RE: Change HC/RansomHub, now that the data is for sale, what is the federal govt. or DOD doing to protect…
News 1/19/18
Top News
Some Allscripts remotely hosted systems, including its Professional EHR and controlled substances e-prescribing modules, went down due to a ransomware attack early Thursday.
Only customers whose systems are hosted in the company’s Raleigh and Charlotte, NC data centers are affected.
Allscripts hopes to restore the systems quickly from a backup.
Reader Comments
From Canary: “Re: Vindicet. Heard it is closing its doors next week.” Unverified, since my email to the company’s listed address bounced back as undeliverable. I interviewed CEO Yann Beaullan-Thong back in 2012, but the company has apparently pivoted from electronic referral technology to business intelligence and IT services. The executives listed on its site seem to have all moved on and expunged their history with the company from their LinkedIn profiles.
From Undying Like: “Re: bloat in C-suite titles. Chief Growth Officer? Chief Revenue Officer? Perhaps you should have a contest of how many C-suite titles can be created. I wonder what’s driving this growth of overhead?” I’ve forwarded your request to my Chief Contest Officer. Health systems have made up quite a few C-level titles as well, although I question whether the incumbents actually have equal standing in the mahogany-paneled C-suite. Titles are cheap.
Webinars
January 24 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET: “Location, Location, Location: How to Deploy RTLS Asset Management for Capital Savings.” Sponsor: Versus Technology. Presenter: Doug Duvall, solution architect, Versus Technology. Misplaced or sub-optimally deployed medical equipment delays patient care and hampers safety-mandated preventive maintenance. It also forces hospitals to buy more equipment despite an average utilization that may be as low as 30 percent, misdirecting precious capital dollars that could be better spent on more strategic projects. A real-time locating system (RTLS) cannot only track asset location, but also help ensure that equipment is properly distributed to the right place at the right time. This webinar will provide insight into the evaluation, selection, and benefits of an RTLS-powered asset management solution.
February 13 (Tuesday) 1:00 ET. “Beyond Sliding Scale: Closing the Gap Between Current and Optimal Glycemic Management Practices.” Sponsor: Monarch Medical Technologies. Presenter: Laurel Fuqua, BSN, MSN, EVP/chief clinical officer, Monarch Medical Technologies. The glycemic management practices of many hospitals and physician staff differ from what is overwhelmingly recommended by experts and relevant specialty societies. As a result, they are missing an opportunity to improve the quality, safety, and cost of care for their patients with diabetes and hyperglycemia, which commonly represent more than 25 percent of their inpatient population. Hospitals that transition from sliding-scale insulin regimens to consistent use of basal / bolus / correction protocols are seeing reductions in hyperglycemia, hypoglycemia, and costs. Making this shift more effective and efficient is the use of computerized insulin-dosing algorithms that can support dedicated staff using a systematic approach.
February 14 (Wednesday) 2:00 ET. “Time is Money: Aurora Health’s Journey of Implementing and Advancing Cost Accounting.” Sponsored by Strata Decision Technology. Aurora Health Care’s implementation of Strata’s Decision Support module involved not only building an improved cost accounting model, but improving the process to engage a cross-functional team in cost development. It now has accurate, consistent cost data to support decision-making. Aurora’s next phase will be to use actual procedure and visit times to allocate costs. This presentation will provide a detailed view into both the implementation and future direction of the Strata Decision Support program within Aurora.
Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
The Illinois Chief Procurement Office for Higher Education rejects Cerner’s protest of UI Health’s September 2017 decision to award Epic a $62 million contract, citing Cerner’s inability to “submit a proposal that showed its technical qualifications at the minimum level required” and Epic’s submission that met all of UI’s requirements on price. UI Health CFO Mike Zenn says the protest, filed in late September, has set the implementation back by three months.
Change Healthcare acquires medical guidelines technology vendor National Decision Support Company for an undisclosed sum.
In California, Petaluma Valley Hospital struggles to find new ownership after potential suitor Paladin Healthcare has second thoughts related to replacing PVH’s EHR, which is coupled with the systems of its former owner, St. Joseph Health. St. Joseph says it would be expensive to remove the hospital from its system and offered $2 million toward its replacement, which would cost $5.5 million, and Paladin said OK as long as the hospital agreed to be taken over first.
Several large health systems that operate 300 hospitals and possibly the VA will form a non-profit company that will provide generic drugs for hospitals. They will attempt to work around situations where shortages occur because only one or two companies manufacturer a generic product or where a company uses its monopoly to jack up the price of old drugs.
People
Daniel Castillo, MD (Evolution Health) joins patient decision support company WiserCare as CEO.
Carevive Systems hires Jamel Giuma (Sunquest) as VP of product management.
Sales
Deaconess (IN) chooses Stanson Health’s clinical decision support.
Digestive Care (FL) will replace its Greenway Health EHR with EClinicalWorks.
Announcements and Implementations
DirectTrust says Direct users sent 167 million message transactions in 2017, a 70 percent increase over 2016. The number of DirectTrust addresses increased 16 percent to 1.6 million.
According to his LinkedIn, former HIMSS President Steve Lieber will sell consulting services (governance development, analysis, business expansion) to associations and companies as well as acting as a technical and business advisor to start-ups, all under the newly created umbrella of Avisos Partners. Google tells me that Avisos is Catalan for “warnings.”
