Weekender 4/19/19

Weekly News Recap

• IBM halts sales of Watson for Drug Discovery due to low demand
• Healthcare data integration vendor Redox raises $33 million
• The New York Times profiles the Butterfly IQ device that transforms a smartphone into an ultrasound scanner
• Provider management, credentialing, and payer enrollment technology vendor Symplr acquires competitor IntelliSoft
• InterSystems adds a provider directory to the newly renamed HealthShare Unified Care Record
• Vermont HIE struggles with opt-in vs. opt-out participation
• The number of India-based doctors who support their US counterparts as remote scribes is rapidly increasing
• China’s WeDoctor provides government-required health checks to villages as a way to collect patient data to train their AI-powered systems
• Babylon Health ramps up staffing and spending

Best Reader Comments

I think it remains to be seen if physicians and other healthcare leaders are ready to move from anecdotes to numbers, the concept “numbers do not lie.” I have already commented upon the conflation of quantitation, plus emotions, and also enjoyed your reference to one of our (many) limitations. Ultimately, it is my personal opinion modern society is currently seeking too many answers, placing too much hope, in so-called AI/ML. I also believe “magic” AI/ML solutions may produce serious answers, some decade. However, in (current) reality, there is simply limited data granularity access for research, in the context of an increasing number of mixed/blurred physical & electronic “threats” in major news headlines. I think some of these headlines are hype, a form of Security Theater. (Andrew M. Harrison)

We are lousy at the foundational steps, among which is rigor in the process by which we document what we do in a computer-processable way so that we can then extract from large-enough populations accurate data about the best approach to taking care of people. And right now, the EHR is such a PIA that for the foreseeable future, garbage-in is winning. As a tiny example, the average physician is far more concerned (and needs to be concerned, for practical reasons) with getting a term on the chart that gets him paid than getting a term on the chart that reflects what he wanted to say. (James E. Thompson)

Interesting thought experiment: take Epic or Cerner with their current workforce and give them five years and a billion dollars. Starting from scratch, no existing code or documentation, they could either build a new system or try to replicate their current system from their own memory.  Could they build a competing system? My answer would be very unlikely. (AC)

Watercooler Talk Tidbits

Ms. H in Georgia was happy to have her DonorsChoose teacher grant request funded by HIStalk readers, which has allowed her elementary school students to experiment with programmable robots. She says, “Where is Botley? Are we going to play with Botley? These are the questions I get at least twice a week since I introduced Botley to my students three weeks ago! Kindergartners and first graders are so excited to learn and they love how cute Botley is. They are slowly learning not only what Botley can do, but how to code so that Botley can do what they tell him to do. For students who come from economically disadvantaged areas, our students aren’t exposed to all of the things that their more advantaged peers are. Botley is able to bring a much-needed to skill to our students. What I love about Botley is that students are learning that their input can alter what Botley does. This is much like real life, in that individual actions or input can have an impact on what someone else does! Thank you again for believing in our students enough to fund this wonderful project.”

This is my kind of investigative journalism. Business Insider ponders why healthcare startups such as Oscar Health, Flatiron Health, and One Medical use similar fonts in their marketing materials. The first two companies use Tiempos (pictured above), created in 2010 for a Spanish newspaper to be easily readable on newsprint. A company designer says the font is “warm and human, without being overly cute or friendly.” One Medical’s rebrand included retooling the colors closer to British racing green and moving to a customized font called GT Super, which also has print newspaper roots. The company liked that font because sans serif fonts like Helvetica can feel robotic and impersonal. Half of me wants to declare this to be total BS and a job protection act for otherwise marginally employable marketing people, but I have to admit that I subconsciously form feelings about companies based on stuff like this, no different than reacting to a person’s appearance or manner of speaking.

Louisville-based Freedom Medical Labs, which got caught sending employees in unmarked vans to poor neighborhoods where they offered $20 to collect DNA samples along with the person’s health information, shuts down. The company blames negative publicity, but insists that its activities were legal, voluntary, and covered by the insurance of those who were testing. Several companies offer cancer genetic testing when doctors attest that it is medical necessary, and I’m guessing it’s not hard to recruit doctors if you are willing and able to pay them richly. One national company (Medvantage Consulting, above) markets the tests to people with insurance and a family cancer history and pays 15% of the $6,000 to $8,000 to anyone who brings in billable candidates.

This is, unfortunately, medicine in America. DEA agents escort a handcuffed cardiologist Andrew Rudin, MD from the hospital that hired him just three months ago, he being one of the dozens of doctors that were arrested last week for opioid distribution. The charges involve his previous job in Tennessee, where he supervised (or didn’t, according to the DEA) a nurse practitioner who called himself “Rock Doc” in hoping to land a reality TV gig. He paid Rudin to supervise his practice (cosmetics, weight loss, platelet-rich plasma, and anti-aging), from which Rock Doc traded opioid prescriptions for cash and sex. The cardiologist is highly credentialed and accomplished, so it would be interesting to study the psychology that led him from developing ablation procedures to being hauled away in handcuffs.

Vancouver-based opioid specialist Mark Tyndall, MD, ScD – who sets up safe spaces where addicts can shoot up under supervision – is working with a tech company to develop a vending machine that can dispense prescribed opioids with recipients verified by a palm vein scan. He says the US response to the drug epidemic has been to ramp up arrests and border security, while Canada’s goal is harm reduction in keeping users alive instead of trying shut off their access to drugs.

Lime, one of the startups (were all the good ideas taken?) that is trying to push trendy rentable electronic scooters that seem to have high potential for disrupting both vehicular and pedestrian traffic until they are abandoned dysfunctional or broken, will add sensors that will slow the scooter down if the driver seems drunk. I don’t really get the appeal or understand why cities allow the services to operate, but if you care, Lime charges $1 to unlock a scooter via its app and then $0.15 per minute to ride while looking like an insufferable hipster who has freshly graduated from a skateboard and can’t bear to actually put one foot in front of another while staring into a phone.

