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October 11, 2016 News 2 Comments

Top News

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Hedge fund operator Partner Fund Management sues Theranos for securities fraud, saying Theranos and CEO Elizabeth Holmes told “a series of lies” about its lab testing capabilities and prospects in soliciting a $100 million investment.

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Above is Holmes holding the company’s remaining credibility.


Reader Comments

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From Ken Bone: “Re: Athenahealth. JB got Trumped.” Epic posts a fact check for a recent interview with Athenahealth’s Jonathan Bush. Thankfully, JB’s brother Billy was not available to facilitate an uncomfortable Judy-JB hug.

From Looming Presence: “Re: HIStalkapalooza. Here’s video of Jonathan Bush doing his Donald Trump imitation at HIStalkapalooza earlier this year.” I had forgotten about that. JB, the most politically connected person in health IT, has said that he can’t support his Republican party’s nominee in calling him “a clinical narcissist” and “a wack job,” but says he’ll vote Libertarian instead of Democratic, explaining, “Why going for the nut on the right or the nut on the left when you can have the Johnson?” Bush downplayed his own political aspirations a few weeks ago by saying, “We need another Bush like I need a hole in my head,” although technically speaking, all of us need a hole in our head, just not another one that isn’t a mouth, nose, eyes, or ears (or in cases of emergency, a surgical trepanation). 

From PitViper: “Re: blockchain conference in Nashville last week. Humana’s CIO gave the keynote and his team participated in many of the breakout sessions. Nothing is production-ready and vendors themselves admit the technology is immature, but the ideas are interesting and if there’s truly a common trusted data layer in our future, it will address a lot of the issues we face.”


HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Agfa HealthCare. The company, which provides eHealth and digital imaging solutions to half the world’s hospitals, offers Care You Can See, an enterprise-wide approach to medical imaging that provides a single patient record within a single EHR view. Its product line includes enterprise imaging (VNA, universal viewer, ECM, image exchange, patient portal, scheduling, business intelligence and clinical apps); integrated care (data aggregation for multiple sites, patient engagement); and digital radiography. The company focuses its radiology commitment to maximize the value of medical images within an interoperable ecosystem to support collaboration and the availability of image to all caregivers under value-based care. Its Engage suite provides a first step toward an integrated care model, offering patient-centric views and actions, native mobile functionality, support for clinical networks, and integration with third-party systems. The company is the #1-recommended image sharing vendor in a recent Peer60 report. Thanks to Agfa HealthCare for supporting HIStalk.

Here’s an Agfa HealthCare intro video I found on YouTube.


Webinars

October 13 (Thursday) 2:00 ET. “Glycemic Control During Therapeutic Hypothermia.” Sponsored by Monarch Medical Technologies. Presenter: Tracey Melhuish, RN, MSN, clinical practice specialist, Holy Cross Hospital (FL). Using therapeutic hypothermia (TH) as a method of care can present risks of hyperglycemia, hypoglycemia, and blood glucose variability. Maintaining safe glucose levels during the cooling and rewarming phases of TH reduces the risks of adverse events. Tracey Melhuish, author of “Linking Hypothermia and Hyperglycemia,” will share best practices for optimal glucose control during TH and the success Holy Cross Hospital sees while using a computerized glucose management software.

October 25 (Tuesday) 1:30 ET. “Data Privacy/Insider Threat Mitigation: What Hospitals Can Learn From Other Industries.” Sponsored by HIStalk. Presenters: Robert Kuller, chief commercial officer, Haystack Informatics; Mitchell Parker, CISSP, executive director of information security and compliance, Indiana University Health. Cybersecurity insurers believe that hospitals are too focused on perimeter threats, ransomware, and the threat of OCR audits instead of insider threats, which are far more common but less likely to earn media attention. Attendees will learn how behavior analytics is being used to profile insiders and detect unusual behaviors proactively and to place privacy/insider risk within the risk management matrix.

November 8 (Tuesday) 1:00 ET. “A CMIO’s Perspective on the Successful 25 Hospital Rollout of Electronic Physician Documentation.” Sponsored by Crossings Healthcare. Presenter: Ori Lotan, MD, CMIO, Universal Health Services. UHS rolled out Cerner Millennium’s electronic physician documentation to its 6,000 active medical staff members — 95 percent of them independent practitioners who also work in competitor facilities — across 25 acute care hospitals. UHS’s clinical informatics team used Cerner’s MPage development toolkit to improve the usability, efficiency, communications capability, and quality metric performance of Dynamic Documentation, embedding clinical decision support and also using Nuance’s cloud-based speech recognition product for the narrative bookends of physician notes. This CMIO-led webinar will describe how UHS achieved 70 percent voluntary physician adoption within one month of go-live, saved $3 million in annual transcription expense, and raised EHR satisfaction to 75 percent. It will include a short demonstration of the software that UHS developed to optimize the physician experience.