Government and Politics
FCW confirms that the DoD’s Cerner rollout is on a routine hold as the project plan has specified all along, not as the result of a new decision triggered by support tickets as a recent Politico report indicated. The rollout was to be reviewed through most of 2018 before implementation beyond the four pilot sites would continue and that plan hasn’t changed.
Research and Innovation
Penn Medicine researchers find that ED physicians prescribe fewer opioid pills when an EHR default setting of 10 tablets units is introduced.
Privacy and Security
Adams Health Network (IN) works to restore its servers after a January 11 ransomware attack that took down its scheduling and EHR systems. Hospital employees say their screens indicated “sorry,” common wording of the SamSam ransomware that infected Hancock Health (IN) last week, for which that hospital paid the demanded $55,000 ransom.
Aetna will pay $17 million to settle a class-action lawsuit filed after it mailed HIV medication notices to patients in envelopes with see-through windows.
Other
All of us have had this experience. Many have, like me, also had the health system flat out refuse to give me my data electronically even after I filed an HHS OCR complaint that resulted only in HHS offering it “technical assistance” when technology was not the problem at all.
Microsoft will discontinue its HealthVault Insight app less than a year after its introduction, saying that it was a research project whose insights will be used in other projects. It joins the Microsoft Band fitness tracker in the trash heap of no-longer-shiny objects. Validic was chosen to provide connectivity to the app’s patient-generated health data in a splashy May 2017 announcement.
In Canada, radiologists at BC Children’s Hospital will manually review thousands of charts after finding that integration of ultrasound results with its EHR has been disabled for a year, sometimes preventing doctors from realizing that results were available.
Bankrate’s latest Financial Security Index finds that only 39 percent of Americans have enough savings to cover an unexpected $1,000 expense, such as an ED visit. The likely choice that wasn’t mentioned for the ED example was “ignore the hospital’s bill in prioritizing cell phone and cable payments first because those companies will actually shut me off from my all-important entertainment.”
ACEP pushes back at Anthem’s decision to charge members for unnecessary visits to the ED with a TV commercial.
Sponsor Updates
- Healthcare Growth Partners recaps the nine transactions it closed in 2017 – RPA, Ontellus, Kognito, Prognosis Innovation Healthcare, Callpointe, Symplr, OmniSys, Clockwise.MD, and High Line Health.
- PerfectServe publishes a new success story featuring The University of Tennessee Medical Center, “Streamlined follow-up appointment scheduling aims to reduce readmissions.”
- LogicStream Health launches a podcast series.
- ChartLogic parent Medsphere reports a 45 percent growth in 2017 subscription revenue.
- LifeImage celebrates its tenth anniversary with major milestones.
- MarketsandMarkets recognizes Liaison Technologies as a “Visionary Leader in the Hybrid Integration Platform Market.”
- MedData will exhibit at the ACEP Reimbursement & Coding Conference January 22-26 in Nashville.
- Meditech announces that 92 healthcare organizations implemented its Web EHR in 2017, 47 of which were new customers.
- Lane Regional Medical Center selects CloudWave hosting services for its Meditech EHR.
- W2O Group features PokitDok CTO Ted Tanner in its JP Morgan recap.
Blog Posts
- 2018 Cybersecurity Resolutions: Start Focusing on the Fundamental (Fortified Health Security)
- Agile Healthcare: Reduce toil to improve care coordination and clinical workflow (LiveProcess)
- Doctors hold the solution to the opioid crisis in our hands (Meditech)
- People with Addiction Issues Should be Able to Control Their Own Data (Netsmart)
- 2018 Rock Solid Award Winners (Parallon Technology Solutions)
- We Successfully Installed Our New EHR – Why Haven’t Things Changed? (Optimum Healthcare IT)
- Patient engagement technology: Transform into a proactive healthcare organization (Experian Health)
- Welcome, 800 Pound Gorillas (PatientKeeper)
Contacts
Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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It isn’t surprising that the State of Illinois procurement office rejected Cerner’s shortsighted protest of Epic winning the bid. I’m wondering if that the bid was set up accordingly to get away from one entrenched and under-performing vendor and shift it to another. If that is the case, how much of that perception of under-performance is fairly or unfairly placed on the vendor of course is a fair question. There are bad customers too. I’m not saying that is the case here but it is possible. Both on purpose and unintentionally, as organizations seek out better solutions and question massive spend, bids can tilt towards the current vendor or away from it. As information is gathered across the organization departments seek out wants and nice-to-haves framed against the current system. Often this leaves the current vendor in an unfair position, but just as often the new vendor simply and smartly addressed weaknesses of competitors. In some cases savvy leaders who have made up their mind about staying or changing selectively place this information gathered in to the RFP or scoring methodology, to influence the final result. In the aftermath of a large loss like this there are a lot of lessons for the losing vendor. Whether they can learn them or not is the most important question because the nature of the process and vendor/partner relationships isn’t going to change. That doesn’t seem to be the case here so far.
RE data transfer item: it says “doc is changing Hosp”. To me that means a provider wanted all his pt records in Epic transferred to another version of Epic at another institution. That goes way beyond your answer.