Home » News » Currently Reading:

News 9/17/14

September 16, 2014 News 5 Comments

Top News

image

Several member organizations — including HIMSS, CHIME, AHA, and AMA — urge HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell to shorten the 365-day 2015 Meaningful Use reporting period to 90 days. The groups say they are “incredibly concerned” that the full-year reporting period will kill the Meaningful Use momentum, pointing out that only single-digit percentages of providers are ready for Stage 2 with only 15 days remaining. Meanwhile, Burwell focuses on more important issues – writing her first HHS blog post, in which quite a bit of Presidential butt is kissed.


Reader Comments

From Hospital IT’er: “Re: GE Centricity HIS. We have been getting calls from GE asking us when we’ll get off their platform. It is clear to me that they are going to abandon the product line sooner rather than later.” Unverified.

image

From Teddy Lemur: “Re: Tuesday’s CMS/ONC Meaningful Use webinar. One of the most confusing I’ve attended. If you were to try and create a decision tree based on whether the site is an EH/EP/CAH, their Stage, their Year, site’s first year of attestation, date of attestations, site’s mix of certified EHRs, EHR’s level of certification,  etc., etc., it would rival the family tree of European royalty for the last 700 years. How would you like to be a MU auditor and try to judge a site’s 2014 attestation a year or two from now? It’s time to figure out how to best achieve the MU program’s future goals. Better patient care, anyone?”  


Webinars

September 18 (Thursday) 1:00 p.m. ET.  DHMSM 101: The Hopes, Politics, and Players of the DoD’s $11 Billion EHR Project. Presented by HIStalk. Presenters: Dim-Sum, an anonymous expert in government healthcare IT, military veteran, and unwavering patriot; Mr. HIStalk. The Department of Defense’s selection of a commercially available EHR will drastically change the winning bidders, the health and welfare of service members all over the world, and possibly the entire healthcare IT industry. The presentation will include overview of the military health environment; the military’s history of using contractors to develop its systems vs. its new direction in buying an off-the-shelf system; its population health management challenges in caring for nearly 10 million patients all over the world, some of them on the battlefield; and a review of the big players that are bidding. This presentation will be geared toward a general audience and will be freely sprinkled with humor and wry cynicism developed in years of working in two often illogical industries that hate change.

September 25 (Thursday) 1:00 ET. Using BI Maturity Models to Tap the Power of Analytics. Presented by Siemens Healthcare. Presenters: James Gaston, senior director of maturity models, HIMSS Analytics; Christopher Bocchino, principal consultant, Siemens Healthcare. Business intelligence capabilities are becoming critical for healthcare organizations as ACOs and population health management initiatives evolve in the new healthcare marketplace. The presenters will explain how BI maturity models can help optimize clinical, financial, and operational decisions and how organizations can measure and mature their analytics capabilities.

September 26 (Friday) 1:00 ET. Data Governance – Why You Can’t Put It Off. Presented by Encore, A Quintiles Company. Presenters: Steve Morgan, MD, SVP for IT and data analytics and CMIO, Carilion Clinic; Randy Thomas, associate partner, Encore, A Quintiles Company. In this second webinar in a series, “It’s All About the Data,” the presenters will review the pressing need for data governance and smart strategies for implementing it using strained resources.


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

image

Outsourcer Cognizant will acquire TriZetto for $2.7 billion in cash from its majority owner, London-based private equity firm Apax Partners. I reported on August 19 that Apax was hoping to flip its 2008 investment of $1.4 billion in TriZetto, which earns $190 million in annual profits, for $3 billion.

image

Craneware announces FY2014 results: revenue up 3 percent, EPS $0.34 vs. $0.33.

image

Readmission software vendor RightCare Solutions raises $4 million in funding.

QPID Health will move to a larger Boston headquarters building and open a West Coast office in Carlsbad, CA.


Sales

Flagler Hospital (FL) chooses Allscripts dbMotion to connect community EHRs.

Oncology device and software vendor Varian Medical Systems will deploy the Infor Cloverleaf Integration and Information Exchange Suite.