November 9 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “How to Create Healthcare Apps That Get Used and Maybe Even Loved.” Sponsored by MedData. Presenter: Jeff Harper, founder and CEO, Duet Health. Patients, clinicians, and hospital employees are also consumers who manage many aspects of their non-medical lives on their mobile devices. Don’t crush their high technology expectations with poorly designed, seldom used apps that tarnish your carefully protected image. Your app represents your brand and carries high expectations on both sides. This webinar will describe how to build a mobile healthcare app that puts the user first, meets their needs (which are often different from their wants), creates "stickiness," and delivers the expected benefits to everyone involved.

Contact Lorre for webinar services. View previous webinars on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel.


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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Siemens Healthineers will resell  IBM Watson Health’s population health management solutions. The companies will also work together to create new solutions in a five-year strategic alliance.

3M Health Information Systems and Verily Life Sciences will work together to analyze population-level datasets into usable quality measures for complications, readmissions and mortality, and cost.

Pharmacy software vendors Rx30 and Computer-Rx announce their merger.


People

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AMN Healthcare-owned contingent workforce management systems vendor ShiftWise names Steven Rodriguez (Asure Software) as president.

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Outpatient rehabilitation therapy technology vendor Clinicient hires T. Kent Rowe (ZirMed) as CEO.

CTG promotes Rick Sullivan to VP of strategic staffing services.


Announcements and Implementations

HIMSS Europe is conducting a “Women in Health IT” survey whose results it will use to tailor future female-focused offerings. 


Privacy and Security

In India, Chennai city police have filed 43 cases against people they say have spread rumors about the health of the chief minister of Tamil Nadu, who has been hospitalized since September 22. The latest two arrests are of a website manager who published audio claiming to be from an Apollo Hospitals employee and an IT engineer who they said posted false information on Facebook. They’re charged under a law prohibiting statements intended to cause public panic.

The incarcerated human rights activist who coordinated an Anonymous-led denial-of-service attack against Boston Children’s Hospital in April 2014 to protest the involuntary commitment of a teenager stages a hunger strike to protest behavior modification programs for non-adults.


Technology

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China-based search engine Baidu launches Melody, a smartphone chatbot app that asks consumers AI-generated questions in performing basic triage before sending the information to a doctor to take over. The company says it’s talking to US healthcare companies as a potential market.

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London-based, Google-owned DeepMind has doubled its team to 40 employees since its February 2016 launch, hiring experts in artificial intelligence and from the NHS to help develop its products.


Other

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The Wall Street Journal says apps that help migraine sufferers predict their attacks or identify their triggering factors hold promise, but they struggle to distinguish triggers (causation) from warning signs (correlation).

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CMS Acting Administrator Andy Slavitt is one of my favorite tweeters, with refreshing recent examples above.

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Family physician, CMIO, and AAFP board member Carl Olden, MD says that EHRs provide important benefits despite the extra work they require of doctors. He suggests that documentation responsibilities be spread to non-physician care team members and that payment reform “get us off the E/M treadmill.”

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An emergency medicine professor blames CPOE for an error in which an intern ordered “CT Abdomen and Pelvis with contrast” and somehow thought she would need to order oral contrast separately, which she did in sending the patient into contrast nephropathy when both agents were administered. I disagree with blaming CPOE for these reasons:

  • The intern ordered an item without understanding it.
  • The same error would likely have occurred with paper-based ordering, especially if the hospital was equally sloppy in how it phrased the orderable’s description on paper.
  • All the other doctors appeared to have understood and used this orderable without problems. 
  • Receiving a non-paper, non-verbal order does not eliminate the responsibility of the employees acting on it to review it for mistakes, electronic or otherwise.
  • It’s hard to understand how an undertrained intern’s one-off mistake – without the author’s seeing even basic evidence, such as how the hospital built the pick list in question — provides sufficient rationale to throw CPOE under the bus.
  • I agree with only one point of the article – system administrators should monitor cancelled or replaced orders to help them understand where there system setup might be confusing users.