A 25-year-old woman being discharged from University of New Mexico Hospital steals an ambulance on her way out, crashes it into a pole, and then hops into the gurney in the back to pretend that she is a patient. She explained to the arresting officers that she was just looking for heroin, then claimed that the crash injured her, whereupon she once again became a UNM patient.

In Case You Missed It

• News 4/19/19
• EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 4/18/19
• Readers Write: Uniting the Full Continuum of Care for the Individual: Why Digital Technologies Must Embrace Holistic Patient Engagement
• Health System IT Professionals vs. Would-Be Disruptors: Unfairly Dismissive or Appropriately Skeptical of Outsiders?
• News 4/17/19
• Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 4/15/19
• Monday Morning Update 4/15/19

Get Involved

• Join my Rolodex to provide occasional news reaction or ideas
• Contribute regularly as a provider CIO, IT director, or informatics nurse (anonymous or not)
• Be interviewed (providers)
• Deliver an educational webinar (providers)
• Sponsor
• Report a news item or rumor (anonymous or not)
• Sign up for email updates
• Connect on LinkedIn
• Contact Mr. H

Morning Headlines 4/19/19

IBM cutting Watson for Drug Discovery

IBM halts sales of Watson for Drug Discovery due to low demand.

Elizabeth Holmes’ Failed Theranos Was Just Granted 5 New Patents In 2019

CB Insights reports failed blood-testing company Theranos was awarded five new patents in March and April, all filed between 2015 and 2016.

Northwell Health opens Emergency Telepsychiatry Hub, reducing ER wait times

Northwell Health (NY) opens an Emergency Telepsychiatry Hub to serve EDs in New York City, Long Island, and Westchester County.

News 4/19/19

Top News

IBM halts sales of Watson for Drug Discovery due to low demand.

The company says it will intensify its focus on clinical development. 

The Watson for Drug Discovery web page is still active, including testimonials from Barrow Neurological Institute.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Healthcare data integration vendor Redox raises $33 million in a Series C funding round. It has raised $50 million since launching five years ago.

EMV Capital acquires San Francisco-based Wanda, a clinical decision support company focused on preventing adverse events.

After merging last year, healthcare consulting firms HealthInsight and Qualis Health rebrand to Comagine Health. HealthInsight CEO Marc Bennett has assumed leadership of the new company.

The Theranos saga just won’t go away. CB Insights reports the company was awarded five new patents in March and April, all filed between 2015 and 2016. Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, meanwhile, is preparing for her day in court. Charged with several counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, she has filed a motion in federal court to to force prosecutors to hand over thousands of communication records between the FDA, CMS, and Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou, whose reporting helped bring the company’s fraudulent activities to light. A trial date has not been set, given the 17 million documents federal prosecutors must sift through to build their case.

People

Tom Niehaus (TJN Advisory) rejoins CTG as EVP of North American operations.

White River Health System (AR) promotes Jeff Reifsteck to AVP/CIO.

EarlySense names Matt Johnson (Sowell & Co.) as CEO.

Robert Fosmire (Kareo) joins Greenway Health as SVP of customer success.

Sales

• Sentara Healthcare (VA) selects PACS software from Mach7 Technologies.
• Prisma Health (SC) will implement patient access and provider directory technology from Kyruus.

Announcements and Implementations

After more than a year of training led by a core team of 20, Carris Health (MN) will go live on Epic at six facilities next month.

Best Buy begins offering TytoCare’s at-home telemedicine kit online and at select stores in Minnesota. The TytoHome kit retails for $300 plus the cost of a virtual visit with partners that include American Well, LiveHealth Online, and Sanford Health.

In New York, Northwell Health opens an Emergency Telepsychiatry Hub to serve EDs in New York City, Long Island, and Westchester County. The hub’s 35-member team expects to conduct 5,000 consultations this year.

A new KLAS report on enterprise resource planning systems  (HR, finance, and supply chain) finds that cloud-based systems are attractive and organizations are willing to consider them even if it means replacing their incumbent vendor. Workday leads the field despite gaps in supply chain functionality. Infor and Oracle offer newer, lower-rated products; earn client criticism for not taking an active lead during implementation; and have a significant percentage of customers who say they wouldn’t buy those products again. 

Government and Politics

In England, the NHS develops the National Events Management Service, a digital personal health record for children that parents may use in place of the traditional paper version they are expected to bring with them to all pediatric appointments. The new service also features real-time messaging capabilities for birth notifications, address changes, and change-of-practice notifications.

An ONC data dive into the ways in which hospitals used their EHR data between 2015 and 2017 finds:

• A hospital’s use of EHR data varied significantly by vendor; Epic, Meditech, and Cerner users had the highest rates of data utilization to inform clinical practice
• Small, rural, critical access, state and local government, and non-teaching hospitals had the lowest rates of EHR data utilization
• Hospitals most frequently use EHR data to support quality improvement efforts, monitor patient safety, and analyze organizational performance
• Utilization of EHR data slowed significantly (in some cases stalling completely) between 2016 and 2017

Privacy and Security

The communications director at Northern Light’s Acadia Hospital in Maine mistakenly emails a spreadsheet containing the names of 300 patients with Suboxone prescriptions and those of their providers to a reporter at the Bangor Daily News. The spreadsheet was an attachment buried in a chain of emails between the hospital employee and the reporter, who was developing a story on the the availability of Suboxone – a drug given to patients battling opioid addiction – in the Bangor region. The hospital’s privacy lapse has, ironically, made the paper’s pages.

