Photo: Health Management Technology

Security and privacy in healthcare are obviously hot topics. So, when Sentillion decided to sponsor HIStalk a few weeks ago, I pressed my luck and asked for an interview with CEO and co-founder Rob Seliger. I knew the company was refocusing a bit and also introducing a new single sign-on application called expreSSO, so I offered as bait the chance to talk about that. When I got on the phone with Rob, he said he’d be happy to talk about anything and that we didn’t have to pitch product. Good answer.

When I hear either “single sign-on” or “CCOW”, I think of Sentillion first because they’ve been doing it for a long time. They’ve introduced some new products I wasn’t fully aware of, including the vThere virtualized client for remote access.

Thanks to Rob for the chat.

Tell me about Sentillion and how you came to create it.

Sentillion was founded in 1998, spun it out of the former HP medical products group. I have the simplest resume on the planet – paper route, HP for 18½ years, then Sentillion. [laughs] I was working on technology that integrated applications not on the back end, like databases and integration engines, but on the front end of care, looking at the user experience of the caregiver, whether using applications from the same or different vendors.

We determined that our technology would serve better as a glue, run as a neutral company. We built a business case, they agreed. We spun the IP out with myself and my co-founder in 1998. We did three rounds of venture capital, the last one in 2001, and have been growing the company every since.

We moved from general integration to specific applications used in identity and access management. What we’ve been able to do is create a whole suite of products that address identity and access management needs for healthcare and, specifically, hospitals.

We sell to provider healthcare organizations. We’re unique in that way. Our competitors sell to finance and banking and retail customers. We said that healthcare has special needs, workflows, idiosyncrasies, and constraints. We wanted to create technology that was purpose-built for healthcare. Fast forward and we have hundreds of thousands of caregivers in hundreds of hospitals in the US, Canada, UK.

Healthcare security, like IT in general, seems to fall well behind that of most other industries, with lack of consistent authentication rules across applications, applications that don’t support LDAP or other centrally managed security, and heavy help desk use for password resets. Is it getting better?

It is getting better, but slowly. There are reasons why stronger security technologies have not been broadly adopted in healthcare. The main reason is that they get in the way of delivering healthcare. I’m not a physician or nurse, but I have a tremendous respect of what those people do for a living, taking care of people as their number one job. Navigating security isn’t what they’re paid to do. Our customer base is some of the smartest, most highly trained people on the planet and they’re adept at finding workarounds to impediments to delivering care, including security.

Part of our process is leveraging the years of experience we have in the care business. How many other security companies can you name that have a chief medical officer? We hired Dr. Jonathan Leviss as our Chief Medical Officer because he had a passion to eliminate the obstacles between caregivers and the productive use of computers.

You’ve heard of the last mile problem, like with DSL, where you can’t get connected if you’re too far from the telephone switch. I refer to our situation as the last inch problem, that inch that’s between the caregivers’ fingertips and the keyboard they don’t use. We provide security solutions that make them more productive instead of less, while instilling better security practices across the organization.

People often say that healthcare is slow to adopt technology, yet you can look at the amazing equipment from imaging systems to robotic surgery that is used. I don’t see a fear of technology in healthcare, just an avoidance of technology that’s an impediment to healthcare delivery. Vendors often miss that. We work really hard to get that right.

What security priorities would you recommend to a hospital CIO?

My favorite thing to do if I’m allowed is to take a walk, particularly in care areas, and watch what people are doing, who they are, where the computers are, what they’re showing, and whether they’re attended or unattended.

UPMC implemented our solution years ago. They started deployment in the ICU. I was with an entourage of UPMC executives and I drifted back from the tour group because they were headed to a workstation that someone was using with single sign-on and single patient selection. I stood back and marveled at all the workstations that were not in use, but were locked. I asked UPMC when the last time was that all those workstations with no one around were actually locked. [laughs]

It’s kind of like the broken window theory of why neighborhoods go downhill. Good security isn’t just the things you do on your network with firewalls and antivirus software. It also has to do with what people can see. Show them that their information is being safeguarded and protected. How would someone feel being wheeled down the hall and seeing other people’s information on display? It could be their information as well. You must show personnel and patients that they’re doing the right thing.

You testified before Congress after the VA’s security breach. How would you grade their progress since?

The hearings were for the right intentions but for the wrong reasons. The breach that occurred with the theft of that laptop was benign. The information was not clinical and the thief who stole it didn’t know it was there. At the end of the day, it was a non-event. They didn’t get Congress to the point of understanding how to practice good security.

The VA has the same challenges as non-VA – security vs. usability, however people who work for the VA can be told what to do, which isn’t always true of community physicians in hospitals. The VA has its act together as well as anyone else. They’re continuing to make investments in practical security practices. They’re extending a pilot we did for deployment of single sign-on, which is the first step in a powerful direction for them.

The participation in that hearing was fascinating for me. It was literally like being in a TV show. Members of Congress were in seats elevated maybe 10 or 12 feet in the air, looking down at myself and my VA colleagues at a table. Each member of Congress took the opportunity to express a passionate opinion, not all of which were germane to the conversation at hand. Despite the hyperbole, they actually listened to what I said and what the VA said. They asked good questions. It was a remarkable discourse.

The hearings were well after 9/11, yet the halls of Congress, with minimal screening, are still very open to the public. It was a wonderfully reassuring about our way of life. It was wide open to people who wanted to come and listen and participate and not be overly encumbered with security.

I’ve done so much public speaking that I’m rarely nervous, but I was nervous. I would not want to be there for a serious transgression or offense.

If I looked at your laptop right now, what security measures would I find?

You’d find our product, Vergence, which is single sign-on and a bunch of other things. Virtually everybody here uses it. What do I like about it the best? I don’t have to remember my passwords for the system that approves expense reports, Webex, salesforce.com … the list goes on and on. What I like best is the sheer convenience factor. The screensaver periodically locks my workstation after about 15 minutes of unattended use. That happens whether I’m using it at home or in the office. We all use high quality passwords, mnemonics based on pass phrases, based on an elaborate sentence I can remember and choose some letters from it to make my password.

Unless you’re sitting in front of it, you wouldn’t see the display because of a 3M privacy protection screen. I was working on board financials on an airplane flight several years ago when the woman next to me leaned over, almost into my seat, and said, “You know how to use a spreadsheet.” I thought, “How long has she been watching me work on board financials?” Anybody who’s a road warrior in the company can have a privacy shield.

Security and privacy get confused. The woman looking over my shoulder wasn’t trying to hack our systems, but she was breaching our privacy as a company by looking at sensitive information. Both security and privacy need proper protection. The recent George Clooney story suggests that the concern is well founded that the biggest data access concern that healthcare organizations should have is what happens within their four walls. Too bad Palisades Medical Center isn’t a Sentillion customer, as this is not a good way to get one’s hospital in the news.

Are you happy with the progress that healthcare software vendors have made in making their products CCOW compliant for improving the user experience?

Interesting question. The general answer is no. We’ve put our heart and soul into the CCOW standard going back to the HP days. Standards in healthcare still have a fickle existence when it comes to vendors adopting standards and applying them thoughtfully and properly to their products and with the same interest as something that is purely proprietary.

Much of the venture capital we raised in the early days was spent giving market visibility to the CCOW standard. That helped to a point, but there are vendors to this day who have not implemented the standard or have done so in an incomplete way just to check off that they’ve done it, or done it in an elitist way, interpreting it in a way that’s good for their business interests but not as useful to the customer as a full implementation.

Often a customer will say to us, “You’re Sentillion, can’t you get Vendor X to do it correctly?” I keep looking for that sheriff’s shield or subpoena power to tell vendors what to do. [laughs] We’re just another vendor.

Our answer was that so much of what was conceived by us and others in the standard is extremely powerful, but if vendors won’t implement it timely or correctly, we need another way. We developed a technology called bridging that allows achieving the standard in a way that’s not invasive to the application.

The A-Ha was that the part of the application we can see and rely on is the user interface, as opposed to trying to inspect the application at a code level and hoping for an undocumented API or secret hook that we could latch on to. The user interface is tangible. Because that translates into a series of calls to the underlying OS, we created programs to watch for those calls. We can watch an application as the user is using it and see that they selected a patient. We can get that and send it to other parts of the application to automate patient selection, but without having the CCOW standards.

