News 3/19/14

Top News

The comment period opens for a CMS proposal that would allow it to recoup improper PQRS and e-prescribing incentive payments in a four-year project that would look for errors, inconsistencies, and gaps related to data handling, program requirements, and clinical quality measure specifications.

Reader Comments

From Cupola Dogs: “Re: Epic Emeritus Program. Interesting.” Forwarded documents describe a program in which Epic will offer vetted, independent “Epic Emeriti” (Epic-experienced retirees who are least 55 years old) who will help customers as Epic subcontractors. It’s an interesting concept, especially considering that the average Epic employee is probably under 30. Obviously most of the Emeriti will come from hospitals, where experience is considered an asset rather than a liability. Maybe Epic is finally acknowledging that while industry newcomers can follow a carefully documented project plan, sometimes it’s nice for nervous customers to have someone who has walked in their shoes standing beside them.

From TooMuchCoffee: “Re: Mass Health Exchange. Cuts ties with CGI Federal. There has been a lot of finger-pointing over the poor-performing sites, but the one common factor in the lousy sites is the lousy contractor CGI Federal, period. WA state was done by Deloitte and is doing fine.” My cynical suspicion is that the combination of governmental and contractor incompetence creates a lot of dysfunctional software that neither party wants publicized. The insurance exchange sites just happened to be public-facing and political, ensuring that their problems make the papers.

From Parker: “Re: McKesson. Still struggling to find a major health system on their Horizon product to convert to Paragon in order to prove to the naysayers that Paragon can manage complex systems. Atlantic Health was going to, but now is not going to move until they see more progress before making a final decision.” Unverified. It’s tough to get customers to switch to a different product offered by their incumbent vendor without their at least going out to the market first, so that may be causing indecision. It’s also tough to convince them to stick with a vendor who’s retiring the product they bought, which will require a painful new implementation no matter whose product they choose. That’s not a reflection on Paragon, just the reality of why most customers aren’t going to be thrilled, especially the larger ones that can afford to buy another system instead of accepting a free one.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests


Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor VisionWare. The Newton, MA company provides a healthcare-focused data management platform that provides world class operational and analytical integrity. Its Master Data Management solutions address data management, integration, and data visualization. VisionWare’s Patient 360 brings in information from a variety of enterprise systems (including retired ones) to provide providers, payers, and HIEs a 360-degree view of a person (patient, member, or customer) and meet the needs for Meaningful Use Stage 2, ACO reporting, and fee-for-value reporting. Provider 360 manages provider engagement, credentialing, referral management optimization, and relationship management. Specific solution components include an EMPI, provider registry, data verification, data visualization, and data governance. Long-time friend of HIStalk Paul Roscoe joined the company as CEO in January after running The Advisory Board Company’s Crimson analytics unit and Microsoft’s Health Solutions Group. Thanks to VisionWare for supporting HIStalk.

Listening: reader-recommended Lake Street Dive, skilled jazz/soul featuring amazing vocals and a female upright bass player who rocks it. They even sound great in a driveway.

Upcoming Webinars

March 19 (Wednesday), 1:00 p.m. ET. The Top Trends That Matter in 2014. Sponsored by Health Catalyst. Presenters: Bobbi Brown, VP and Paul Horstmeier, SVP, Health Catalyst. Fresh back from HIMSS14, learn about 26 trends that all healthcare executives ought to be tracking. Understand the impact of these trends, be able to summarize them to an executive audience, and learn how they will increase the need for healthcare data analytics.

April 2 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. A Landmark 12-Point Review of Population Health Management Companies. Sponsored by Health Catalyst. Presenter: Dale Sanders, SVP, Health Catalyst. Learn the 12 criteria that a health system should use to evaluate population health vendors and to plot its internal strategy, then see the results of grading seven top PHM vendors against these criteria. No single vendor can meet all PHM needs. The most important of the 12 criteria over the next three years will be precise patient registries, patient-provider attribution, and precise numerators in patient registries.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

AbilTo, a provider of behavioral health telehealth services, closes a $6 million Series B round.

Castlight Health signs a deal to turn Leapfrog Group’s 2013 hospital survey information into report to help consumers understand hospital performance.

Varian Medical Systems will acquire the oncology team imaging collaboration software product of Atlanta-based Velocity Medical Solutions.

Bloomberg Businessweek profiles CrowdMed, where patients whose unusual conditions have stumped their local doctor post their the symptoms and offer a reward for a correct diagnosis. The site says 180 people have gone through the process, with 80 percent of them reporting that they received a useful diagnosis.

Sales

The Veterans Health Administration Midwest Health Care Network will deploy Lexmark’s Perceptive Software Acuo VNA to consolidate medical image storage.

Meridian Health Systems ACO (CA) selects Halfpenny Technologies to provide analytics modules and an interface engine for exchanging lab information.

Capital Regional Medical Center (MO) selects Summit Healthcare’s Exchange technology to enable CCD integration and Direct messaging.

Saint Peter’s Healthcare System (NJ) selects athenahealth’s athenaOne EHR, PM, and communication system.

Health Choice (TN) selects Valence Health to build a clinically integrated network for population health management and clinical integration.

UNC Health Care (NC) chooses FrontRange HEAT for its newly consolidated service desk, replacing ServiceNow.

New Hanover Regional Medical Center (NC) chooses Strata Decision Technology’s StrataJazz for cost accounting, budgeting, planning, forecasting, management reporting, and productivity improvement.

