Home » News » Currently Reading:

News 5/10/13

May 9, 2013 News 7 Comments

Top News

5-9-2013 7-31-07 PM

Allscripts reports Q1 results: revenue down 4.8 percent, EPS –$0.07 vs. $0.03, missing estimates on both.


Reader Comments

From IT Exec: “Re: HIStalk. Thanks for everything you do. My day wouldn’t be complete without spending a few hours on there.” Thanks. Mine either.

From PCP Doc: “Re: athenahealth. Just got back from their user conference. Jonathan Bush did not mince words on stage, just like in their earnings call, when talking about ‘companies of Epic proportions.’ Athena going to Haiti to install an EMR in a rural clinic that treats spinal injury patients was a noble touch.”

From Green Lantern: “Re: CMIO searches. I am aware of a couple of hospital systems that restarted their search rather than make an offer to an existing applicant. Does that happen often with CMIO searches vs. other C-level corporate officers? Are there enough applicants, or are hospitals being unreasonable?” Your thoughts are welcome.


HIStalk Announcements and Requests

inga_small Highlights from HIStalk Practice this week: the AMA’s board of trustees chair criticizes the federal government for mandating the use of EHRs under threat of monetary penalty while simultaneously accusing providers of cloning documentation. Frederica Krueger responds to the AMA’s complaints in a “Nightmare on EHR Street” Readers Write post. DigiChart changes its name to Artemis. American Medical News reviews the status of various lawsuits against Allscripts since the company announced plans to stop regulatory development of its MyWay product. CMS creates a timeline for aligning quality measurement and reporting for multiple initiatives. Dr. Gregg considers patient engagement and patient empowerment from both the provider and consumer points of view. Get your fix of ambulatory HIT news and sign up for the email updates while you are there. Thanks for reading.

On the Jobs Page: Open Positions in Development, Senior Manager Engineering Development, Clinical Analyst.


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

5-9-2013 7-31-44 PM

HealthTap raises $24 million in series B funding led by Khosla Ventures.

5-9-2013 7-32-33 PM

Alere reports Q1 results: revenue up 10 percent, EPS $0.09 vs. –$0.05, beating expectations on both. The company also acknowledged that an investment firm that is a major shareholder will launch a proxy fight.

5-9-2013 10-04-47 PM

The Advisory Board Company reports Q4 results: revenue up 19.1 percent, adjusted EPS $0.33 vs. $0.31, beating analyst expectations for both.

5-9-2013 7-29-59 PM

Canada-based vertical software vendor Constellation Software acquires Quantitative Medical Systems of Emeryville, CA, which offers dialysis-specific revenue cycle and EMR software.


Sales

5-9-2013 6-16-19 PM

The Mount Sinai Medical Center signs a multi-year agreement for Cureatr, a mobile app designed by one of its residents that offers HIPAA-secure group text messaging for care coordination.

Chicago Health System ACO (Vanguard Health Systems) selects Care Team Connect’s integrated care management platform.

SSM Health Care – St. Louis (MO) selects the EDCO Health Information Solutions day forward medical record scanning services for use at its seven area facilities.

Quality Health Solutions, formed to support the virtual network of seven healthcare systems and Medical College of Wisconsin, chooses population health management and clinical integration solutions from Valence Health.


People

5-9-2013 9-14-13 AM  5-9-2013 9-17-38 AM    5-9-2013 1-21-59 PM
Culbert Healthcare Solutions adds Jason Faaborg (Dell), Tom Gurdak (CSC), and David Howe (Public Consulting Group) as VPs of sales.

5-9-2013 6-25-26 PM

Forbes profiles Imprivata CEO Omar Hussain in an article on leadership.

5-9-2013 7-22-43 PM

Adventist Midwest Health names Thomas Schoenig (Wyoming Medical Center) as regional CIO.