In England, Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh NHS Foundation Trust names Allscripts as its preferred EHR vendor. Allscripts acquired Oasis Medical Solutions in July 2014 to improve its position as a single-source vendor to NHS Trusts in pairing that company’s patient administration system with Allscripts Sunrise.

image

Willis-Knighton Health System (LA) selects Merge’s enterprise cardiology and interoperability solutions.


People

image

Phil Fasano (Kaiser Permanente) joins insurance company AIG in the newly created position of EVP/CIO. His pre-Kaiser background was in the financial sector.

image

Joining Phil Fasano in leaving Kaiser Permanente for AIG is Madhu Nutakki, KP’s VP of digital health, who has taken the role of CTO of data, innovation, and advanced technology at AIG.

image image

Brad Allen (Lumeris) joins ESD as regional VP, as does Aaron Johnson (The Morel Company).  

image

Patientco names Jared Lisenby (Greenway Health) as VP of sales.

John Volanto, VP/CIO of Nyack Hospital (NY), is named interim CEO after the resignation of David Freed.


Announcements and Implementations

Surescripts adds four pharmacy benefit management companies and six EHRs to its electronic prior authorization service.

image

Registration for HIMSS15 is open along with hotel booking. Early bird registration (through the end of January) is $745. A new (and somewhat odd) option is the free Conference Plus Pass, which allows Sunday pre-conference attendees to move from one session to another during breaks, which would be a benefit primarily if the one you paid $325 for is a dud and you’re willing to roll the dice.

Billian’s HealthDATA makes its searchable Vitals hospital news and RFP feed available at no charge.  

Siemens will offer its customers patient financing programs from CarePayment.

InstaMed and Coalfire release a white paper covering the security of payment cards in healthcare.

Infor announces CloudSite Healthcare, providing its solutions via Amazon Web Services as a subscription service.


Government and Politics

image

A trade group for healthcare app developers asks Congressman Tom Marino (R-PA) to influence HHS to change HIPAA regulations, saying they are “mired in a Washington, DC mindset that revolves around reading the Federal Register” or “hiring consultants to explain what should be clear in the regulation itself.” It adds that small-scale app developers have few resources to help them understand their HIPAA responsibilities. The letter asks HHS to (a) publish a HIPAA FAQ for app developers; (b) update HHS’s HIPAA technical documentation, which in some cases pre-dates the iPhone; and (c) participate in developer-focused events.

A GAO report will call out security vulnerabilities in Healthcare.gov, warning that they will persist until fixed. GAO says CMS didn’t finish security plans, didn’t perform adequate security testing, failed to enforce password strength requirements, didn’t secure some of its infrastructure from Internet access, and failed to create a failover site.


Technology

image

Stanford University Hospital and Duke University Health System will pilot the use of Apple’s HealthKit for tracking patient information. Stanford will send two pediatric diabetic patients home with an iPod Touch to record blood glucose levels, while Duke will track basic vital signs for some unannounced number of cancer and cardiac patients. Both health systems use Epic, with Stanford saying it hopes to be able to trigger alerts from the patient-provided blood glucose levels that will be sent back to the patient via Epic’s MyChart. It’s not much of a commitment by either organization and little detail was provided, so I assume it’s just a couple of university people playing around with Apple’s technology just because they can, possibly (or not) to eventual patient advantage.

image

IBM is desperately seeking new nails for its Watson hammer that has failed to hit its sales numbers, now packaging it as Watson Analytics.

In Canada, volunteers at Bruyere’s Saint Vincent Hospital develop a headband-powered computer navigation system for quadriplegics using open source tools and consumer-grade parts. A quadriplegic resident of seven years says, “It makes life interesting. When you are in bed, it’s boring. If you can go online, you can go anywhere. With Google Maps, I can go on virtual tours.” She also uses the technology to connect with family via Skype.


Other

image

The American Medical Association lists eight recommendations to make EHRs better:

  1. Design systems to enable physician-patient engagement, with fewer pop-up reminders and complicated menus.
  2. Allow physicians to delegate tasks.
  3. Track referrals, consults, orders, and lab results automatically.
  4. Modularize system design for easier configuration.
  5. Create tools that provide more context-sensitive, real-time information beyond overly structured data capture.
  6. Open up systems for interoperability.
  7. Link EHRs to patient apps and telehealth to support digital patient engagement.
  8. Build in capabilities for users to send product feedback and problem reports to vendors.

image

HL7 tweeted out this photo of the brilliant and always-entertaining “Father of HL7,” Ed Hammond of Duke University.

image

Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems (ME) will eliminate 43 IT jobs, about 12 percent of the department’s headcount, hoping to avoid a $100 million shortfall by 2019.  

Kaiser Permanente Hawaii launches an internal medicine residency, touting in the announcement its HealthConnect system.

image

A Wisconsin newspaper is amused in its coverage of Epic UGM, reporting that Judy Faulkner joked that health IT acquisitions will accelerate and Epic will buy GE and rename it General Epic. She said, “The greatest users of electronic health records are the patients.” The photo above was tweeted out by David K. Butler, MD.

Weird News Andy says this is one of his “pet” peeves among vets of the animal kind. A Colorado veterinarian pleads guilty to charges of unauthorized practice for using creams on humans.


Sponsor Updates

  • PerfectServe will exhibit at MGMA and the ACPE Fall Institute.
  • Impact Advisors is included in Modern Healthcare’s “Largest Revenue Cycle Management Firms.”
  • MedAptus announces that approximately 4,000 charge capture and management suite end-users have rolled out its ICD-10 software upgrade.
  • Allscripts offers a short list of dos and don’ts of clinical IT deployment based on a new Alberta Health Services case study.
  • Consulting Magazine names Aspen Advisors, Deloitte Consulting, and Impact Advisors to its “2014 Best Firms to Work For” list.
  • The Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative receives ONC HIT 2014 Edition Modular EHR certification from ICSA Labs.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Get HIStalk updates.
Contact us online.

 

125x125_2nd_Circle



HIStalk Featured Sponsors

     

Currently there are "5 comments" on this Article:

  1. In response to Teddy Lemur who said: “Re: Tuesday’s CMS/ONC Meaningful Use webinar. One of the most confusing I’ve attended. If you were to try and create a decision tree based on whether the site is an EH/EP/CAH, their Stage, their Year, site’s first year of attestation, date of attestations, site’s mix of certified EHRs, EHR’s level of certification, etc., etc., it would rival the family tree of European royalty for the last 700 years. How would you like to be a MU auditor and try to judge a site’s 2014 attestation a year or two from now? It’s time to figure out how to best achieve the MU program’s future goals. Better patient care, anyone?”

    I totally agree. The last speaker who was a PhD talked so fast and clearly was more interested in checking this webinar off the ‘to do’ list than making sure anyone understood the content. Very disappointing. No wonder there is diminishing interest in MU. Those who are supposed to be teaching the masses, don’t really seem to care if the masses are learning! Sigh.

  2. I have to laugh out loud reading the AMA recommendations for making EHRs better. Better for whom, may I ask? This is sort of a variant on why doctors hate EHRs, but unless the author is a user of the system, there is no way that they could understand the issues.

    Why not keep it simple?…like assure that the EHRs are safe, efficacious, and usable, so that they can be trusted to control the workflows of medical care so as to not impede the doctor or kill the patient.

  3. Varian partners with Infor for Cloverleaf? Like GE’s Centricity, thought Cloverleaf was fading into the distance. Likely a very sweet deal for Varian.

  4. Just what does this possible move by GE to get users off of Centricity mean for health systems that use GE/IDX for registration & scheduling? Are the days numbered for GE/IDX as well?

  5. I look forward to watching the Dim-Sum webinar after it is uploaded. I am also interested in hearing what industry veterans think will happen to the EMR consultant marketplace after a vendor is selected and implementation begins.







Text Ads


RECENT COMMENTS

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

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

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

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

  5. Yes, Meditech will talk your ears off about Expanse. There are multiple factors at play here which undercut both Meditech…

Founding Sponsors


 

Platinum Sponsors


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gold Sponsors