Monday Morning Update 10/24/16

Top News

Friday’s major Internet outage appears to have been the result of a cyberattack launched by a botnet that targets Internet-connect devices. A scan last week found 11.3 million IP addresses of infected devices, many of them DVRs and IP cameras manufactured by China-based XiongMai Technologies.

The distributed denial-of-service attack was launched against Internet routing company Dyn, which is one of several that host the Domain Name System that translates text Web addresses to IP addresses.

Some speculate that Friday’s outage may have been a test to see if US election technology could be disrupted on November 8.

I saw no mention of hospitals that were affected, although it’s likely some were.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Few poll respondents say their organizations are doing anything to prepare for Medicare’s 2019 switch of patient ID numbers. Glen says the change seems like “bureaucratic masturbation” since it won’t improve his care or reduce costs, but the point is that Medicare cards will no longer enable identity theft by exposing Social Security numbers.

New poll to your right or here: which inpatient EHR vendor’s marketing program is most effective?

Last Week’s Most Interesting News

• Athenahealth’s Q3 results beat earnings expectations, but fall short on revenue.
• HIMSS announces IBM CEO Ginni Rometty as the HIMSS17 opening keynote.
• St. Joseph health (CA) pays $2.14 million to settle HIPAA violations in which a misconfigured server containing Meaningful Use data exposed patient information to Internet searches.
• Shares of IRhythm Technologies, which offers continuous skin patch monitoring of cardiac arrhythmias, jump 53 percent on the company’s IPO day.
• Industry groups respond mostly positively to the newly issued MACRA final rule.
• FDA approves an ultrasound sensor for Android smart phones developed by Philips.

Webinars

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

From the Athenahealth earnings call following a revenue miss that sent shares down nearly 6 percent on Friday:

• The company added a record 5,092 providers in Q3.
• The company’s expected 30 percent bookings growth for the year is behind “as the lack of sense of urgency in the market has elongated the sales cycle” and Epocrates revenue was lower.
• Jonathan Bush says the MIPS program changes provider focus to “the operational cost of managing quality” and closes out the focus of the past six years, requiring a change in product approach.
• Bush says the company is building a new EDI platform that will be more reliable, more stable, and less expensive for adding new network connections.
• Bush said when asked about revenue growth and hiring, “You could look at the provider adds … as the great men of Monty Python like to say, I’m not dead, actually feeling much better.”
• University of Toledo is still the company’s only larger-hospital inpatient EHR customer.
• Bush says there’s not value-based care being delivered despite a lot of talk. “Obamacare was extremely incremental this idea of an ACO that takes the first two percent itself and gives you half of the incremental savings 18 months after you generate them when it is done calculating them. Even if the calculation is wrong, you still have to accept it. If you generate savings for three years, they reset your base at the new lower number. It is a crap game to play, so not many people really play it. There are a few companies that are standalone, independent to the hospital systems, that have more to gain. The economic rents doesn’t come out of their own. The other problem is most of the ACOs that are affiliated with us know that the savings would come out of the hospital.”
• Bush summarized, “The big news, of course, is that I have been promising to tell you if I ever thought that there was no chance of making 30 percent bookings growth, I never had to because there is always a chance. There is no chance. The reasons behind it are fundamental shift in the market, a shift that inspires us and that gives us more confidence in our ability to differentiate ourselves from traditional software, install it and run the traditional way.”

Decisions

• Jennie Sealy Hospital (TX) switched from GE PACS to Philips in August 2016.
• Little River Memorial (AR) will change payroll and time attendance from Healthland to ADP in January 2017.
• Rockcastle Regional Hospital (KY) went live with Kronos HR, time and attendance, and payroll in September 2016.

These provider-reported updates are provided by Definitive Healthcare, which offers powerful intelligence on hospitals, physicians, and healthcare providers.

Announcements and Implementations

Brigham and Women’s Innovation Hub and Evidation Health will work together to measure the impact of digital health solutions on outcomes.

Privacy and Security

From DataBreaches.net:

• Baystate Health (MA) says five of its employees clicked on a phishing email link disguised as an internal memo, giving hackers access to their accounts that contained emails with the information of 13,000 patients.
• Seattle Indian Health Board notifies 800 patients that a breach of an employee’s email account exposed their information to an unknown hacker. The organization says it will “implement more structured password management and control measures” and is working on a project to “move all staff to a more secure email system.”

Other

Mayo Clinic and Arizona State University will build a new medical school adjacent to Mayo Clinic Hospital in Scottsdale, AZ that will also offer a certificate and master’s degree in the science of healthcare delivery. The organizations also plan to open a medical technology innovation accelerator. Groundbreaking is scheduled for 2017.

In Ireland, a hospital blames a system upgrade for sending doctors lab results that had been performed up to 20 years ago.

Sponsor Updates

• Agfa HealthCare’s enterprise imaging will participate in RSNA’s Image Sharing Validation Program.
• Experian Health will exhibit at the HFMA First IL Fall Summit October 24-25 in Oakbrook Terrace.
• HIMSS names Patientco CEO Bird Blitch chair of its Revenue Cycle Improvement Task Force.
• PatientMatters will exhibit at the Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association Annual Meeting October 26-28 in Marana.
• TierPoint joins the Amazon Web Services Partner Network.
• Verscend will exhibit at AHIP Medicare and Medicaid October 23-27 in Washington, DC.
• Visage Imaging will exhibit at the SIIM Wisconsin Regional Meeting October 24 in Madison.
• ZeOmega will exhibit at the AHIP National Conference on Medicare, Medicaid & Duals October 23-27 in Washington, DC.
• ZirMed will exhibit at the National Association for Home Care & Hospice Annual Meeting October 23-25 in Orlando.

Blog Posts

• Out-of-Pocket Healthcare Costs Increase in 2016 (Patientco)
• Curing Unhealthy IT (PatientKeeper)
• Two cool systems that talk (PeriGen)
• CMS releases MACRA final rule … here’s our take (Infor)
• Why Maintaining an Effective Healthcare Provider Data Management Program is Critical (Phynd Technologies)
• Making the Most of Your Data with Population Health Management (PMD)
• Surescripts Unveils New Patient Record Locator Service (Point-of-Care Partners)
• Illuminating a Black Box in Healthcare: Translating HIPAA Auditing Requirements, Access Logs, and System Logs (Protenus)
• Denials Management: It Takes a Village, or at Least All of the Hospital (Sagacious Consultants)
• Ransomware Increasingly Seen in Healthcare IT (Summit Healthcare)
• Talking Technology & Health IT with CVS Pharmacy (Surescripts)
• What You Missed at TeleCon16 (TeleTracking)
• Joint Commission Launches Workplace Violence Prevention Tool (Versus Technology)
• Welcome to the Edge of Disruption (VitalWare)
• The Mind-Body Connection (West Corp.)
• Who will Patients Vote for This Open Enrollment Season? (Xerox)

Contacts

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