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Kaiser Permanente CEO Bernard Tyson says in a conference presentation that 52 percent of KP’s 2015 physician-member interactions were conducted via technology rather than face-to-face visits. The article’s author calls those encounters “virtual visits,” but I would bet that the huge number is mostly portal text messages, refill requests, and lab test communication. KP has turned in those big numbers going back to at least 2014, so this is really not news.

Canada-based drugmaker Valeant, known for acquiring old drugs and then jacking up their price, does it again with a drug for lead poisoning it bought in 2013, raising its price from $950 to $27,000. The company’s excuses (short shelf life, low sales volume) don’t hold much water since they haven’t changed since the previous owner was presumably making a nice profit at $950.

An expert criticizes vendor-operated company wellness programs, saying that data from the program that was recently chosen as the industry’s best suggests that employees were actually harmed rather than helped. He also cites the 2015 winner McKesson, who claimed savings despite no change in employee biometric risk factors.

In India, illegible doctor handwriting forces medical examiners to switch to computer-completed autopsy forms that police and juries can more easily read.

The Atlantic profiles Tristan Harris, a former Google employee who created an advocacy group called Time Well Spent that is trying to convince app developers to take a Hippocratic Oath that they won’t turn their users into slot machine-like tech addicts by exploiting their psychological vulnerabilities. He says app developers are like junk food vendors in introducing the digital version of sugar, salt, and fat into their apps to profitably satisfy user craving in earning “likes” and impressive LinkedIn connections via pointless yet hypnotic auto-play videos and clickbait stories. He’s thinking about developing an app to measure app usage vs. user-reported benefit in calling out apps that create addiction without satisfaction. Harris responds to the magazine’s reporter who expresses anxiety at trying not to check his cell phone during their interview:

Our generation relies on our phones for our moment-to-moment choices about who we’re hanging out with, what we should be thinking about, who we owe a response to, and what’s important in our lives. If that’s the thing that you’ll outsource your thoughts to, forget the brain implant. That is the brain implant. You refer to it all the time.


Sponsor Updates

  • AHIMA will add Meditech’s EHR to its Virtual Lab for HIM student training.
  • Haystack Informatics publishes a white paper on insider data breaches.
  • Aprima will exhibit at the Texas Association of Community Health Centers meeting October 17-18 in Dallas.
  • Arcadia Healthcare Solutions CMO Rich Park, MD will present at the inaugural meeting of the American Association of Strategic Regional Organizations October 17 in Philadelphia.
  • Bernoulli will exhibit at AARC16 October 15-18 in San Antonio.
  • Besler Consulting, Clinical Architecture, Direct Consulting Associates, and FormFast will exhibit at AHIMA October 15-19 in Baltimore.
  • The Chartis Group adds three principals: Mary Jo Morrison, Mark Pasquale, and Robert Schwartz, MD, MPH. 
  • Besler Consulting releases a new podcast, “Five keys to mitigating risks associated with hospital-physician contracting.”
  • Dimensional Insight and Hayes Management Consultants will exhibit at the Centricity Healthcare User Group October 13-15 in Austin.
  • MedScape includes E-MDs as a leading vendor for usability and customer satisfaction in its latest EHR report.
  • Elsevier Clinical Solutions features predictions from Geeta Nayyar, MD in its celebration of 100 years of medical clinics.
  • EClinicalWorks will exhibit at the AOAO Annual Meeting October 13-15 in Washington, DC.
  • HCS will exhibit at the NASL annual meeting October 16-18 in Nashville.Healthgrades will exhibit at the Built in Colorado Fall Startup Showcase October 13 in Denver.

Blog Posts


Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jennifer, Dr. Jayne, Lt. Dan.
More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.
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Currently there are "2 comments" on this Article:

  1. Re: CPOE. It makes me angry as a nurse to read this paper. The whole thing reads like a witch hunt in APA style. The subtext here is alarming: its not out fault if we can blame the EMR.

    Does the professor not want to take responsibility for the intern’s error?

    Is accountability absent if grand rounds said so?

    What is happening here is a plain and simple case of passing the buck. And medical school hospitals already have a higher than average death rate among patients in their care. Here’s a thought: hold physicians to the same level of accountability as nurses. See if patient care gets better.

  2. Can’t link to the paper, but I’m confused by your description. IV contrast causes nephropathy, not oral.







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