Other

Columbia University (NY) reminds medical staff of the importance of its upcoming transition to Epic, which will encompass converting aging systems to the new or upgraded Epic software across Columbia, Weill Cornell Medicine, and NewYork-Presbyterian facilities. “We knew staying the course was not an option,” said Jack Cioffi, MD, president of ColumbiaDoctors and an executive sponsor of the EpicTogether project. “The pain points we feel now with CROWN and SCM will fade with Epic. That’s not to say we won’t experience new ones these next nine months, but we will be able to better address and fix them. We will have a more efficient, comprehensive system to support us in delivering the best care possible.” Rolling go-lives will take place between 2020 and 2022.

Sponsor Updates

• Elsevier’s new Transition to Practice platform helps retain newly licensed nurses and build their confidence and satisfaction.
• EClinicalWorks and Imat Solutions will exhibit at the NAACOS Spring 2019 Conference April 24-26 in Baltimore.
• Imprivata and Kyruus will exhibit at NAHAM April 23-26 in Orlando.
• Solutions Review interviews InterSystems Director of Product Management Jeff Fried.
• Ivenix publishes a new white paper, “Exploring Real-World Performance of IV Pumps.”
• Vocera receives an Authority to Operate from the DoD, extending the potential purchase and deployment of its Vocera Badge to facilities in the Air Force and Navy.
• Phynd Technologies migrates its Provider 360° platform to AWS, has partnered with the American Board of Medical Specialties, and joined the Drupal Association.

Blog Posts

• HEDIS: Keeping Snowbirds’ Data from Flying Away (EClinicalWorks)
• 5 Things to Look for When Evaluating the Security of Your Health IT Vendors (Ensocare)
• CMS Boosts Reimbursement for Addressing Social Determinants: Does Your Organization Have the Patient Data it Needs? (FormFast)
• The Tension Between HITRUST and User Experience in Healthcare IT (The HCI Group)
• How to achieve EHR ROI in a post-go-live world: 6 Qs with HCTec’s CEO Bill Grana (HCTec)
• A Career at Healthgrades Combines Healthcare, Technology and Meaningful Work (Healthgrades)
• Developing an IT Playbook for Mergers, Acquisitions and Affiliations (Huntzinger Management Group)
• NAACOS 2019: Imat Solutions Helps ACOs to Achieve Measured Quality Improvements with Health Data (Imat Solutions)
• An overlooked weapon in your cyber security arsenal: IAM (Imprivata)
• Consultant spotlight: ‘Volunteer addict’ Alicia Baylor supports Puerto Rico in its time of need (Nordic)
• Is Your Healthcare Organization HIPAA Compliant? Check Out Our Guide (Fortified Health Security)
• A 1-2 Punch: How Alarm Surveillance Increases Safety and Reduces Fatigue (Spok)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates. Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 4/18/19

The largest US health insurer, UnitedHealth Group, has added its critique to the Medicare for All proposals currently being debated in Congress. We’re going to hear about this for the next year and a half, at least through the next presidential election, so I’m not surprised they’re putting their two cents in.

Medicare covers approximately 60 million people and UnitedHealth’s products cover nearly 50 million, so they conclude that Medicare for All would cause “wholesale disruption of American healthcare.” I’d like to remind the CEO making the statement that there’s more to the Americas than the US and we should be looking at many nations’ healthcare systems as we try to find a way out of our own mess. UnitedHealth posted revenues of $226.2 billion last year through insurance, physician practices, consulting, and pharmacy benefits operations. Medicare for All, or any universal coverage, plan would likely take a bite out of those revenues.

In the patient care trenches, I have a bird’s-eye view of the issues caused by employer-based health insurance. Patients staying at jobs they hate where they are abused because they are afraid of losing health coverage, particularly for pre-existing conditions? Check. Patients with complex medical conditions staying in abusive relationships because the spouse holds the coverage and they can’t afford it on their own? Check. Patients suddenly losing coverage due to downsizing, and not being able to afford individual plans? Check.

I saw all three of these this week. A discussion of the cost of care was part of the urgent care visit. Members of Congress need to walk a mile or two in their constituents’ shoes before making decisions on this complicated issue. Even the concept of Medicare for All means many different things depending on whose proposal you are looking at.

Mr. H asked recently for comments on “Health System IT Providers vs. Would-Be Disruptors: Unfairly Dismissive or Appropriately Skeptical of Outsiders” and I wanted to throw in my two cents’ worth based on a recent client project. It’s not only the outside disruptors who that make those of us in the IT trenches skeptical. It’s also the other outsiders that our organizations bring in, because either they feel that input from another industry would be useful, or that as one director told me, “You don’t have to know healthcare to manage IT systems in healthcare.”

That’s how I found myself sitting across a conference table from a “lab interface team” who was supposed to be helping create some custom orders management content for a boutique practice. As we were in the Motor City, it seemed that my team was entirely populated by former auto industry programmers and technicians. Confident in their ability to use algorithms to free the physicians from mundane data management, they had designed a flow for laboratory orders and results management and wanted my sign-off.

Unfortunately, they had no idea of how laboratory flags work or any concept that a lab that is technically abnormal might be perfectly fine for a given patient, or that one that is normal range might be bad for a given patient. The idea that results need to be interpreted in context not just based on normal vs. abnormal was a new one to this team, which appeared hastily thrown together by the hospital, which had acquired said boutique practice without really thinking it through.

Did I mention that they also didn’t know their OBR from their OBX from the proverbial hole in the ground? The look in their eyes at having a physician school them on the nuances of being an actual lab interface team was priceless. I left the meeting suggesting that perhaps they should learn something about HL7 capabilities and scheduled a discussion with their director about the team’s ability to actually get this project done on any kind of useful timeline.

I don’t doubt that non-healthcare people can learn and become healthcare people, but you have to at least understand the problem and the business case before you try to create a technology solution. I’ll be earning my money with these folks, for sure.

From Jimmy the Greek: “RE: Hide the women and their uteri….” Jimmy shared a Washington Post article covering health-monitoring app Ovia, which sells intensely personal (although de-identified) data to employers that include the app in company benefits packages. We all know how easy it is to re-identify that data, so it caught my attention. The app collects information on user mood, bodily functions, sexual activity, and ultimately labor and delivery. The article mentions a woman who was using the app in the delivery room to upload data. Were I not a hypothetically swinging single, perpetually 29-year-old clinical informaticist, using an app when I should have been contemplating the perfectness of my baby and his amazing existence would be appalling.

Employers can see aggregated data on health risks, question searches, finances, and return-to-work plans. Depending on the size of the company it might be easy to figure out exactly what employees are documenting. Users are also exposed to targeted advertising for dubious products, including nutritional supplements and special cleaning products. Privacy experts are worried that employers could modify benefits based on projected costs or that discrimination may occur against women seeking pregnancy. Not to mention that some coercion may be involved when companies pay workers to use the app as mentioned in the article.

As someone who previously provided maternity care and delivered over 150 babies, I’m also concerned at the psychological ramifications of this level of tracking in pregnancy. It’s a scary enough time for mothers without having their every move quantified. There is one popular pregnancy guide out there that I actually recommended the mothers under my care should avoid. It included recommendations that shamed mothers who weren’t baking their own whole-grain muffins and said that pregnant women shouldn’t use microwave ovens because of unknown risks to their babies. The so-called “femtech” market is apparently big business, slated to hit $50 billion by 2025.

The Ovia terms of use give the company a “royalty-free, perpetual, and irrevocable license, throughout the universe” to clearly use information for marketing however they see fit. They can also sell the data to third parties and I doubt many of the users actually review the 6,000-word disclosure.

Ovia also claims reductions in premature births and other outcomes, but the data is from an internal return on investment calculator rather than from appropriately constructed peer-reviewed studies. The company makes no secret that it’s delivering content that helps reduce medical costs and encourages women back to the workplace. While researchers are tempted by the availability of large data sets, they’re concerned about the applicability of the data to actual research.

The article mentioned a number of other women’s health apps, including period trackers and fertility trackers. I must admit I was woefully unaware of the size of that market segment. I’d like to see women be better educated about their bodies, but I hate to see some of these apps positioning themselves as something to help “demystify” normal biological processes.

If you had a daughter, would you encourage or discourage her from using apps like these? Would you use them yourself? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Morning Headlines 4/18/19

Acting as the data integrator between hospitals and digital health apps brings Redox $33 million

Health data integration vendor Redox raises $33 million, bringing its total funding to $50 million since launching five years ago.

Theranos’ Holmes seeks records on reporter’s communications with FDA, CMS

Elizabeth Holmes files a motion in federal court to force prosecutors to hand over thousands of communication records between the FDA, CMS, and Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou.

EMV Capital Completes the Acquisition of Wanda INC, a Leading Telehealth Company in Silicon Valley

EMV Capital acquires San Francisco-based Wanda, a clinical decision support company focused on preventing adverse events.

Health Care Industry Leaders, Qualis Health and HealthInsight, Become Comagine Health

After merging last year, healthcare consulting firms HealthInsight and Qualis Health rebrand to Comagine Health.

Readers Write: Uniting the Full Continuum of Care for the Individual: Why Digital Technologies Must Embrace Holistic Patient Engagement

Uniting the Full Continuum of Care for the Individual: Why Digital Technologies Must Embrace Holistic Patient Engagement
By Mary Kay Thalken, RN, MBA

Mary Kay Thalken, RN, MBA is chief clinical officer of Ensocare of Omaha, NE.

More than half of healthcare professionals believe digitization is transforming the healthcare industry. Of adults 55+, 85% believe technology will improve healthcare in the next five years by delivering faster and more accurate diagnoses, curing diseases, and predicting and preventing diseases and conditions before they happen. However, 35% of seniors feel their health plans do not use any technology to improve access, information, or care, and they want more tech-enabled solutions.

Though the first two survey findings from 2017-2018 are encouraging, the third speaks loudly to this need: payer organizations as well as provider organizations must examine what is lagging in their technology offerings to better serve our biggest generation of people spanning the birth years of 1946 to 1964. From politics to fiscal projections, it’s reasonable to predict that Baby Boomers will have an outsized influence on the healthcare technology landscape for years to come.

The projected growth of this population has also caught the eye of Washington. In March, the US Task Force on Research and Development for Technology to Support Aging Adults and the Committee on Technology of the Science & Technology Council released the “Emerging Technologies to Support an Aging Population Report.” It identified six primary functional capabilities as being critical to individuals who wish to maintain their independence as they age and for which technology may have a positive impact:

• Key activities of independent living
• Cognition
• Communication and social connectivity
• Personal mobility
• Transportation
• Access to healthcare

Unquestionably, digitization is penetrating healthcare, including the burgeoning post-acute acute marketplace. In my role, I converse with leaders reshaping the patient’s continuing health recovery, from discharge to home health and hospice centers, skilled nursing facilities, rehab facilities, long-term care hospitals, or home. As a former nurse and provider business executive, it’s an exciting time to work in innovation on behalf of end users and patients who will benefit from enabling technology that unites the full continuum of care.

Why holistic patient engagement matters

Still, national survey results that look at the opinions of the senior population are a serious wake-up call, warning us all that a lot more work must be done – particularly in the critical area of patient engagement.