5-9-2013 8-40-57 PM

Care collaboration platform vendor CareInSync names Steve Curd president and CEO. The company also announced a follow-on investment from California HealthCare Foundation’s Health Innovation Fund.

NCPDP names First Databank’s VP of Health Policy and Industry Relations Tom Bizzaro to its board of trustees.

Mike Vandiver (SecureWorks) joins Ingenious Med as CFO.

Charlie Ditkoff (Bank of America Merrill Lynch) joins Cumberland Consulting Group’s board.


Announcements and Implementations

5-9-2013 9-37-23 AM

Royal Philips and Al Faisaliah Medical Systems open Philips Healthcare Saudi Arabia, a 50-50 joint venture to market and sell Philips solutions and services in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

5-9-2013 10-04-50 AM

Geisinger Health System (PA) will give patients access to their doctors’ notes in its RWJF-funded OpenNotes program, in which 82 percent of participating patients opened up at least one EMR note.

5-9-2013 7-39-33 PM

Martin’s Point Health Care will present at the AQA meeting in Washington, DC on May 13. They use Forward Health Group’s PopulationManager at all nine sites and 70 provider panels for micro and macro reporting.

API Healthcare and TeleTracking Technologies enter into a strategic partnership to offer API’s workforce optimization solutions and TeleTracking’s workflow automation offerings.

Project MIST takes first place in an athenahealth and MIT H@cking Medicine-sponsored hack-a-thon for its glaucoma eyedrop spray canister.

Lake Tahoe Regional Hospitalists (NV) and Shasta County Hospitalists (CA) deploy MedAptus for inpatient charge capture.

5-9-2013 10-09-07 PM

Rochester General Hospital (NY) implements EDCO Health Information Solutions’ point of care batch medical record scanning solution.


Government and Politics

HHS releases data on inpatient charges that shows significant variations in pricing, such as joint replacement that ranges from $5,300 to $223,000.


Innovation and Research

5-9-2013 9-49-26 PM

Healthfundr launches its equity-based crowdfunding platform for health startups, open to accredited investors only and working with more established companies.


Technology

 

Epic gives VMware Horizon View “Target Platform” status for EMR delivery through a virtual clinical desktop, quoting Metro Health CIO William Lewkowski as saying the move is saving his organization $1.6 million per year.

 

 


Other

5-9-2013 10-12-15 PM

Fletcher Allen Health Care (VT) will lay off 40 staff members and outsource its transcription services to Nuance Communications, which will offer jobs to 35 affected transcriptionists.

5-9-2013 6-32-04 PM

The Leapfrog Group finds in its spring update that hospitals have made only incremental progress in addressing errors, accidents, injuries, and infections that kill or hurt patients. Sixteen hospitals received an “F” grade.

Gila Regional Medical Center (NM), struggling with uninsured patient volumes, downgrades employees, halts an expansion project, and postpones implementation of a new hospital information system.

Keynote speakers at the MUSE conference May 28-31 in Washington, DC will be Farzad Mostashari and George Will.

5-8-2013 3-03-08 PM

A Surescripts report finds that 69 percent of office-based physicians actively e-prescribed last year and nearly half of patient visits generated an electronically-delivered medication history, 31 percent more than in 2011.

Allscripts will add 350 new jobs over the next five years in Raleigh, NC as it consolidates its US engineering centers. State officials will extend up to $5.35 million in incentives if Allscripts meets investment and hiring goals and maintains its 1,266 jobs in Raleigh.

5-9-2013 3-52-39 PM

An eight-country survey of physicians finds that 93 percent of US physicians report using an EMR. E-prescribing rates were highest (65 percent) among US providers, as were rates for entering patient notes into EMRs (78 percent.) While the majority of doctors in all countries report EMR and HIE have had a positive impact on their practice, US doctors were the least likely to report that their use reduced organizational costs.

Ken Roberts, MD and Jim Granfortuna, MD sing about EHRs in “Our Song of Epic Proportions.”