I read something where someone said that CCOW is a great standard, but that Sentillion controls it. Boy, did that rile me. I’ve been doing this for over 15 years, originally for non-CCOW work. There are very specific rules of engagement for a standards open development process, from NIST, a standard for being a standard, how you vote, how you achieve a quorum, etc. For an open standard, when you have a final ballot, people can vote Yes, No, or Abstain. You throw out the Abstain votes and 90% of what’s left has to be Yes for the standard to be valid. Imagine trying to get that level of agreement in your own family. [laughs] It’s a tough hurdle with lots of opinions, lot of eyeballs before a ballot passes. There’s no way any one organization can control a standard. They can be a blocker if they have enough votes, but they can’t force something to happen.

If there’s a secret to what we’ve done, it’s two things: show up to the meetings and document them. [laughs] I like to write and most people don’t, so often it is myself or others who volunteer to document the meetings, but that doesn’t mean we’ve done anything more than spending evenings and weekends to pull documents together for the greater good. The idea that an individual or organization can control a standard is unfounded.

When I Google Sentillion, I get ads for ComputerProx and Encentuate. What is the Sentillion value proposition over these and other competitors like Carefx?

The companies we’re most likely to compete with head to head are more often companies like Novell or Computer Associates, We’ll also see Imprivata. We don’t see a lot of some of the other companies that come up with the ad hits, even though they’ve latched onto the keywords. Across the board, for all our competitors, there are really three salient points.

First is the healthcare focus. A CA or Novell, while they have sales and marketing teams that cater to healthcare, have products that are generic that are supposed to work in 9 to 5 office environments and not necessarily healthcare.

Second, we believe strongly that we provide a fabric or glue. The last thing we want our customers to have to do is glue our glue. If we show up and say, “We have one piece of the puzzle and you’ll have to work with these other vendors”, that’s not particularly satisfying. That’s why we’ve invested heavily in developing our own products. All our products were developed by Sentillion so our customers would have a single vendor, a single number to call. Every one of our competitors requires multiple partners to do what we do as a single vendor.

Third is the incredible track record we have in getting customers live and keeping them live. We have hundreds of hospitals and hundreds of thousands of users. We monitor uptime across all customers and report to our board like it was financial information. Five nines. Who’s doing that for a security apparatus like we provide?

I hope you don’t think it’s bravado, it’s just pride. There are still hospitals using monitors that I wrote firmware for, like the HP Clover. I still feel pride when I walk by them in a hospital and know that patients are being cared for with something I wrote.

Why is desktop virtualization important?

Going back to this sense of responsibility to solve problems, for years our customers were asking us to help with people who are not physically in their facility, like community docs or docs working at home. We told them we could help to a point, but they’d have to build a portal or provide remote emulation like Terminal Server or Citrix, which requires an investment in servers and expertise. That’s an OK answer, but not satisfying for customers.

We were developing improvements to our internal testing apparatus. We do massive scalability tests to test response time and failure factors and failover. We were experimenting with the virtualizing of clients, not servers. 99% of what people are doing is on servers, putting multiple virtual servers on one physical server. We thought, “With a bit more work, we could provide a virtualized client to our customers.” That was the birth of our vThere product.

Take the clinical workstation with whatever applications, OS, service packs, etc. for people who are physically in your enterprise. You can make exactly that same environment available to people outside your organization. It’s transparent, no particular software package or OS, or even preventatives or antivirus. You need a host PC of a reasonably contemporary vintage running a reasonably contemporary version of Windows. That’s it.

Fire up Windows and you get a completely virtualized version of the clinical workstation running on the host using the host’s memory and CPU, but no other aspect of the host software, If you use a VPN, we use that. The user clicks on an icon, it runs in a window and looks exactly like the application in a hospital. They provide their logon credentials and everything is identical. Radiologists can manipulate their images exactly like in the office without the remote delays. There’s no training involved, no new portal, and no additional expenses for standing up servers to host WTS or Citrix. It’s all running on native client hardware.

We introduced vThere in the middle of 2006. Use ranges from physician access to their full cadre of clinical applications to medical coders who work at home, who have increasing clout because they stand between the hospital and reimbursement. Hospitals are increasingly willing to accommodate a work-life balance for coders. Customers are doing that with IT, too, allowing them to work from home two or three days a week. How can you provide with them their usual applications? Our vThere product is a practical, elegant, and cost-effective solution.

Proximity-based security and biometrics always seemed ideal for healthcare. Are they, and how well are they selling?

We have extensive implementations of proximity and biometrics, primarily in the US. Less so in Canada and in the UK, which has a different model where NHS has mandated the use of smart cards. The combination of active proximity and biometrics is very powerful. You can achieve touchless logon. You walk up to a workstation, your identity is provided to an active proximity device, and you are then authenticated by fingerprint. With Vergence, our flagship product, we can not only log you on, but automatically launch your applications based on your role, and then single sign you onto those applications. The first thing you need to do is select a patient – we can’t read minds yet. [laughs] It’s very powerful. Customers are using the technologies separately as well.

We introduced in the latest version of Vergence a variation on the strong authentication theme using passive proximity devices and an Enterprise Grace Period. Most healthcare environments are reasonably physically secure. You can have flexibility in how you apply authentication to users during the day. The user, at the beginning of their grace period, swipes a proximity card, authenticates by password, and does their business. The next time they need to log on, during the grace period defined by the organization, they only need to swipe their smart card. Possession of the smart card within the grace period tells us it’s that user. Those seven or eight character strokes done 50 to 100 per day times add up. It allows organizations to find the right balance between strong authentication and caregiver convenience.

How does expreSSO change the single sign-on equation for healthcare customers and for Sentillion?

The biggest challenge that customers have with anybody’s single sign-on always centers around connecting with the application. Often, a vendor walks into a sales situation, tries to impress on the customer how easy their tools make it, and shows a live demo. They’ve thought through the applications to impress how easy it is. For more complicated applications, or those developed in-house with less optimal programming, what seems so easy in the sales call is much harder.

We’ve taken everything we’ve learned to make it easier to deploy. The next generation of tooling accompanies expreSSO. A wizard allows organizations to create incredibly sophisticated connectors without having to write code. If you think about a process of creating a connector for signing on and off and dealing with other sign-on related events, you’re navigating through a series of screens and either inputting information on behalf of the users or accepting information like a password expiration message. The trick is to satisfy the application by putting in the right information at the right time while responding to the information needed.

We looked at metaphors that would be easy for people to understand. We decided to use editing a movie. Movies have frames, they flow in a sequence, and you can insert special affects. We take a movie metaphor and apply it to the process of having a user generate a connector to a target application. We show screens in the order they want them to appear and define inputs based on visual controls that they point and click through — for a logon, logoff, or password expiration message, each representing the application as it appears at a certain point in time.

Anybody that’s used iMovie or Microsoft’s movie maker would instantly get how the expreSSO wizard makes connectors for applications. My wife recently edited videos of my son, who’s a competitive fencer. Colleges wanted 15 minutes of video. My wife went through hours of movies, having a great time with iMovie creating effects. She’s not a movie director, and had never used iMovie before, but she was still able to use a tool to do very powerful things.r That’s what expreSSO is all about.

The press release mentions cost savings.

Vergence does an awfully lot more than single sign-on – patient selection, auditing, and role-based access. Vergence is really a platform for creating a complete clinical workstation. It’s always been that, but in the early days, it was too broad for people to understand that, so we positioned it as a single sign-on solution. It’s like saying a car is an air conditioner when it’s more than that, like an entertainment system and transportation.

expreSSO does one thing really well and cost effectively – signing on and signing off. Customers increasingly want to focus on that to start and that’s what expreSSO is meant to solve really, really, well. When they’re ready for a more comprehensive solution, they can upgrade to Vergence.

You’ve had some recent organizational changes, I’ve heard. What’s going on at Sentillion?

We made some changes back in June that were mainly centered around refocusing the company on healthcare. We had started a process with vThere in broadening our footprint beyond healthcare in a thoughtful way. We created a business unit inside of Sentillion to look at opportunities outside of healthcare so the bulk of the company could stick with healthcare.

It’s difficult for a $30 million company to do as many things as we were trying to do. We were diversifying into the UK, bringing vThere and expreSSO to market, and trying to establish a foothold for vThere outside of healthcare. It was one vector too many. I decided we needed to reconsider expanding outside of healthcare, or at least let it be opportunistic and let companies find us. We had hired people without the healthcare background because we didn’t need that.