Granted it seems marginally small that only 35% of seniors think their health plans do not use technology to improve access, information, or care and have a desire for more tech solutions. Now consider this survey result in the context of the aging boomer population and their share of national health expenditures, which is expected to reach $6 trillion in less than 10 years. This powerful moment of clarity challenges the status quo, moving us forward in making tech-enabled patient engagement for adults 55+ a top priority.

Connecting digital technologies to the patient starts with a holistic view of that person’s entire care engagement experience. Subsequently, to unify the patient’s entire care experience through the use of technologies, we must zero in on what’s important to that person in terms of social determinants of health at every touch point. In short, we must create a tech-enabled, personalized experience specific to each patient’s individualized care and other needs, starting from within the hospital to discharge post-acute care facility or home.

The patient’s recovery or chronic care journey doesn’t stop there. Providers can address and integrate comprehensively the needs of patients who are spending more time outside instead of inside the brick-and-mortar walls of the hospital. We can effectively manage those patients — coordinate, personalize, individualize, and enrich their care alias tying all the disparate pieces together — to improve overall their experience, the goal of wellness, and outcomes.

Recommended best practices

On October 2, 2018, 48 health IT leaders from provider and vendor organizations gathered outside of Salt Lake City for one day to collaborate with KLAS Research. Participants developed a framework of key patient engagement initiatives and took part in discussions about best practices either observed or used. The following is those most often cited successful practices focused on the individual that healthcare organizations can use as a planning tool.

Technology

• Create easy-to-use apps
• Create cloud-based software solutions
• Adopt telehealth capabilities

Analytics

• Gather and analyze social determinants of health
• Gather and analyze behavioral habits (travel patterns, transportation)

Convenient Care

• Enable 24/7 access to care team
• Enable communication with care team (text, email, phone, video)
• Enable communication with patient (text, email, phone, video)
• Enable families to communicate with care team (text, email, phone, video)
• Allow patients to choose how they want to communicate

Right Care Setting

• Direct patients to the appropriate care setting (nurse practitioner, urgent care, or primary care physician)
• Let patients go to the care setting at which they will be best served
• Bring the right care to the patient (24-hour nurse line, telehealth)

Personalized Care

• Provide patient education and personalized discharge instructions
• Assign health buddy or care manager to patients as they leave
• Include patients in the process of setting goals and choosing interventions
• Enable physicians and nurses to engage with patient during the encounter
• Incent patients to participate in wellness activities and make healthy lifestyle choices

Provider Organization

• Develop a patient engagement vision and road map
• Adopt effective change management when implementing patient engagement strategies

Our industry is facing a colossal transformation over the next 30 years as value-based healthcare solidifies and Baby Boomers dominate the use of healthcare services. Despite their collective differences and perceptions, multi-generations—including the largest groups, the Boomers, Generation X, Millennials and Generation Z—working together creates the potential for creativity, community, coordination, and optimization of enabling technology solutions to enhance quality of life.

No doubt about it, a seismic shift to management and engagement of individuals is underway. To not prepare begets gaps in care that lead to poor outcomes and tremendous waste and spending.

Health System IT Professionals vs. Would-Be Disruptors: Unfairly Dismissive or Appropriately Skeptical of Outsiders?

I asked provider IT professionals to weigh in on this question, whose genesis was an outsider’s assessment via an HIStalk comment: do we health system IT people automatically dismiss potentially disruptive technologies (such as AI) because we are too entrenched or too well rewarded by the status quo?

The edited responses are below. Thanks to those who offered their excellent insights.

Outsiders have trouble with understanding the speed at which physicians want to move. They are one of few occupations still paid by the piece, not by the hour or a salary. Every second they are waiting for information to populate on a screen, the screen to flip, or the log-in sequence is a lot of money to them. Until you have a database faster than MUMPS, don’t waste my time. For that reason alone, blockchain is a non-starter.

I’ve been involved in minimally transformative ideas and projects that are shot down due to the (over) regulatory environment. A lot of industries are heavily regulated (airlines and nuclear power come to mind), but their regulations are generally around safety. In healthcare, the regulations are around both safety and the prevention of entities over-profiting (Stark). Sometimes these regulations contradict each other and the outsider only understands some of them.

I believe any technology that puts information and decision-making into the hands of the patient has the potential to be disruptive. This will not be a get-rich-quick application, Most people requiring our services are older and even less receptive to change than outsiders would perceive us to be.

They are correct. We actually look to see if incentives are aligned, like everyone else. We rapidly adopted pagers, cell phones, MRIs, and stem cell treatment when we were paid for it or it makes our lives easier. We didn’t rapidly adopt EMRs or other IT solutions when they made our lives harder and cost us money. The issue is not doing something new, it’s doing something reasonable. Make sure incentives are aligned with realistic business models before introducing anything new. One of my favorite quotes: “Incentives matter, whether you think they do or not.”

I think we probably are resistant to AI, but not solely because of incentives. There’s too much vaporware out there and it takes a lot of time to weed through the good and bad, with the good often being no better than the best systems already provide at the added cost of an AI system and/or of nominal value. If they want to blame someone, blame IBM, who taught us that you need to spend a year training your commercial software only to have it continue to provide inaccurate info. To be fair, it is providers that control the data that makes AI training work and our reluctance to share is probably an issue. On the other hand, Google did manage to wrestle millions of records away from the NHS and they still have nothing to show for it.

It’s the pot calling the kettle black. Everyone wants into the healthcare cash cow, but no one wants skin in the game when it comes to actual outcomes, and that includes providers.

Take a look at the technology adoption lifecycle. We’re still in the innovator phase and they’re not yet screaming from the rooftops to get on board. Technology adoption takes 10-20 years, even for consumer products (many of which in recent years had the benefit of being “free”). Why should they be expecting instant results?

