licensing arrangement that allows for the mapping of molecular diagnostic testing codes in McKesson’s Diagnostic Exchange software to the AMA’s CPT code set.
• Greenway Medical Technologies achieves PCMH 2011 Prevalidation status from NCQA for its PrimeSUITE EHR platform.
• Wolters Kluwer Health adds a Patient Safety Programs File to its Medi-Span solution.
• MedAssets CEO and President John Bardis will ring the NASDAQ closing bell February 27.
• Bottomline Technologies announces the GA of Logical Ink 4.6 and MedEx 4.0.
• Marion McCall of Surgical Information Systems reviews considerations when selecting perioperative analytics solutions.
• Santa Rosa Consulting adds Clearwater Compliance’s HIPAA-HITECH compliance tools to its portfolio of services.
• Truven Health Analytics releases its annual list of 100 Top Hospitals based overall organizational performance.
• CTG Health Solutions announces that it increased revenues 18 percent from 2011 to 2012 and expanded its IT consulting team.
• Direct Recruiters, Inc. offers an interview called “Hiring Game Changers.”

Contacts

Mr. H, Inga, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan, Dr. Travis.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.