We’ve just come off a terrific Q3, the first full quarter since the change. We signed six new customers and sold a bunch of products to existing customers. It was a good thing to do and we did it thoughtfully for our customers and employees.

What do you like most and least about being a CEO?

I thought I would miss writing code. My expertise is in distributed, object-oriented programming. How’s that for a mouthful? [laughs] I really don’t miss it. I find what I really enjoy is the challenge of doing things that others haven’t done before.

People often ask me about what I do other than work. I have a car that I’ve been building for years. I drag race it. It’s a combination of parts that have never been put together, which means I make a lot of mistakes. I fine tune my problem solving skills and persistence. The thing I love most is to see what others here are able to accomplish that I have nothing to do with. It’s intensely satisfying. It happens following ethical principles that we care about and a corporate style that I care about, but I had nothing to do with it.

What I like least is the set of arcane accounting rules that govern software revenue recognition. It’s a set of principles defined by accounting boards that software companies need to follow to book revenue on an annual or quarterly basis. The rules are complex, but accounting rules don’t have that foundation of reason. It’s kind of like laws that evolved over the years. You can spend an inordinate amount of time interpreting the rules so you do the right thing. I’m not always sure that time is effective for the business or customers, other than you want to do the right thing.

Who do you admire in the industry?

The people that I admire most are in the new generation of CIOs, probably in their late 30s or early 40s, who grew up with information technology instead of having it happen around them. They have business savvy as well. The combination of a comfort with IT and business savvy are impressive.

Mark Hopkins at UPMC is one such person. Steve Hess of Christiana Care, Praveen Chophra at Childrens Healthcare of Atlanta, Allana Cummings of Children’s Omaha, and Marianne James of Children’s Cincinnati. All of these are examples of healthcare CIOs who have a comfort with technology and business acumen. They are putting it to formidable use in their organizations.

I gave a lecture at HIMSS about the healthcare tipping point, referencing Malcolm Gladwell’s book. One of the required ingredients is people like this to make it happen. If healthcare IT becomes truly pervasive in the next five years, it will be because of people like this.

Thanks for sponsoring HIStalk, by the way.

What was most fun about sponsoring your blog is that we all reading it already. It was a Homer Simpson Doh! moment. The best endorsement is that we didn’t just hear about it and decided to sponsor. Just like we use our product, we were already reading your blog.

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The Cerner Health Conference kicked off Sunday at the Kansas City Convention Center. Don Trigg, Cerner’s chief marketing officer, offered to connect me with some attendees for a report. (I should note that, despite my occasional criticisms of Cerner, Don has always been a straight shooter, has invited me to Cerner events, and offered to connect me with sources there, all in a casual, non-official way, which I appreciate).

My guests for this live update were Helen Thompson, CIO of Heartland Health of St. Joseph, MO; Reid Conant, MD, CMIO of Tri-City Emergency Medical Group of Oceanside, CA; and Stephanie Mills, MD, CMIO and CIO of Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health System of Baton Rouge, LA. I’m sure they were ready to relax after a long day of conference education, so I appreciate their voluntarily taking time to speak with me.

What’s your impression of the conference so far?

Reid: It’s been very productive sessions so far. I gave two talks today and will be on a panel on Wednesday. I sat in on a few sessions and shared ideas with my colleagues. The setup of the CHC is kind of neat – it’s primarily client-driven educational sessions. The overwhelming majority of sessions are either entirely client-presented or have a panel with Cerner people and other clients. It’s sharing of ideas. It was in Orlando for a few years, now it’s back in Kansas City. It’s a very productive way of sharing ideas among clients. We’re using many of the same applications. You can always learn something from someone else who’s using what you are in a different way.

Helen: The networking that we get from this event, as well as the strategic look at what’s next on the agenda, makes this an extremely valuable conference.

Stephanie: It’s been very interesting to watch healthcare IT over the past several years. I’ve seen us as clinicians become more engaged, more involved, and more committed to developing solutions for quality and patient safety challenges. It’s a group of colleagues with the same experiences, tools and challenges. It’s important to get together in a safe environment and collaborate. It’s amazing what comes out. It breaks down a lot of the barriers.

How would you compare the value you get from attending Cerner’s conference to other conferences like HIMSS?

Helen: We’re just 45 minutes north of Kansas City, so the location factors in. We have an opportunity to do much more focused sharing and learning from one another. HIMSS has such a broad range that it makes it difficult to do this level of collaboration.

Stephanie: It’s practical, with stories from other organizations. Very practically oriented. HIMSS tends to be more theoretical, which is also good. You need both sides of the coin. In the trenches, to know what is or isn’t working.

Reid: Being in Kansas City, there’s been an even larger presence of Cerner associates. That’s done a few things. It’s gotten them more involved and given them a view of what clinical medicine is. I heard from a few of them that that is encouraging to them as they’re working on code. For us, it allows us to give them direct feedback. That’s very important and they seem to listen. I’ve been on an ED solution advisory group for years and they take direct feedback on specific issues. Today in one of my talks, I spoke about using scribes with PowerNote. Cerner has electronic, template-based charting. To augment productivity, we use undergraduate students to assist the physician in creating that document. That electronic record gives them the tool. After this talk, an engineer came up and said, “We liked what you did with that column. It fits with our code.” They want to put it in the product. These guys will listen and the next service pack will often have those kinds of suggestions in them. That reception of ideas is valuable.

Stephanie: Team members were here and some of the Cerner documentation team were dealing with some challenges that’s been difficult to diagnose, working over phone and conference calls and sending log files back and forth. We got in the room, got on the system, and had both teams together. To be able to share those experiences is really valuable, to have direct access to a vendor and share that knowledge and experience and frustration – it really gets folks bought in to finding the solution. We build relations with people, not just a voice over the phone.

Reid: It makes them accountable on a personal level.

Helen: It makes us accountable, too, because we share feedback with them. The success of our organization is tied to the success of this application. It’s very much a two-way learning street. They learn so much from us while we’re down here presenting and we learn from them as the dialog is opened.

Have there been any big announcements or revelations so far?

Reid: This morning, Neal Patterson said something that I felt was impressive. Cerner has taken a stand as an organization and said, “We are going to focus on the current code level.” In this day and age of rushing to get the next release out, they said they’ll focus on 2007 code and put all of the innovation into that code level. They’re going to, for the rest of this decade, ride that code level and make it the best they can, as solid as they can, before moving to a major change to the architecture of the code, incorporating Java and so forth. Thankfully, they recognized that ahead of time. I appreciate that.

Stephanie: We’ve had keynote addresses, discussion about health policy, the future of healthcare, how technology can come to the table in a number of ways. Then, lots of sessions in different areas that focus on a combination of presentations from clients in the trenches and living this, and also some sessions from the Cerner team about what’s going on today in problem solving and development.

Helen: The conference is broken down into a series of tracks to select from. Some are application-specific, some are role-specific. There’s quite a broad range.

You mentioned code levels. Millennium’s Achilles heel for years seemed to be response time, with a rumor that the entire application would have to be scrapped and sent off to India for a rewrite. Was that mentioned and are you seeing performance issues?

Reid: When went live 3 1/2 years ago, we felt some of that. We’ve been remote-hosted since go-live. Some places that tried to do it on their own felt that impact. They had more delays then than now. ED is one of the fastest paced environments. Anything short of sub-second response time won’t cut it and I won’t hesitate to call them for a four-second delay. That’s just not an issue any more. We’re using CPOE with meds and every order I enter is through the system. I can enter 20 to 30 orders on a complex patient in 15 seconds, using order sets and other tools. There are lots of clicks. If response time is not immediate, I feel it and they hear about it. What Cerner highlighted today is the Lights On Network, a Web-based application that allows you to drill down to an institutional and user level on response times. They track some huge number of the most common and most important actions. They track each and every one, so you can literally drill down to Dr. Mitchell if he’s complaining and say, “We saw at 2:55 pm you had one delayed action, but other than that, it’s been sub-second.” You can also pull out by department, not just response times, but how they’re using it, like ignoring alerts.

Helen: We’re a client-hosted solution and Lights On Network user for over a year. We’re very pleased with system performance improvements that Cerner continues to develop from data they get from Lights On.