We’re dragging our feet on AI when it comes to digital imaging so we don’t tick off providers. We provide a lot of exceptions where it may not work, yet we don’t fire the entire medical community when we have a misdiagnosis rate of 10%.

What disruptors don’t understand is that their solutions are typically unaffordable in the long term for health systems that like to spend more money building buildings than they do to support their existing IT infrastructure. The new shiny object may get some attention and might even get an executive to bite, but at the end of the day, it falls on IT to implement, support, and maintain that disruptive solution over time, all while our budgets shrink due to “cost controls.” The disruptors must demonstrate real-world (not hypothetical) ROI and in reality be at minimum a budget-neutral solution in order for us to take them seriously.

Treating people, while doing no harm, is an art in addition to science. Humans are not machines made to exacting specs that benefit solely from repeatable process. The chance of patient harm or malpractice is real with bleeding edge technology.

Everyone I know on the health IT side is very aware of our limitations and looking for any way we can help out the providers. AI/ML, although promising, so far has limited proven use cases. That, coupled with a very high barrier to entry due to the skills required, means that AI/ML often gets lumped into the “maybe, if we have money left over” part of the budget. Not a lot of healthcare organizations ever get to make it to funding that portion of the budget. Trust me, if you proved your ML model could improve clinical care and/or save lots of money, organizations would adopt it in a heartbeat. If you haven’t proven its value, then why would you expect us to adopt it?

Honestly, it sounds like a comment from someone who runs an ML-centric company and can’t find a partner to provide the training for their model. That’s a risk and investment for the healthcare organization, and typically the vendor gets most of the benefit if it works even though they tapped the provider’s knowledge and training to make the product. If you really want us to do that, show up with a fully-funded project, including our expenses, and we’ll consider it if you give us partial ownership of the successful project. At this stage of the game, that’s the only deal that makes sense.

You can kill people with the wrong tech, bad tech, or badly-implemented tech. As a clinician who supported clinical decision support, it is easy to talk it, but harder to prevent the medical misadventures that may happen to said Heath IT Outsider’s child.

Speaking as a provider who works in the vendor space, we prefer to wait and see what works in other industries before taking a risk and sinking big development dollars into expensive new solutions. Exhibit A: cloud computing, which went mainstream with Amazon Web Services in 2006, but only in the last few years have we seen this model take off in our industry with web-hosted EHRs. That’s why we’re always 15 years behind. None of the established players wants to spend $500m to develop a buzzword concept (remember “big data”?) that will fold or go out of fashion next year.

Next time you are sick, open your AI program get a diagnosis, prescription, and any blood tests. There is a place in healthcare for AI, but it is not replacing trained medical professionals

I’m guessing that comment came from a former Elizabeth Holmes devotee. Health IT outsiders have a long history of declaring the US health system stupid, launching a startup, then quietly giving up a year later. If our outsider had any real ideas, they’d have products in the marketplace making money. Optum, Health Catalyst, Arcadia, and many more aren’t waiting around for provider permission. They are innovating, pushing the quality-cost envelope, and growing. I don’t know if AI will truly move the needle positively in healthcare any time soon, but I’d have to hear a great conspiracy theory to believe provider IT people are protecting their EHR vendor from AI, open APIs, or any other technologies that would make the customers happier and their jobs more fulfilling.

As a health system CIO, Individuals who are flabbergasted by the risk-averse nature of the healthcare industry as a whole do not fully understand nor appreciate the current healthcare system business model. It has a customer (patient) market that is shrinking. It is becoming more segmented, with alternative specialized scope limited services. The net revenue opportunity per patient is shrinking as operating costs (especially labor and regulatory related) continue to increase.

Entrepreneurs by their very nature take financial risks if they see an opportunity for a high financial return when no one else does. There is a ton of cash flow within the healthcare industry, but no new opportunities for significant cash infusion The customers (patients) do not have any opportunity to shift their spending from one source to another. The industry players are protecting their revenue stream as best they can. Most healthcare providers and hospitals do not have an entrepreneurial spirit, nor do they have the financial reserves to take on the financial risks.

It is also important to note that the financial industry and venture capitalists do not invest in healthcare providers nor hospitals. The risk is just too high for no foreseeable reward. Thus, it is not surprising at all to me that “health IT outsiders” looking to be disruptors are disappointed when they are not embraced with open arms. I predict that someday there will be disruptors who will change the business model itself with a better SYSTEM of mousetraps rather than just one highly effective mousetrap.

I don’t see provider IT people as being entrenched or particularly well rewarded. Rather, we insiders are pragmatic. Too often we’ve been sucked in by the breathless exuberance of the purveyor of the next big thing that will revolutionize healthcare, only to realize that it’s not nearly what it’s cracked up to be. Or worse, we take the blame for it not turning out to be what it was purported to be.

Technology is evolutionary, not revolutionary. Incremental advances by potentially disruptive technologies – once field tested – make their way into the mainstream. Let’s not forget that a mere 15 years ago, EHRs seemed revolutionary.

Look at FHIR. The bright shiny object du jour which will solve all problems in the delivery of healthcare. Will this technology magically address every issue? Absolutely not. Or will it even address any of the issues better than some long-existing technology? I’m on the fence. Is FHIR really even disruptive? Nope. Interfaces have been around since there was more than one computer. But by being a pragmatist and viewing FHIR as an incremental improvement, I get painted as a curmudgeon.

I think there is an extreme sense of being jaded from a long list of previous failures. People often don’t understand the complexities of healthcare, the countless variations, the messy data, the fickle users mixed with the extreme regulations of privacy and billing. Add all of that to hospital bureaucracy, understaffed IT departments, and low-salaried (and therefore often mediocre) IT staff and you have more sub-optimal systems than you can count.