5-9-2013 8-06-59 PM

Weird News Andy wonders, “What is it with Brazilians and harpoons lately?” A couple of weeks ago a Brazilian guy accidentally shot a harpoon into his own head. Now a Brazilian man cleaning his spear gun in the living room accidentally shoots off a spear that goes through the mouth of his wife, who was in the kitchen at the time. She’ll recover fully. And in another incident, a Brazilian teen fishing in the Amazon River mistakes his brother for a fish, shooting a harpoon into his face and then paddling 195 miles in a canoe to take him to the hospital.

WNA also ponders this story, in which a South Florida plastic surgeon is arrested for using waterboarding-type torture on his girlfriend for 16 hours after being angered by her Facebook post.

 


Sponsor Updates

5-9-2013 7-02-12 PM

  • Consulting firm Virtelligence and its client Cone Health (NC) donated 400 tree seedlings via the Arbor Day Foundation to the Guilford County School System, whose students planted the trees around the Triad. The company tracked the number of pages printed during the Epic implementation and used an online program to estimate the number of trees required (361) to manufacture it.
  • NTT Data moves its North American corporate headquarters to Plano, TX.
  • EClinicalWorks releases agenda details for its 2013 National Users Conference October 11-14 in San Antonio.
  • Holon Solutions hosts a May 15 Webinar introducing the value of building an HIE.
  • Sandlot Solutions Director Rosalind Bell discusses how recent emergencies highlight the need for HIEs.
  • Billian’s HealthDATA releases its Provider Portal benchmarking database, which gives hospitals and health systems data for competitive analysis.
  • In a company blog post, Patientco addresses the growing patient payment problem.
  • Red Herring names Awarepoint, InstaMed, and Kony Solutions finalists for its 2013 Top 100 North American Award, which honors private technology ventures.
  • Aspen Advisors consultants will co-present at two sessions during next week’s Texas HIMSS Conference in San Antonio. Aspen’s Director of Clinical Informatics Mark Van Kooy, MD will participate in a panel discussion during an executive summit in San Francisco May 15-17.
  • Kathy LePar, VP of strategic services for Beacon Partners, offers recommendations for healthcare organizations for creating an integrated, holistic approach to strategic enterprise initiatives.

EPtalk  by Dr. Jayne

Georgia Governor Nathan Deal signs the State Physician Shield Act, which is aimed at preventing use of Affordable Care Act provisions to establish standard of care in liability cases. Supporters want to ensure that payment guidelines aren’t used to define care standards to the exclusion of individual patient factors or other clinical standards.

CMS releases Medicare provider charge data for the top 100 most frequently billed discharges across 3,000 hospitals. The variation across some procedures is as much as tenfold.

CNBC recently ran a piece on bad habits demonstrated by younger job-seekers. There are certainly a lot of relatively young workers in IT departments, but I’ve found that regardless of age, behavior is becoming more boorish. I may not be Emily Post, but I’d like to offer some etiquette tips for the age of social media:

  • Learn how to put your phone on silent. Practice this skill often.
  • Texting or checking e-mail on your phone while in face-to-face meetings is just rude.
  • Choosing “Darth Vader’s Theme” as your supervisor’s ringtone is not a career-advancing move, especially if you haven’t learned to put your phone on silent.
  • If you’re hosting a Web-based meeting and sharing your desktop, turn your instant messenger and e-mail notifiers off. I’m tired of seeing embarrassing, unprofessional, and distracting messages come across while I’m trying to work with you.
  • If you’re attending a meeting by conference call, don’t multitask unless you have the skills to pull it off. Asking, “Can you repeat that? I was on mute.” makes no sense and brands you as inattentive and illogical.
  • If you join a meeting late, don’t waste the group’s time with excuses. Say “I’m sorry” then sit down and get to work.
  • Lock your Facebook page down like Fort Knox unless you can keep your mouth shut. Do you really think it’s smart to advertise to your co-workers that you accepted prime hockey tickets from a vendor and thereby violated corporate policy?
  • Learn how to use Scheduling Assistant, Busy Search, or whatever tools your company uses when inviting people to meetings. If an attendee is already booked and you make them “required,” have the courtesy to discuss it and obtain approval first.

clip_image002

Speaking of meeting etiquette, it’s been a rough week, so I was happy to see a tweet for The Ridiculous Business Jargon Dictionary. I think I’m going to try “acluistic” in a meeting I have scheduled for tomorrow and see if anyone figures it out.