Stephanie: I agree. We’ve been quick to look for a quick fix for our healthcare woes and sometimes fall prey to technology seduction. We want the magic Band-Aid. At the same time, we’re quick to blame when the magic fix doesn’t solve the problem. You can’t do that in a vacuum. When you look at performance, we have a lot of challenges that can be pointed at a particular vendor or application. We’re maturing as an industry in applying best practices like ITIL. For leaders in healthcare IT, it’s important to have a comprehensive perspective and make sure our organization is optimized to provide quality of care and to apply technology. It’s about people and processes and workflow and not just automating a process.

Helen: We need to think back. When we had a paper record and a very ill patient and the chart got larger, it took longer to filter through that information. The more data we collect, it will be a more constant process to keep sub-second response.

Reid: One real strength of Millennium is integration, like accessing old records. If the patient rolls into the ED by ambulance, with a couple of identifiers I can pull up the record from visits three days or three years ago. The ED course is immediately accessible to the nurse in the ICU. For hospitalists, it’s worth it to get out of bed and get online. They can look at orders and tests.

Stephanie: It really does change the way we pratice completely.

Are you glad the conference moved to Kansas City?

Stephanie: It’s helpful for the reasons we mentioned, access to team members and architects and engineers and folks here behind the scenes that we don’t get to build a face-to-face relationship with. Orlando is a very big conference town and its nice to bring it to Kansas City.

Reid: It’s a busy week, too busy to bring the family to Disney World, so we get much more out of having it here.

Are you planning to check out any particular Cerner products?

Stephanie: We’re an integrated Cerner site using a lot of the solutions. We’re going through a reorganization of Information Services. The next step is to optimize what we have, dialing things back, looking at current state, looking at workflow. The next piece that we already own but haven’t implemented is Power Insight, which has clinical and operational dashboarding.

Helen: We’re optimizing the solutions, also looking at the Care Aware product, leveraging the application to move to a digital environment.

Reid: Care Aware is on the horizon. It was demonstrated this morning at the kickoff. In the ICU setting, where they’ve had antiquated paper flowsheets with graphs four by six feet double sided [laughs] someone goes in there with a pencil and traces the latest vitals on that graph. How antiquated is that? But it was one of the most useful tools. If I go to a code, that’s one the first things I look at. Care Aware is a centralized reporting tool and repository for acute care patients. Many of us were salivating at the demonstration. It uses a larger screen, maybe a 20-inch monitor, with an image of the latest chest X-ray, vitals, etc. It’s highly customizable at the user level. It asists you in decision-making, changes in plan. It appears that it will be an invaluable tool.

Stephanie: It will be great. It’s been fun to see this in development. In Louisiana, we have problems with access to care. We can leverage what we have outside of our walls to create a virtual critical care environment that’s more automated. We’ve been saying, “You have to be able to tell the story and have that snapshot in a comprehensive view.” Our Lady of the Lake has created our version using Cerner tools, but it’s pieces and parts and not quite as seamless. To be able to see that pulled together and configurable is certainly where the future is.

Reid: It takes something like the tracking board in the ED, the FirstNet application. The tracking board is highly customizable, data-rich, and drives processs improvement. It’s a very powerful tool. At a glance, you can see exactly what’s happening with each patient, what’s pending and what’s back. It’s a matter of getting as much data in an organized fashion right there in front of the provider.

What would you say has changed most dramatically about Cerner in the last couple of years?

Stephanie: I’ve seen consistent dedication to partnership, to collaboration from Neal Patterson down, a true interest in what’s going on and how Cerner can impact that. I think it’s authentic, it’s genuine. When the Cerner brass comes to visit your hospital, they’re out there and want to know what’s going on. They’re continuing to march the ball forward in that arena. We need all the help we can get in healthcare, to have companies that are truly committed. We’re all in this together. To feel that we’re able to collaborate with our colleagues and vendor partners in a meaningful fashion and with the patient as our primary responsibility – what more can you ask for? We’re continuing to see clinician involvement on the Cerner side. That’s promising. They’re taking a smart approach to technology, applying it where it makes sense, and not just trying to get the latest whiz-bang out.

Reid: An example of that is the organizational decision to take a step back and not advance to the next code immediately. That’s organizational maturity. There’s always the risk of misperception of what that means. I don’t think it’s a negative indicator. It just shows that, when they roll out the next code, that they want it to be a dramatic step up. Where we already are is phenomenal. Look at the curves on the Lights On Network and graph performance over the last year or two. You can see a very steady and fairly steep drop in response times, now to the point where it’s not an issue.

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Hardly an HIStalk posting goes by without an insightful commentary by The PACS Designer. TPD always seems to be up to speed on various emerging technologies, particularly in the PACS world. I was curious to learn what made him tick and was able to have a chat with him recently. Thank, TPD, for sharing your story.

Inga:  How did you select the name The PACS Designer?

TPD:  Since I have been working in the medical field for years and designed a PACS system in the mid-90s with some great partners, I thought, why not use the name as a blogger? I am also trying to promote PACs. Shahid Shah encouraged me to blog. I am an electronics engineer and wasn’t really working in the PACS area but found an opportunity. I got to like what I was doing and some good things happened out of it.

When did you first begin reading and posting on HIStalk?

I first started about two years ago, when Shahid Shah from Shahid’s Perspectives and creator of HITsphere told me about it. I decided to get involved with blogging. I love teaching people. In my prior job, I taught courses in PACS and other medical technologies and even did SAP software teaching.

What was it about HIStalk that interested you?

I thought the style was good, because sometimes you see blogs where the posts are very infrequent. But HIStalk had the right formula to get people to respond to the posts in the Web 2.0 sense. It promotes 2.0 through interaction. Bloggers are becoming an important part of society, as everybody knows.

What about your background has made you an expert in HIT in general and PACS specifically?

I worked with PACS behind the scenes in design. Before that, I was a purchasing manager and I always knew the latest technology. The combination of purchase evaluation decisions and designing helped me, development-wise.

I love technology. It is a small point, but in 1958 my mother bought me a transistor radio that came from Japan, made by Matshushita, now better known as Panasonic. I got so fascinated with the transistor radio that I decided to go into an electronics engineering program. I’ve been an electronics buff ever since. It is really becoming a digitally connected world and that is where healthcare needs to be.

So, what really got me into PACs goes back to the 1980s, when hospitals were using telephone technology with PACs and it was a very slow teleradiology. In the late 1980s, a company my employer partnered with discontinued their product line, so it killed our product line. I was looking for ideas for the next version of PACs and eventually hooked up with a company to design the next generation of radiology PACs.

What did you do after helping to design the radiology PACs systems?

I looked at how we could help cardiology. I designed a cardiology PACS that has had good success and is used all over the world. I am proud of both things, the radiology and cardiology products, but I am proud that the cardiology images in the cardiology PACS I designed can be viewed all over the world with the PACS I designed.

What do you do professionally today?

Today I am an independent healthcare software developer, working with major universities and vendors on the next generation of software.

PACS software?

Not just for PACS, but Web-enabled software solutions that are available by accessing a Web browser. No software is loaded on your PC. It’s downloaded to you just like YouTube is. Healthcare is going to see a lot more of that technique in the next 10 years.

So you are hired by the different universities to develop applications? 

Yes, to do integration of DICOM, HL7, and Java technologies to create Web-based solutions for healthcare.

Do you find your current job rewarding? Fulfilling?

I love delighting my customers and really like innovation and like to pursue it with excellent partners that will make customers happy with the end result. I will be starting a major project with a Top 10 university next month. 2007 is turning out to be a transition year for technology that is going to excite end users.

I am also a member of the ASTM International. I’m a member of the E31 Health Informatics Committee that developed the Continuity of Care Record. The E31 Committee that created the CCR used the Massachusetts Patient Care Record that had been used for many years as the basis for the CCR. I am still on the committee and another health informatics committee called Privilege Management Infrastructure to design enhanced security for HIPAA so users only see information that they’re entitled to see.

HIPAA is great, but there is a lot of structure out there that needs improvement, security-wise. The ASTM PMI standard will be coming out within the next year or so.

Do you actually meet with your fellow ASTM members?

We work remotely, but I get all my information sent to me over the Internet. I approve or disapprove information online. It is very interactive, but it is all done remotely. They do meet in person, but I’m very busy and don’t have the time and funds to travel all over the place.

I believe I have noticed that you have posted on other blogs.

I randomly contribute to others.  Do you want to know some of the other blogs I read and post on?

Sure!

The Healthcare IT Guy, Shahid Shah. He got me started. LabSoft News. Dr. Friedman is very good at presenting concepts and I like his highlighting techniques. Dalai’s PACS Blog. He is a radiologist who is a very good blogger. Candid CIO. Will Weider lets us know what’s happening in the real world of healthcare IT, which I enjoy reading, and then I post comments on his blog to educate his readers. Scott Shreeve, MD. I also like Scott’s blog and we’ve seen his HIStalk interview and the numerous posts about him. Christina’s Considerations. Christina is not as well known yet, but she covers RHIOs, a controversial subject today. HealthBlog from Dr. Bill Crounse at Microsoft. He tries to let us know what Microsoft is focusing on next, like Azyxxi.

HIStalk is the best one, right? [laughs]

Of course! Actually, HIStalk is more consistent about their format. There is a lot of interaction with readers. There is Inga, Tim, and other posters, I was so happy when you joined. It made it better.

Thanks. Well, there are some amazing posters. Next question, how is the PACS world going to change over the next few years? What companies will survive and what will the hot technology be?

PACS is becoming a vital modality as far as hospitals are concerned. PACS takes away the cost of X-ray films, which is a very expensive thing. And PACS is expanding to include a mini-EMR through HL7 interfacing techniques and open software solutions.

Everything is going digital. The patients are becoming more involved. Here is a new term – Digitally Connected Patients (DCP). The patients from home will be able to be wirelessly monitored by the hospital. That will be the next big wave over the next 10 years. Patients who live alone with health problems would definitely want to be connected. We’ll actually see that in less than five years. We already have the ability to send heart rate, blood pressure, and other vitals information from remote locations, such as ambulances in route to emergency departments, and also remote digital storage for redundancy.

The infrastructure of companies will change a lot. With EMR companies, they will be bought up or go out of business because everything is going to be Web-enabled. If you are not Web-enabled, you won’t survive. The EMR and PHR will be a partnership involving the patient, hospital, and doctors all submitting information into the combined record. It will be Web-based and a lot of the EMR companies will need to change their business plans to go Web-based, or go out of business, or merge with larger companies.

EMR/PHR will be viewed similar to having an online bank account. You can call up your account any time as long as you have an ID and password. If you can do it in banking, why not do it in medical?

I didn’t mention this earlier, but XML, Extensible Markup Language, will become a big part of how we capture information. Any time you enter information via a Web browser, you can capture it in XML and store it in an EMR or PHR. Currently I can’t talk much more about this because I am in the middle of a patent application. I have developed a new technique for this.

2007 is becoming a year of major transition because a lot of things are happening and it is exciting for the healthcare field.

You have been in this business a long time. Any plans to retire soon?

I love the healthcare field so much that I plan to do software development as long as I can, no matter how old I am. I am not inclined to retire in the immediate future. I love being independent. I have a great group of partners ready to work with me. Being free and independent lets me innovate the way I want to innovate.

Thank you for interviewing me. Hopefully HIStalk readers will enjoy some of my comments and I hope readers will benefit from them in the coming years.

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I ran across Eric Fishman, MD a few months back when I stumbled onto his EHR Scope, a compendium of information about physician system and speech recognition. Ambulatory systems continue to be very hot in the marketplace and it was interesting to find a practicing physician who was putting so much time and expertise into that market.

Since then, Eric has decided to put his full time and attention into his business, which also includes a free service to help physicians choose an EMR/EHR and a package of products and services related to speech recognition for physicians (based around Dragon NaturallySpeaking). Note: I’ll mention as a disclaimer that Eric’s company recently decided to sponsor HIStalk, although our plans for the interview had already been made by then.

Thanks to Eric for bringing me up to speed on the complex world of physician practice systems. Big changes are happening.

Give me some background on yourself, the company, and how you got interested in physician automation.

I’m an orthopedic surgeon. About 14 years ago, one of my secretaries came to my office and said, “I know you like computers. I just took my son to a pediatrician and he was talking to a computer.” He was using a voice recognition product from a company called Kurzweil, which had been started by Ray Kurzweil.

I decided to buy it. Ours was a three-physician office at the time. The $26,000 cost was hard to swallow, so I opened a company to sell voice recognition software 13 years ago. And so the rest is history, although I didn’t want to say that because it sounds overly grandiose. [laughs]

I always refuse to use the term EHR since vendors started using that name in talking about their old EMR products without changing anything. Am I being too much of a stickler?

Yes. I have a treadmill in my garage with a wireless mouse and keyboard and I do a lot of Internet surfing. I don’t call it by the time, but rather by the mile. When I surf, I can do five miles.

John Naisbitt is the author of Future Trends. He made the rational conclusion that what is important to the present and what will be important in the future can be measured by how often items come up in newspapers. I compared “electronic medical record” and “electronic health record” to see how often they showed up in Google. I wrote in an article that the term “electronic medical record” would have become less prevalent when the lines met. Right now, “electronic medical record” is 46 million in change in Google hits and “electronic health record” is 71 million. Three years ago, it was exactly the opposite.

There are subtle distinctions. An EMR is used by a physician in the office to take care of patients. An EHR is more connected and takes care of the community. Connectivity is the distinguisher.

The manufacturer calling it so doesn’t make it so. The terms are very frequently interchanged. I changed the name of my company from EMR Consultant to EHR Consultant in recognition of that change, although you’ll see Word changing EHR to HER. [laughs] In EHR Scope, we talk about how Microsoft Word versions can be corrected to stop doing that.

Notwithstanding all the above, I frequently use the terms interchangeably.

What’s holding back widespread adoption of practice automation?

It’s a few basic issues. Physicians are the ones who pay for it, both with cash and, more importantly, blood, sweat, and tears from the angst of changing how the office functions. Third parties are the ones that benefit, like government and patients. That disequilibrium is disconcerting to many physicians.

I’m a strong proponent of using voice recognition. It substantially minimizes the inconvenience of electronic recordkeeping. It allows physicians to alter the way they interact with patients to a lesser extent.

Despite the significant amount of time and cost, essentially every physician who has been involved with a successful implementation says they would never go back to a paper office, myself included.

I saw recently that a physician insurer is offering a discount for EMR users. Is that common and will that benefit be attractive to fence-sitters?

I believe it’s common. It’s probably not a sufficient amount of money to pay for the software, but it could be meaningful. I was pushing that idea in 1994 with insurance companies to use Kurzweil and structured reporting systems. Physicians who prove they can provide greater quality of care will not only have greater gross revenue due to pay-for-performance, but will also be offered more meaningful malpractice insurance discounts.

Can a one or two physician practice implement a good EMR with reasonable cost and effort?

You used the term EMR either intentionally or not, so I’ll speak to an EMR specifically. Yes. But, you can’t implement a state-of-the-art, easily interconnected EHR with all the bells and whistles and billing capabilities for $5,000. However, if you want to take a substantial step in the right direction and automate reports, absolutely. In fact, a number of those systems are CCHIT-certified, surprisingly.

Speaking of CCHIT, is it accomplishing what it was intended to accomplish?

I’m not positive that I know what it was supposed to do. I feel badly about specialty-specific programs that were not offered the opportunity to be CCHIT-certified. If you wrote a state-of-the-art, phenomenal program for OB-GYN or ophthalmology, you won’t be certified because you don’t have the features they require. Certainly that will change.

I’ve heard scuttlebutt about the $28,000 certification fee and the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to bring products up to CCHIT specs and whether that has caused a material increase in the cost of software. It probably does weed out some of the mom and pop operations.

I spent a substantial about of time and money developing what I called an EMR that was more of a documentation product. I stopped developing it about three years ago, so I can feel the pain of someone who spent years to develop software that helps people accomplish what they need to in their specialty, but because of CCHIT certification, may be put out of business. Over time, under-funded companies will go out of business.

If its purpose was to give comfort to physicians buying software or to make it easier, I’m not sure it accomplished that. I’m not seeing it. One of the bits of data I maintain from people going to EHR Consultant and telling us what they’re looking for is whether they want a product that is CCHIT-certified. Maybe 20% of our clients say they won’t look at non-CCHIT certified programs. That means that 80% will. Many say it’s of no consequence to them. Smaller offices seem to care less and larger offices care more, but that’s a subtle trend.