Valley Hospital (NJ) will upgrade to Meditech 6.1, including the company’s new CCU/ICU application.

People

R. Andrew Eckert (CRC Health Group/Eclipsys) joins TriZetto Corporation as CEO.

CynergisTek hires Erin Fulton (T-System) as VP of operations.

NexTech names Eric Nilsson (Surgical Information Systems) CTO.

Home health and hospice EMR provider HealthWyse appoints Graham Barnes (HealthyCircles) CEO.

Lois Rickard (Press Ganey Associates) joins Streamline Health Solutions as SVP/chief people officer.

Deloitte names Sarah Thomas (NCQA) director of research for the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions.

Box appoints Aneesh Chopra (Hunch Analytics) and Glen Tullman (7WireVentures) as advisors for its healthcare and life sciences practice.

SSM Health Care (MO) SVP/CIO Tom Langston will retire on July 3 after 33 years with the health system.

GetWellNetwork appoints Bart Witteveen (Matrix Medical Network) CFO.

Announcements and Implementations

Three teams share $85,000 in prize money for winning NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital’s InnovateNYP, a two-day hackathon to develop patient engagement ideas for its patient portal. The winning concepts were: (a) a platform that allows inpatients to connect with each other for games, communication, and education; (b) an app that allows patients to connect with other patients, mentors, friends, and families; and (c) a tool that streamlines appointment check-in and rewards patients for healthy activities.

The Boone County Health Center (NE) and clinics go live on Cerner.

Grady Memorial Hospital (GA) implements RTLS from Intelligent InSites to track mobile assets and tissue and blood samples.

InstaMed launches InstaMed Go, which allows providers to collect patient payments via smartphones from any location with the payments posted automatically to their practice management systems and receipts emailed to patients.

Government and Politics

A salary review of Colorado’s health insurance exchange finds that its 36 employees are paid generously with mostly federal tax dollars, with 20 percent of them making more than $100,000 per year and all of them receiving a  10 percent contribution to their retirement plan. The executive director makes $191,000 per year and was given a $18,500 bonus within nine months of being hired. According to a healthcare policy expert for the Independence Institute think tank, “This is a bunch of people really responsible for nothing other than getting government grants.”

Innovation and Research

Inpatient EHR information can be used to predict sepsis, according to a study published in JAMIA. Researchers are working on a sepsis risk algorithm that an EHR can automatically calculate.

Technology

Google beats Apple to the smartwatch punch by announcing Android Wear, available later this year. The watches, which will be tethered to Android-powered phones, will offer voice control, a Siri-like personal assistant, Google Maps, and fitness-tracking sensors. Android Wear may eventually power other wearables, such as a smart jacket.

Other

UNC Health Care System-owned Rex Healthcare (NC) will pay $28 million this year for its portion of UNC’s Epic implementation, which is scheduled for a summer go-live.

CDC’s flu tracking data is better than Google Flu Trends even taking its lag time into account, with Google Flu Trends overestimating flu prevalence by more than 50 percent in the past two flu seasons.

AHIMA, CHIME, and other ICD-10 stakeholders urge Congressional leaders to continue to move forward with the October 1, 2014 ICD-10 implementation deadline and ask for support for the Medicare Audit Improvement Act, which addresses challenges with the RAC program.

A doctor in England is caught by fraud investigators for falsifying electronic medical records to earn NHS quality care bonuses. He enlisted the help of an IT person to enter fraudulent data, but after getting caught, blamed the technician and then computer coding errors for the falsified records. Some of the patients he claimed to have treated were imprisoned, abroad, or dead at the time. 

Weird News Andy titles this, “Lungfish?” Student engineers program at Rice University (TX) enrolled in a program that addresses the problems of hospitals in developing countries create an affordable bubble CPAP device (it helps newborn breathe by pushing air into their lungs) made from two aquarium pumps and a Target shoe box. The device has been deployed in hospitals in Malawi and is being rolled out to other countries. One of the students visited a hospital in Malawi and was told by a nurse there that their device had saved her own baby’s life.

Sponsor Updates

• Nuance will host a free “Art of Medicine” panel discussion on Thursday, March 27 from 9:00 to 11:00 a.m. at the W Hotel in Boston, MA that features Beth Israel’s John Halamka, MD; the AMA’s Steven Stack, MD; and Mass General’s Keith Dryer, DO, PhD discussing demands that take doctors away from patients. Email to register.
• SyTrue is chosen to participate in the first Wharton DC Innovation Summit on April 29-30, which will bring together investors, innovators, entrepreneurs and academic leaders. CEO Kyle will present a session on “Innovation Tools.”
• Gartner positions NTT in the Challengers Quadrant of the 2014 Magic Quadrant for Global MSSPs.
• Canon USA introduces Nuance eCopy ShareScan v5.2, which features an email and folder-watching service to simplify electronic workflows.
• The Drummond Group certifies Kareo EHR for MU 2014 Stage 2.
• Truven Health Analytics reports that its Treatment Cost Calculator tool for estimating out-of-pocket medical costs now reaches 20 million consumers through its client base of employers and health plans.
• Culbert Healthcare Solutions VP Brad Boyd and Oschsner Health System medical director of accountable care Philip M. Oravetz,MD will discuss strategies for extending EHR technology to affiliated practices at next month’s AMGA conference in Dallas.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect