Monday Morning Update 12/1/14

Top News

Cloud solutions provider 8K Miles Software Services acquires 30-employee Epic consulting firm SERJ Solutions. 8K Miles says it will use the newly acquired expertise to create cloud-based healthcare solutions. I was curious about SERJ’s self-proclaimed marketplace difference, which it describes as follows: “Through our unique and multi-faceted approach, SERJ is able to ensure your EHR implementation is successful by providing strategic and subject matter expertise, software tools to increase productivity and provide an immediate return on your investment, and a proven post-implementation support model.  We are committed to our clients, every step of the way.” Here’s a challenge: name one consulting firm’s “why we’re different” statement that suggests that they really are different in specific ways. I’m not saying there aren’t any, just that they are rare. 8K Miles is headquartered in San Ramon, CA and has an office in Chennai, India, which might explain why all seven members of its leadership team have Indian names. Meanwhile, even though 8K Miles declined to announced what it paid for SERJ, its CEO tells a financial site in India that it paid what I think is $2.5 million cash (if I did the conversion from Rupees Crore correctly) plus a potential earnout, with SERJ taking in annual revenue of $6.4 million.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Half of the respondents to my poll say they’ll use less IT-related consulting in 2015 as they did in 2014, with 14 percent predicting they’ll use more. New poll to your right or here, in a repeat of my 2011 poll that named a clear and possibly surprising winner: which city has the strongest claim to call itself the US capital of healthcare IT? Perhaps the winning metropolis will arrange an official and expense-paid visit for the award-bearing HIStalk delegation.

Some folks involved with CommonWell Health Alliance have offered to answer questions from HIStalk readers after seeing several comments here. Send me anything you’d like to know about its technology, plans, business model, or anything else and I’ll get their response.

This week on HIStalk Practice: MediGain acquires Millennium Practice Management Associates. HIE-sponsored patient portals face an uphill adoption battle, while Epic’s portal wins rave reviews. Notes from the Health IT Leadership Summit. Dr. Gregg offers “It Do and It Don’t” observations on the impact of MU. Drchrono integrates biometric authentication into its EHR. James Stevermer, MD answers five questions. PracticeFusion docs see almost zero patient demand for wearable data integration. MD Mama puts being thankful in perspective.

Thanks to the following sponsors, new and renewing, that recently supported HIStalk, HIStalk Practice, and HIStalk Connect. Click a logo for more information.

Listening: new from Brooklyn-based power pop band Nude Beach, which sounds like Tom Petty singing lead for The Replacements. I’m also revisiting concert video from the best live band in the world: Sweden’s The Hives, featuring the singer Mick Jagger wishes he could be, Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist.

Last Week’s Most Interesting News

• ECRI Institutes includes missing or incomplete EHR information in its “Top 10 Health Technology Hazards for 2015”
• CMS extends the 2014 Meaningful Use attestation deadline from November 30 to December 31 because its attestation software wasn’t ready in time.
• Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (MAI) pays $100,000 to settle a state complaint involving an unencrypted stolen laptop.
• In Canada, a Montreal newspaper agrees with the health minister that the province’s $500 million EHR project is “an abysmal failure.”
• Emdeon announces that it will acquire Change Healthcare for $135 million. Change Healthcare markets a benefits management system focused on helping employees make the most of their health benefits,

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Vivify Health receives a reported $15 million in Series B funding. The Plano, TX-based company offers remote patient monitoring and care coordination tools.

Vista Equity Partners will buy British software vendor Advanced Computer Software Group for $1.14 billion. The company’s healthcare-related offerings include a community-based EHR and software for home care, ED, and long-term care.

People

James Parks, former CIO of Box Butte County General Hospital (NE), is sentenced to three years in prison for storing child pornography on his hospital PC, discovered by his own IT staff who were investigating a hospital-spread virus that originated on his device.

Announcements and Implementations

Johns Hopkins Nursing magazine covers the September switch of Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center from skilled nursing facility to specialty hospital, which including moving it from paper to Meditech.