You offer a free EMR evaluation service. How does that work and are other companies offering something similar?

I went to HIMSS 3½ years ago and rapidly realized that most mortal human beings would be incapable of learning about the wide variety of programs in order to support them, which is what is consultants do. I decided to do an evaluation. I devised a vendor questionnaire of 600 questions and then asked doctors 200 to 300 questions.

If you look up electronic medical records on Google, a surprisingly large number of responses are from companies that will gladly help you find the proper EMR. My experience is that many of them ask name, address, phone number, number of docs, when purchasing, and not much else. They’ll say, “Here are the top five products.”

Our methodology is that there are dozens of qualified products and not all are appropriate for an individual office. There are a number of cars, Mercedes and BMW, all of which have different styles in the marketplace.

By matching the 200 to 300 questions the physician has answered against the 660 the manufacturer has answered, we can make a qualified match of the appropriate technology. It’s a matter of judgment, but we give large positive grading for EMRs designed specifically for one specialty for somebody of that specialty. In that way, we’re best able to give a good number of very appropriate software program recommendations to each individual physician.

Is speech recognition software underrated in its ability to help physicians save time?

Absolutely. I’ve been doing it and selling it for 13 years. You’re not supposed to take returns of open software, but if someone returned it, I took it back. In 1994 to 1995, I had a 50% return rate. Nobody asks me to take it back any more. You get 99% accuracy. You can speak like a New Yorker. It’s like transcription with no fees.

The sweet spot is a rich EHR. I can click through the physician exam, click through the review of systems and family history, and social history. I dictate the history – how the accident happened, what restaurant they were at when they started choking. The specific factors that make each individual’s history unique are important. Speak those first two paragraphs. Minimize the transcription cost and let the EHR do what it’s supposed to do, which is get good data capture.

I have some confidential information as a distributor. It used to be a meaningful event when a medical group would buy five or 10 Dragon licenses. With increasing frequency, we’re quoting and selling 100- and 500-license opportunities. If somebody bought 10 licenses, then 50, by the time they’re buying 500, they know it works.

What’s the penetration of speech recognition in practices?

Tens of thousands of physicians use Dragon NaturallySpeaking. That’s probably still single-digit percentages, but it’s increasingly rapidly. I have no visibility into the market of companies not selling Dragon NaturallySpeaking. They’re clearly the market leader, but I don’t know the percentages of the others.

We’re a distributor, so we sell to 100 Nuance-certified solutions providers. At the present time, I’m doing an ambitious project, which is finding out from each reseller which EMR packages they’ve installed Dragon with. I’m putting together a series of Google Maps. I can point them to a page on the Web that will have a map point for each qualified, certified Dragon reseller that has experience with their particular EMR program.

I just sent an Excel worksheet to 160 resellers with 362 EMRs listed down the left hand side and a dozen different qualifications across the top: have they used it, have they developed macros, do they help install it, etc. We’ll tabulate that onto Web pages to display that data.

What do you think about AcerMed’s situation?

As I understand it, there was an intellectual property infringement lawsuit that led to substantial legal fees. That was the immediate cause of the demise of AcerMed, not the fact that the program didn’t work. I’ve spoken to people who liked it and people who didn’t.

Functionality didn’t lead to AcerMed’s demise. I don’t believe that CCHIT is in the business of looking at the financial aspects of companies.

Will that event change how doctors look at software?

If you’re a single doctor spending $10,000 or $15,000 on software, I don’t think you need to pull out all the stops. Larger installations spending hundreds of thousands should get financial information and do a Dun and Bradstreet or Hoover’s check.

What changes would you predict in the physician office system market over the next 3-5 years?

There will come a time where a specialist is no longer getting referrals from their general MD because that doctor has an interoperable software program with the specialist across town. When that happens, you’ll see rapid adoption because they’ll need to stay competitive.

You’ll see greater use of non-MDs putting medical information into the history, either the patient or less highly paid people to enter the data, whether a physician assistant or nurse practitioner or medical assistant. I think that’s an inappropriate use of an MD’s time. They should be spending their time diagnosing people. It can be a substantial change of physician time to document an encounter and I think it will be attacked in different waysE

The EMR industry seems to be polarizing, with legacy, expensive vendors on one end and modern, inexpensive products on the other. How will that shake out?

That’s absolutely an accurate depiction. I am somewhat surprised, and I’m not politician, but hospitals are permitted to pay 85% of software costs that are compatible with hospital legacy systems. I was expecting to see a sea of change where legacy systems would run over these new companies. I haven’t seen the new companies being quashed like I expected.

What does that mean?

New companies that are selling 10, 20, 50 million dollars of software a year in to medium and increasingly larger practices have a very bright and rosy future. As I think should be self-evident, I do analysis for physicians for free, but I have some referral agreements with a very few vendors. I’ve been doing this for 3½ years and I used to get an intermittent check from these companies for sales to a one -or two-physician practice. Now I’m seeing small companies selling to 10-, 20-, or 100-physician practices.

Are they taking away business from the legacy vendors or selling to first-time customers?

In 2010, they’ll be taking their business away. I don’t think that the current sales being made in physician offices for a few thousand dollars would have been made for $75,000 if the smaller companies weren’t there. Those sales would not have been made.

If I were a large public company with product installed in hospitals, I’d rapidly provide an inexpensive offering to the local physicians to stay competitive.

So you like the Misys-iMedica deal, where Misys will resell the small vendor’s product instead of developing their own so they can get to market faster?

From Misys’s perspective, it was the proper thing to do. I have the pleasure of having thousands of offices telling me what they like or don’t like. Misys will likely benefit from having a new, up and coming, recently written, capable software program. They’re a billion-dollar company with long marketing reach and having a product that physicians are happy to use will be a welcome opportunity for them.

Will the smaller vendors be bought by the larger ones who worry about the competition?

I don’t think big companies will buy them because they’re a threat. They will buy them because they provide an opportunity.

I live in the same county that Dr. Notes was headquartered in. I was appointed by the bankruptcy court to sell the company’s source code to its .NET version. They had a Windows-based program and were allegedly 90 days away from shipping a .NET program. They went into bankruptcy and I’m helping sell the 400,000 lines of code.

I sent 360 e-mails at 9:00. By 9:01, I started getting responses. People from the up-and-coming companies wanted to buy the code. They wanted a billing module, which Dr. Notes didn’t have, or wanted their customers, or wanted their code.

Then, I noticed that the people calling me were saying things like, “Well, Dr. Fishman, since you seem to be in the business of buying companies, can you find someone to buy mine?” That happened dozens of times. Others said it wasn’t exactly what they wanted, but wanted to hire me to find them an ASP CCHIT product within 30 days.

There will be a lot of churning of these 1, 2, and 5 million dollar companies in the near future. That’s a particular interest of mine. In next EHR Scope, we have half a dozen pages about recent transactions written by an investment banking firm.

Was it a surprise that McKesson bought Practice Partner?

Andy Ury did a great job having a company of McKesson’s stature helping them do the marketing. I don’t have any insights into McKesson. The phenomenon of having billion-dollar companies snapping up EMR companies with eight-figure revenue will continue.

Do doctors like the idea of personal health records?

I don’t think it’s happening in doctors’ offices. Companies are interested.

I’m potentially involved with a PHR company and a clinical practice guidelines company interested in getting more entrenched into the personal health records. I think it’s something that will be very important and I’m surprised it hasn’t taken off more quickly. I stopped practicing 3 1/2 months ago and had zero patients express interest in interacting with me in that way. It’s not happening yet.

What about Google Health’s rumored PHR project?

It amazes me what Google knows. I think if they set their mind to it, they will do it. I understand they had some change in staffing at that level. I’m not qualified to offer an opinion as to whether they will or won’t do it, but I spend money advertising on Google and thinking about their algorithms and how much they know about people.

They certainly have the computing power to enter this space and pharmaceutical companies spend tens of billions of dollars in advertising their products. Google would certainly be willing to accept some of that.

A magazine just released its 100 Most Powerful healthcare people. If someone asked you, “Who are the most powerful and influential people when it comes to physician use of software,” who would you say?