Healthcare doesn’t operate financially as other industries. I’ve spent the majority of my career in community hospitals and it is difficult for them to sink money into disruptive technologies when you’re payer mix is 40-60% government. We would love to invest in disruptive technologies, but when replacing an EMR originally installed in the mid-90’s causes a financial burden, what’s a girl to do?

What’s the evidence of benefit to (a) patients and their caregivers first; (b) physicians, nurses, and other bedside technical caregivers second; and (c) then everyone else? As a 40+ year emergency physician and 20+ year medical informaticist, let’s see the evidence that AI and other disruptive technologies deal with the chaos of patient variability and sensitivity to initial conditions better than the competent, compassionate physician.

This is healthcare. Ultimately, people’s live are literally on the line. There is no room for alpha or even beta level products in a production environment. If AI can do my job and help save lives, so be it. But that is not now and it is not anytime soon.

The workplace dynamics of provider-based healthcare are different than any other industry. Who is the customer? Is it the patient, doctor, nurse, CFO, payer, government, or someone else? Or all of the above?  Outsiders have not not been able to solve that riddle yet, although things may be changing with consumerism on the rise.

Also, in my long experience as a CIO (25+ years), it is rarely the CIO who calls the shots. Hospital CEOs are notoriously risk averse with a huge herd mentality when it comes to IT. The history of the industry is littered with multiple failures of so-called IT solutions. In addition, CFOs control the purse strings, and if they do not control IT, are out to hamstring it.

I have seen several outside CIOs try to “fix healthcare” and they have all failed to recognize the unique cultural characteristics.

I’m not worried about protecting my paycheck. There are always positions available in my particular medical specialty and my current income isn’t that great anyway. What I am worried about are the costs and potential negative consequences of inadequately designed and tested “disruptive technology.”

Healthcare technology is not like trying a bunch of free or cheap apps on your personal IPhone to see if any generate major or disruptive improvements. Instead, with healthcare technology, there are significant upfront costs (often with no guarantees of benefit or acceptance), significant personnel costs for installation and training, significant changes to workflow, and potential for unintended consequences, including inefficiencies, lost revenue, and actual harm to patients if it doesn’t work correctly. Indeed, I’d be concerned that anyone who jumps on the bandwagon too quickly is impulsive and reckless.

Add to that all of the half-baked snow jobs that we’ve been sold over the years and it’s no wonder that HIT providers (and users) are cautious and skeptical.

I welcome the challenge, but I am more often than not faced with those who do not want to accept that they don’t know the extent of what they DO NOT KNOW about the unique specifications of the industry. If only the industry was established in the status quo. Most who make such proclamations dismiss the history to the why and how we are where we are. Case in point — the Jim Cramer declaration and folks like Chrissy Farr who just pass along without doing the basic journalistic research on Epic. If they came about it with some sort of due diligence, it might be a different story.

Morning Headlines 4/17/19

Activist investor Jeff Smith: There is a ‘huge’ value opportunity in Cerner

Starboard Value CEO Jeff Smith believes Cerner can increase its operating margins by as much as 9% within the next 18 months if it meets unspecified targets.

In African Villages, These Phones Become Ultrasound Scanners

The FDA-approved Butterfly IQ device transforms a smartphone into an ultrasound scanner, a capability that is having a huge impact on pubic health efforts in Africa.

Advocates battle over health record consent change

Politicians struggle with the privacy and legal issues over changing patient participation in the HIE operated by Vermont Information Technology Leaders from opt-in to opt-out, which VITL says is needed because low participation has caused low HIE usage.

Clearlake-Backed symplr Acquires IntelliSoft

Provider management, credentialing, and payer enrollment technology vendor Symplr acquires competitor IntelliSoft.

Ro, a direct-to-consumer online pharmacy, reaches $500M valuation

Direct-to-consumer telemedicine company Ro raises $85 million, prompting VCs to increase its valuation to $500 million.

News 4/17/19

Top News

The New York Times reviews the use of an IPhone-powered whole-body ultrasound scanner in Uganda and other developing nations. The $2,000, US-made device addresses the issue that two-thirds of the world’s population gets no imaging at all due to cost, geography, and machine availability.

The sign that the device is real – it has earned FDA’s marketing clearance. The sign that it works disruptively for public health – one of the company’s backers is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which unerringly funds projects that deliver the biggest bang for the global buck.

It’s a beautifully written and photographed article.

The tap-and-swipe Butterfly IQ device offers 18 presets for images such as cardiac and deep abdomen. It stores data in Butterfly Cloud to offer HIPAA-compliant image sharing with patients and peers.

The inventor is DNA sequencing pioneer and Yale School of Medicine genetics professor Jonathan Rothberg, PhD, who I hereby elevate to the top of my “most interesting people in health IT” list (and that’s a short list).

Reader Comments

From OOB?: “Re: Epic and Cerner. This article says they’ll be out of business within 10 years because their EHR technology is outdated.” That’s just attention-seeking silliness since surely nobody who has any connection to health IT could be that uninformed. I’ll offer just three of the many dozens of counterpoints that come immediately to mind:

• Seeing Epic and Cerner as offering just “EHRs” – which is an awful and misleading term in the first place – is marking yourself as a clueless technology fanboy who has never worked a day in hospital IT. Their systems run every hospital department and service, including non-clinical ones, and then roll the vast amount of information up into a single database for operational management, reporting, patient access, etc. With what, exactly, would they replace all those systems, which are integrated with every kind of clinical device made?
• It would take even a tech giant probably five years and $1 billion to develop a competing system assuming they could recruit the right subject matter experts, and given the maze of governmental, regulatory, financial, and clinical minefields to be navigated, no publicly traded company would devote the resources to get Version 0.1 into testing, much less find buyers among conservative health systems who have little interest in bearing the beta testing pain. Even Microsoft and Google couldn’t give away their crappy consumer-targeted personal health records and ended up shutting them down, so don’t expect them run off and responsibly build a laboratory information system or IV barcode scanning.
• No tech company is working on anything at this scale. They might try to cherry-pick a few seemingly easy targets, but they aren’t hiring armies of people who know how healthcare works to help them design a system that would actually function beyond offering sexy screens. You cannot build healthcare software with 23-year-olds sitting in a Silicon Valley and slinging rad code in between company-provided foosball and beer pong.