GE Healthcare announces keynotes for its Centricity LIVE 2015 user conference, April 29-May 2, 2015 in Orlando: Atul Gawande, MD, MPH (surgeon and author), Melissa Etheridge (singer-songwriter), and LeVar Burton (actor, director, and the guy who wore what looked like a car air filter over his eyes in “Star Trek: The Next Generation”).

Innovation and Research

VGo telepresence robots, tablet devices, network equipment, and software from Vecna Cares are sent to Ebola treatment units in Liberia, moving paper-based recordkeeping to electronic. Robotics researchers hope the telepresence robots can serve as interpreters, deliver supplies, decontaminate equipment, and bury deceased Ebola patients.

Technology

An MIT Technology Review article titled “Google Glass is Dead; Long Live Smart Glasses” says interest in Glass has rapidly evaporated as Google has lost key personnel and failed to advance the product from geek beta experiment to consumer mainstream. The article says Glass’s biggest problem is the way “Glassholes” look wearing the device and concerns by those nearby that they are being unknowingly recorded. The article says the technology is fine, but the form factor needs to evolve so that the technology is hidden within the glasses instead of being perched like a prism on top of them, perhaps even being incorporated into a contact lens. It’s a tough break to have developed an entire business around an orphan product that may never make it out of beta. Meanwhile, disillusioned Glass Explorers are trying to unload their devices on eBay for less than the $1,500 they ponied up to get preview versions.

Other

Gilbert Lederman, the former director of radiation oncology of Staten Island University Hospital (NY) will pay $2.35 million to settle Medicare fraud claims. He is best known for (a) his hospital commercials that ran on New York radio; (b) pestering a dying George Harrison to sign his son’s electric guitar; and (c) turning his office walls into a self-promotional billboard, as described by New York magazine as, “the kind of celebrity shrine you see in Italian red-sauce joints.”

An internal email provided by a reader contains more details on the Epic outage following its October 26 go-live at England’s Cambridge University Hospitals Foundation Trust.

University Hospitals (OH) fires an employee for inappropriately accessing the electronic medical records of 692 patients.

At least 5,000 Russians, many of them doctors, march through Moscow to protest a healthcare reform plan driven by sagging oil prices and Western sanctions that would eliminate up to 10,000 physician jobs and close 28 hospitals and clinics in the next few weeks. Proponents say the actions are necessary to enact President Vladimir Putin’s pledge to increase physician salaries to twice that of the average employee by 2018.

An Annals of Family Medicine editorial written by ADFM’s Education Transformation Committee says medical school graduates require EHR competence that can be gained only by first-hand experience, recommending that supervised, patient-centered EHR use be added as an Entrustable Professional Activity even though some medical schools bar such access since students aren’t allowed to bill for their services.

The always-entertaining folks at pMD post Thanksgiving-related ICD-10 codes on their blog:

• W61.42XD – Struck by turkey, subsequent encounter (drily noting, “If you find yourself confronted with a live turkey, you may want to rethink your Thanksgiving strategy”).
• W29.0 – Contact with powered kitchen appliance, subsequent encounter.
• K21.9 – Gastro-esophageal reflux disease without esophagitis (aka “heartburn and indigestion).
• W52.XXXA – Crushed, pushed or stepped on by crowd or human stampede, initial encounter (a Black Friday special).
• W22.02XA – Walked into lamppost, initial encounter (alcohol-fueled parade mishaps).

The career development team at Besler Consulting ran a Thanksgiving food drive for the South Brunswick, NJ food pantry.

Also running a holiday food drive, this time a virtual version: Aprima employees are collecting money for the fifth year for Metrocrest Social Services, which serves communities near the company’s offices in Carrollton, TX. They like the “virtual food drive” idea because the organization pays less than retail and can provide fresh foods instead of just canned goods. Last year Aprima’s employees provided more than six tons of food, double that of the previous year. 

Vince Ciotti’s inaugural CLAS Report names Epic #2 in a very important category, with the billionaire-led company losing to a thousandaire who packs a size advantage.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

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