The CEOs of those dozen up-and-coming EMR companies that I refuse to name. [laughs] They are involved in determining what the software that they’re producing will look like. They are profitable companies with millions or tens of millions of dollars of free cash flows without the shackles of having it burdened to something from their past.

They will decide whether to encourage or discourage interaction with patients, like personal health records or smart cards or thumb drives. They have the resources and knowledge and motivation to be in the doctors’ examining rooms around the country showing how healthcare will be delivered. They have the wherewithal to acquire technology, like clinical practice guideline technology, and integrate it in their software.

I know a little about nanotechnology. A friend asked me where to buy a portfolio of nanotechnology stocks, but they’re mostly privately held. If I could invest in a portfolio of smaller EMR companies, I’d do it in a heartbeat. You could reasonably choose a handful that will be successful, though I can’t pick them all, but the small ambulatory EMR industry will do very well financially.

My specialty is the smaller office, but two weeks ago, I got call from hospital CIO with 525 physicians on staff. He mentioned two legacy EMR systems they were interested in. I mentioned a couple of smaller systems and there appears to be some interest. Some of these up-and-coming players may play a role in hospitals

What about retail medicine?

I don’t want to grow old and decrepit in this country because healthcare won’t be as good as it is today. Retail healthcare is here to stay. Healthcare should be touching and care, but it’s clear that retail clinics aren’t going away any time soon. I don’t get my care at one.

Will retailers develop their own software or buy from those sexy companies?

I have made successful introductions between retail pilots and one or more of those dozen hot, sexy companies I won’t name. I don’t mean to be evasive, but I have relationship with those companies.

If an HIStalk reader is interested in ambulatory EMRs, what information do you provide?

EHR Scope is a free publication, over 150 pages, and the next issue is in October. It has a meaningful amount of information on over 200 ambulatory products. It comes out in a PDF and if somebody’s a cardiologist, they can search cardiology and find systems appropriate for them. They can quickly get their Web sites and contact information. I think it’s a very valuable resource. The electronic version is free.

Any final thoughts?

I love what I’m doing.

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A couple of readers suggested I talk to Danny Sands. He’s an assistant clinical professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and senior medical informatics director for Cisco Systems. If anything interesting happens in the industry, he will hear about it while wearing one of those two significant hats. I have to figure out what whole bicoastal, two paychecks thing since he seems to be having a ball.

Dr. Sands earned his medical degree from Ohio State and a master’s from Harvard. He did his medical residency at Boston City Hospital and an informatics fellowship at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He’s also on AMIA’s board and is a fellow in both the American College of Physicians and the American College of Medical Informatics.

Thanks to Danny for spending time with me.

Describe your job at Cisco.

My position is as the senior medical informatics director. I work in a part of the organization called the Internet Business Solutions Group, or IBSG.

Cisco has always been organized around engineering and sales. There was no verticalization of the organization at all. Five or six years ago, the company started to understand how it could do verticals better and created IBSG. We have maybe six to eight verticals and healthcare is one of the most mature.

IBSG can be thought of as the global, no-fee consulting organization of Cisco. We’re vertical-specific. We do consulting in a limited way with important customers around the world. In healthcare, our job is to help Cisco understand healthcare in a very deep way and to let our customers know we understand healthcare.

Given our size, our consulting engagements aren’t like Accenture’s. They’re just six to eight months. We work with CxOs to understand business and clinical problems and develop solutions, often employing technology. We think deeply about the industry, always thinking about what’s happening in healthcare and healthcare IT and how we can effect change in healthcare through our writings and working with Congress and ministries of health around the world. We’re transforming health to practice in the most clinically safe and high quality and cost-effective manner possible.

Everybody’s talking about Cisco’s recent announcement about its healthcare growth. What’s driving that growth?

Healthcare is an industry in which organizations have under-invested in technology for so many years. Back when computers were just becoming ubiquitous, every industry that viewed itself as information-intensive was investing in infrastructure to put in the fundamental applications. Now, they’re investing 8-10% of revenue and doing very sophisticated things.

Healthcare has not viewed itself as an information-intensive industry, which is quite a shock to those practicing in it. It hasn’t viewed itself that way, except for billing, and hasn’t built up infrastructure and put in fundamental applications and databases to deliver care effectively.

Healthcare is investing 2.5% of revenue and still falling behind. For years, it was even less, under 2%, and there’s a lot of catching up to do. Many organizations are behind the eight ball and it will take awhile to catch up. They’re beginning to understand that this is an information-intensive industry, and for quality metrics, they will need technology.

There’s a huge market in healthcare. What we’re interested in doing isn’t just selling stuff, but helping people do business and clinical work effectively. Cisco started investing several years ago because we saw the technology was underutilized and we could really help the industry.

Does Cisco manage healthcare the same as other vertical markets?

Yes. The IBSG has verticals in retail, public sector, entertainment, financial services … so we have a bunch of these things. In this consulting group, we have 225 peple around the world, so it’s not a huge organization. Intel has more than 200 in just their digital health organization.

My counterparts do similar things to what we do. Some of them do more traditional consulting instead of the thought creation we often do. So, healthcare is pushing into areas that not all the verticals have done yet. We also have a sales force dedicated to healthcare.

I think we go about things differently because we’re offering to be a partner that understands healthcare. In our group, we have expertise across the spectrum: healthcare consulting, nurses, nurse practitioner. People who understand networking, homecare … someone from life sciences, someone in the payer market. We have a breadth of expertise becaue we’re coming at it from so many different sides.

What are the biggest technology challenges in healthcare?

The biggest challenge is the lack of capital to invest. Still today. If we look at organizations, larger healthcare organizations will spend more money and will be more forward-thinking. Intermountain, New York Presbyterian, those centers of excellence. We have these name brand organizations that have clearly spent a lot on IT and have done neat things.

You have others that big who have the margins to invest. You have others that are struggling financially. Hospitals are running near-negative margins. If you’re in a business with no margins, you’re just trying to keep your head above water.

It’s similar in practices. They mirror hospitals in that larger ones have infrastructure and staff and revenue, but in the smaller practices where most care is delivered, no margin, no infrastructure. The biggest problem is appropriate investment in technology.

One barrier is a misalignment of incentives. Who is investing the money and who is benefiting? Clearly, if a hospital invests in technology, they need to see some return on investment. Some may come from reduced cost of handling records. It’s a lot harder for practices to make these justifications. Larger institutions are doing better in being able to step back and look at their issues. We’re focusing on large enterprise users for that reason.

We have a very hands-on business in healthcare. We can’t replace people, but we must keep them in mind all the time. We need to remember that people have a limited capacity to change, so you have to help people apply the technology in their work. Healthcare is hands-on and so is introducing technology into it, so we want it to be done appropriately. There have been too many situations where hospitals have invested money and their projects haven’t been successful, often because they didn’t involve clinical staff from the beginning.

Is “medical grade network” a technology or a marketing approach?

That is a technology. When I talk about setting an appropriate infrastrucrtre, that’s what I’m talking about. It is an architecture for building a network that is resilient and reliable and secure and has survivability, those things we need in a mission-critical environment.

You can’t afford to have a network go down in healthcare. It must be hardened and tough. This is like plumbing or running water and electricity and needs to be that reliable. We say the fourth utility is a converged network. It brings together all the low-voltage circuits into a very reliable, robust network that’s expandable and can be managed. You need to be able to grow a network as you add more functionality and nodes. Sometimes that means adding to it, sometimes shutting parts down without bringing down the whole network.

You were at Beth Israel in 2002 when network failures caused what might be the biggest patient-impacting systems outage in history. Is it ironic that you’re working for Cisco?

It’s a great point. I tell that story often. Fortunately, I had no responsibility for the network management there. [laughs] The situation was that nobody was minding the infrastructure.

A network is a living, breathing entity. One needs to not only create an architecture, but maintain it to ensure it performs well. At Beth Israel, we weren’t investing in maintaining the infrastructure. Not only was it no longer architected correctly, it wasn’t managed over time, so it was vulnerable.

That sort of travesty could not occur with what we’re architecting now. I’m sure that will never happen again at Beth Israel. [laughs]

Wireless networking in hospitals is suddenly prevalent. Have caregivers and clinical software vendors embraced the concept that computer users aren’t chained to desks any more?

