Morning Headlines 3/7/13
Q&A: Mostashari on sequester, RECs, CommonWell
ONC Farzad Mostashari, MD, held a Q&A session at HIMSS today, discussing REC’s, the CommonWell Health Alliance announcement, and the federal budget sequester, of which he says "This is going to hurt. We are not furloughing people, which is the bulk of the budget, so our contracts are going to take a big hit."
HIMSS13: athenahealth Issues HIT Industry ‘Code of Conduct’
Responding to recent calls from Farzad Mostashari, MD, for vendors to "step up" and agree to a code of conduct that protects patients, athenahealth publishes just such a code which includes five principles: Empower Data Portability and Provider Choice, Built a True Nationwide Information Backbone, Protect Patients, Prevent Fraud, and Drive Meaningful Use.
Epic’s Faulkner Says Rivals May Use Data Pact as Weapon
In response to the CommonWell news, Judy Faulkner was quoted as saying "“It appears on the surface to be used as a competitive weapon and that’s just wrong." Epic representatives have maintained that they were not invited or informed of the new collaboration between EHR vendors until the public announcement. Together, the five EHR vendors included in the CommonWell Health Alliance represent 41 percent of the market for hospital EHR systems.
Information Overload and Missed Test Results in Electronic Health Record–Based Settings
A study published in JAMA Internal Medicine concludes that clinical notifications, and the alert fatigue that they sometimes cause, is having the unintended consequence of causing physicians to miss abnormal lab results. The study was conducted across the hospital and clinic settings within the Department of Veterans Affairs health system.
March 7th, 2013 at 12:25 am
From a practical standpoint, HIE is really only valuable on a local/regional basis. In our region, we have one Cerner shop, at least 5 Epic shops and zero Allscripts. The Cerner organization’s volume will be minimal.
March 7th, 2013 at 9:15 am
CommonWell=EU: it’s a last ditch effort by once prominent vendors to remain relevant. Should be interesting to watch the weak links drag down the somewhat competent vendors in the alliance.
March 7th, 2013 at 9:26 am
Example of a desired Code of Conduct for HIT vendors: I pledge to produce good HIT rather than bad HIT to enable doctors to provide safe and effective care to their patients, unlike the bad HIT reported here: http://www.bizjournals.com/southflorida/news/2013/03/05/judge-denies-allscripts-motion-to.html
Jenny
March 7th, 2013 at 3:02 pm
@buckydoc
I think your assessment is accurate, but it may also be short sighted. Acute care represents a small portion of the care given in our society. Most of the care given today comes in an outpatient environment and, although most hospital systems have a strong outpatient presence, they are still a lot of private facilities providing care.
Although a single vendor may be able to collect a great amount of health information from a patient’s ambulatory and acute stays with the five hospitals on the system, how do they collect information from a private family doctor, specialists, skilled nursing facilities, etc…
As we move to population health, I think even data from fitness centers, pedometers, maybe someday even an iWatch will need to be shared as a part of the HIE/ACO.
Simply put, Healthcare is not meant to a single vendor world. We need information exchanged throughout.
March 7th, 2013 at 6:50 pm
I was at HIMSS and heard about the CommonWell announcement. It is sad that these vendors have put together an alliance that is clearly focused on disrupting EPIC business. Any CIO or organization who buys into CommonWell BS, will deserve their fate. Why would anyone think that these vendors who have not been innovative all of a sudden provide a great solution. Taking a step back, they are disparate systems, so they are no better that any other software vendor who bought systems and could not integrate them into a single workable solution. I would give it a year of hype, and they will not hearing about CommonWell at HIMSS next year.
March 7th, 2013 at 7:45 pm
The sequester is a joke. Any manager with more than 3 years experience has had to deal with cuts to their budget. You can’t tell me the govt. is running at maximum efficiency, and that a 2.5% reduction in 10 year growth is going to do anything but be a political football.
March 8th, 2013 at 10:11 am
Judy complains about her rivals using “competitive weapons” while having no qualms enforcing Epic’s noncompetes. Must be nice to live in that kind of bubble.
March 11th, 2013 at 3:00 am
Funny how upset epic is over commenwealth considering they are by far the least cooperative EMR vendor in the market….