Print


Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

125x125_2nd_Circle



HIStalk Featured Sponsors

     

Currently there are "7 comments" on this Article:

  1. On the AllScripts earnings call today Paul Black was saying that dbMotion and JarDogs is now their long term solution for a comprehensive single patient record.

    Are they now going to justify not integrating a real solution for a health system by saying it doesn’t matter anyways, you might as well just get used to living in an HIE type environment?

    Also, could anyone interpret their talk on CommonWell?

  2. The article about Imprivata’s CEO is comical for those of us in healthcare that know the true story. Imprivata is a copycat and his comment about it being a “big problem that nobody was solving” is far from the truth. Anyone close to the industry knows that Sentillion was solving the SSO problem and more long before Imprivata. I’m not suggesting that they haven’t done well but its pretty funny for him to act like he had some bright idea and read the “tea leaves”. He saw another company doing extremely well and thought he could get part of the market with a low cost solution. Their biggest break was Sentillion being acquired by Microsoft.

  3. In response to the CMIO hiring question… I have worked with five CMIO’s at 3 organizations. One was there when I arrived, left, then we hired from the outside. HOWEVER, that MD was known to many on the medical staff, much more so than the other external candidate. The next place, we had a contract/part time CMIO that earned the position full time, and again, very well known by the medical staff. Current location, CMIO was moved into role after a stint as CMO for our clinic organization. He recently left and the replacement, which will have an expanded role, will most likely come from the outside. In short, its a mixed bag.

  4. Allscripts finally has an integrated acute/financial/ambulatory product!!! Coupled with Enterprise for large practices, dbMotion and Jardogs—that’s a pretty sweet spread of products.

    Paul also mentioned Allscripts’ Care Director is one of their best selling products and it has ACO written all over it. Its a big piece that a lot of hospitals are missing.

  5. @ long timer: I think Paul said dbMotion or sunrise ambulatory would be options for integration, depends on the health system. As we all know, every client has a different needs/wants. The point is they can offer either sunrise ambulatory or dbMotion, it’s live, and clients are happy.

    No, still trying to figure out CommonWell…

  6. While the etiquette tips are appreciated, I think it is misleading to imply that “younger job-seekers” are the only offenders of the rules you suggest. I agree with almost all your suggestions, but I find your blurb demonstrates a larger issue in healthcare – reverse age discrimination. While we may not all have worked at a hospital as long you all or have all the war stories and wrinkles, young IT professionals are still just as dedicated to improved medical care through technology as our older colleagues. When we are referred to as “kid” or frequently reminded how we are “too young to know,” it not only is rude on the part of our older colleagues, but also borderline discriminatory.







Text Ads


RECENT COMMENTS

  1. I think Disingenuous is confused (or simply not aware of how it has been architected). How control of Epic is…

  2. It seems that every innovation in the past 50 years has claimed that it would save money and lives. There…

  3. Well, this is predicting the future, and my crystal ball is cloudy and cracked. But my basic thesis about Meditech?…

  4. RE Judy Faulkner's foundation wishes: Different area, but read up on the Barnes Foundation to see how things work out…

  5. Meditech certainly benefited from Cerner and Allscripts stumbles and before that the failures of ECW and Athena’s inpatient expansions. I…

Founding Sponsors


 

Platinum Sponsors


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gold Sponsors


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

RSS Webinars

  • An error has occurred, which probably means the feed is down. Try again later.