That’s one of the big waves that’s coming. We no longer have to think in terms of desktops, but can think of devices. Whether tablet or desktop or biomedical engineering equipment, everything becomes a node on the network. That’s the way that more progressive IT groups are thinking about things. That doesn’t mean there’s no role for the desktop PC, but there are roles for other wireless devices.

We need to think more about untethering hospital personnel from walls so they can interact with their hospital information system while sitting at a patient’s bedside. It could be a wireless phone so patients can communicate with them. Because it’s an IP phone, it’s part of the network and can share any information from the network. We can ID a patient, get a test result.

It shouldn’t matter what kind of device it is, whether it’s a wireless phone or tablet computer or PDA or desktop. All of these can interoperate on the medical grade network. The last mobility trend in hospital was COWs. Those are fine, but there are a lot of places you can’t wheel one in. It’s nice to have something that’s truly portable. The interoperability becomes important.

As we introduce new varieties of devices, whether phone or PDA or tablet, we’ll need to reinvent some of these applications, creating applications that are customized to that form factor. We have already seen some of this, like PatientKeeper and MercuryMD. We will have to see more hospital information systems that run on a tablet computer, for example.

Cisco is building unified communications. It doesn’t matter what device you’re using. You can communicate with all. Open a directory and communicate with anyone in whatever manner they want to be communicated with. Dr. Smith may say they’d like to be text messaged first. Everybody can have their own preferences. That’s a more effective way to start communication with people, by not annoying them by contacting them in a way they don’t like.

They can seamlessly move from a text sesson to a phone system or a collaborative session on the Web where we’re sharing a screen. Unified communications will change healthcare. So much of what we do in healthcare is communicating, yet our technologies are primitive.

Give me the Cisco perspective of the Cisco-sponsored HIMSS Community for Connected Health.

We wanted to form a community of people thinking about the connected health concept. That’s almost the form of a user group, but it’s a community. People can share ideas with each other and with us. I don’t know how this worked with HIMSS, but we’re really just trying to reach out and think about community.

As an aside, Cisco has embraced the idea of Web 2.0 and groupware and collaboration. We’re trying to experiment with that in many different ways, like wikis and a new directory that’s almost like Facebook. We think the future is collaboration. When I watch my teenaged daughters on the computer, they’re collaborating all the time. They don’t use traditional means, even e-mail. They skip that and go right to Facebook and MySpace. We’re trying to do these things in Cisco.

Cisco tries to do the things that it gets other people to do. If we think it’s a coming trend, we try in on ourselves first. Another example is Second Life. We have a community there, where we’re trying to push the envelope. We don’t think we can continue to grow the way we’re growing unless we’re collaborative.

John Chambers says he wants us to reduce our travel 20% over the next year using the technologies we sell. TelePresence is a totally game-changing technology. It is totally unlike videocoferencing. It does what videoconferencing promised to do. You really hear people in high definition, see people and even see them sweating, and feel like you met the people on the other side of the table. It’s almost entirely transparent to the users. We’re not really aware it’s there. The problem with videoconferencing is that you’re always aware it’s there, with jerky motion and synchronization problems.

We’re using TelePresence internally. The first customer was Cisco. We put it in all our major offices all over the world and we’re encouraged to use it so we don’t have to fly anywhere. I’ve been able to avert flights all over the country by using TelePresence.

Are today’s electronic medical records systems too tied to the paradigm that physicians have to enter their own data to give and receive value from those systems?

There are many potential sources of information. Some are machines, some are people, and some are people and machine at other institutions. We have to figure out what is the most efficient way to get information from these places and present ot to the clinicians.

There is a large amount of information that we acquire in the course of interaction with patients. Much of it has to be entered by us, one way or another. There’s a large body that clinicians are responsible for entering that should come directly from the source. It would be preposterous to look at a printout of a lab test and type that into a computer. Likewise, why is it that we interview a patient and enter their information into the clinical information system? There’s a practical barrier if the patient is lying down with a gunshot wound, but in many situations, we can take advantage of the patient. The patient is the most important yet underutilized source of information in healthcare.

We’re often very keyboard-centric. There are lots of ways I can interact with a computer – a stylus on a tablet; dictating and having it trabscribed by computer or human; and typing, which can be templated or free-texted.

There’s another aspect to your question, which is that our information systems tend to be very doctor-focused, or let’s say clinician-focused. Just as we don’t ask our patients to enter information into a computer to help their health, we often don’t share the information in the computer with our patients. Patients need to play a bigger role in healthcare.

We don’t think of them this way, but patients are our customers. That leads to problems where we don’t share information and don’t make it easy for patients to make an appointment or get a referral or get test results. We should do these if we’re truly patient-focused. When patients have access to information, it can be more satisfying to both doctor and health.

The physician brings a complementary skill set. You’re an expert in you. If we have a common database and bring our expertise together, we can make tremendous things happen and improve the way we deliver care. There’s some preliminary evidence that patients engaged in this way have better health outcomes.

What about other information types, such as video and voice?

We need to be storing more rich multimedia information about our patients. The first wave was the PACS movement and that’s terrific. It’s amazing as a doctor to be able to see the image instead of just reading the text report. We need more of that. PACS was developed separately from the HIS.

We need a convergence of text and multimedia and it shouldn’t just be radiology images. Cardiology images, photos of a wound, video of a patient walking, pathology images, voice files -– all should be part of the record.

That necessitates data acquisition that we don’t have right now. We’re lucky in a clinic if there’s a digital camera around. We need to think in terms of multimedia acquisition devices. There are digital ophthalmoscopes and otoscopes. We need to acquire that information, capture it, and store it in the record. That requires a new set of input devices and interfaces to the hospital system so that multimedia objects can be stored and retrieved as part of the record, not as a separate system.

A digital image is not only far more effective at delivering information, you can manipulate it. It also requires efficient storage and an efficient network to convey those large objects. Those last two areas are what Cisco is interested in. We do storage area networks to store information more cost effectively. We’ve also pushed network convergence, where video can travel across the network. We’re partnering with some of the big HIT vendors to develop new functionality.

You were an advocate of electronic patient-physician communication. What’s the status of those projects?

A lot of doctors haven’t yet embraced the technology for the same reasons – time, liability, and reimbursement.

An exciting trend is the number of practices and institutions offering patient portal services that offer patient-provider communication. Kaiser rolled out Epic MyChart to millions of patients. That’s huge. It’s far and away the largest deployment of that kind in the world.

We’re seeing adoption among larger practices and more enlightented healthcare institutions in deploying patient portals that provide secure communications. I choose to look at it as a positive trend, even though figures haven’t taken off like I would have thought. The volume of messages a doctor gets from patients is very modest, even when you’re not charging a fee. At Beth Israel, for every 100 patients registered on the system, they’ll generate less than one e-mail a day to the doctor.

What IP-connected devices will have the most impact on healthcare delivery in the next 5-10 years?

Home care. I think there is no question that we need to be reaching into patients’ homes. That’s where patients are sick with chronic conditions. I think we’lll go beyond that and catch patients earlier in their disease or when they’re pre-symptomatic. It will be commonplace to interface with your set-top box or glucometer.

Home care, along with nursing homes, is quite technologically backward. It’s a real shame because these are our most vulberable and sickest people. These will be new markets where we can make a huge impact.

Location-based services, like tracking of things in a hospital,will be successful. Once you’ve deployed a robust wireless network, you have two ancillary benefits. One is the ability to do tracking, or location-based services. I can put a tag on my wheelchairs and infusion devices and code carts and track them throughout the institution through the wireless access points. It’s exciting that you can find out where the equipment is that you need.

You can also create a second wireless network for guest use. When you’re going to visit someone, you can connect your laptop to a public network that’s separate from the secure internal network. Most hospitals aren’t set up this way. They have one wireless network that’s for staff. Offering this for patients, especially for those in units like cancer units where they’re in for a long time, is a great service.

Any final thoughts?

This is a very exciting time to be in healthcare IT. Because of the robustness of the technologies and the ability to implement them effectively, it’s a tremendous time and I’m excited to be part of the industry and Cisco.

I really salute all the people working in this space. We need to remember that we need all kinds of players to effectively implement these systems. It’s not something an IT department alone can do. Vendors, C-level executivess, providers …  it’s an important collaboration pushing IT out to physicians, nurses, and patients. If we do this intelligently, we can make a huge difference. That’s why I’m in this business.

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