From Dignity Defined: “Re: Cerner. Do you you see them cutting back?” All vendors whose sales were goosed by Meaningful Use (note to self – that would be a fun song title) are already cutting back in various ways and will continue to do so. I asked the question publicly when Meaningful Use first came into play of how vendors who geared up for a competitive battle of a fixed duration would gracefully downsize once the feed trough had been licked dry. Nobody could look past the boom years. Hospitals and practices will continue to buy products that provide ROI (why wouldn’t they?) but now that government’s contribution to the equation has been eliminated, software and services will have to pay their own way, which will likely involve lower prices, more tangible short-term benefits, and recurring costs that align with the benefits delivered. Cerner, Epic, and Meditech have won the hospital core IT system wars and the independent ambulatory market seems to be consolidating pretty quickly, so the ripple effects will be seen every aspect of health IT, especially consulting. Cerner is particularly vulnerable because it is publicly traded and has underperformed despite winning billions in federal government business, so in the absence of a fiery, singularly-focused co-founder at the helm, it must now redirect its attention to Wall Street type (although it’s been doing that for years, just to a lesser degree). Note that Cerner Millennium and maybe Cerner itself would not exist today if Neal Patterson hadn’t told 1990s investors that it would take a lot of years and money to create a new hospital IT architecture and they would just have to suck it up until it was done.

From Pistolero: “Re: clinical decision support to detect questionably beneficial orders. Why isn’t it more widely used?” I would say:

• Some and maybe most doctors don’t necessarily think minimum-necessary when ordering – they think more along the lines of, it can’t hurt to get more information while we’re drawing blood anyway
• But it can hurt – the descent into the medical misadventure maelstrom often starts with a pointless test whose value must be conformed to normal range by aggressive therapy that is unlikely to improve and may in fact worsen a patient’s outcomes as armies of uncoordinated niche experts ply their trade aggressively
• Doctors are trained around the paradigm of every patient being unique, and given that they see only their own small number of patients, they don’t always see the big health picture in which their patient is one data point in a see of historical information that, along with the N-of-one experience, will determine likely outcomes
• Even questionably beneficial orders are profitable as long as insurers continue paying for them

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I use AP Stylebook standards about 99% of the time when writing HIStalk (big exceptions – I always use an Oxford comma and I use post office state abbreviations, in both cases feeling as though AP is way off base in mandating a less-readable form). You probably didn’t notice that I started writing “99%” this week instead of “99 percent” because they just changed their standard. Today I learned from them that “farther” refers to physical distance, while “further” is an extension of time, so now I can obsess about that. Thank goodness they don’t use “everyday” incorrectly (as “I brush my teeth everyday,” which drives me crazy) or incorrectly capitalize a noun that isn’t used as a title (“I sent my Mom a present,” which is wrong). I admit that I’m sadly out of touch in believing that you show respect to those who listen or read what you have to say by following the grammatical rules of the road as best you can, although I’m offended only by obvious indifference usually encouraged by text messaging and posting Facebook nonsense.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Interoperability platform vendor Bridge Connector raises $10 million, increasing its total to $20 million.

HM Health Solutions, a 3,200-employee insurance-focused IT vendor owned by Pennsylvania-based insurer Highmark, lays off 239 employees. 

London-based Medbelle raises $7 million to create what it calls a “digital hospital” that sounds more like an online marketplace for cosmetic and weight loss surgery practices that also includes a care coordination platform.

Sales

• Jefferson Health chooses Prepared Health as its digital technology partner for connecting its 14 hospitals to post-acute, home care, and social determinants of health providers for coordination of hospital-to-home care transitions.
• Fullerton Health, which owns 500 medical facilities in the Asia Pacific region, hires Health Catalyst to assess its data analytics potential. 

People

Denis Zerr (Catholic Health Initiatives) joins Radiology Partners as CIO.

Change Healthcare promotes Dan Mowery to VP of channel partner and customer marketing.

Announcements and Implementations

PMD adds video chat capability to PMD Secure Messaging application, extending support for telehealth charge codes for interprofessional teleconsults and virtual check-ins.

InterSystems adds HealthShare Provider Directory to the 2019.1 release of HealthShare, providing a single source of truth for provider demographics and relationships. The release also includes a renaming of HealthShare Information Exchange to HealthShare Unified Care Record.

NPR observes that rural areas whose local hospital closes take an economic hit — retirees move out or look elsewhere, heavy industry bails because there’s no ED, and medical practices close because doctors don’t want to drive 30 minutes to see their hospitalized patients.

Meditech announces Expanse Labor and Delivery, which includes status boards, mother-baby recall, flowsheets, and fetal monitoring integration.

A Solutionreach survey of healthcare providers finds that patient relationship software that includes text messaging improves outcomes through reminders, reduces no-shows, and decreases phone time while increasing revenue.

Government and Politics

Vermont politicians struggle with the privacy and legal issues over changing patient participation in the HIE operated by Vermont Information Technology Leaders from opt-in to opt-out, which VITL says is needed because low participation has caused low HIE usage. Only in maple syrup-producing areas (Vermont contributes half the US total) would a politician describe the maturation of a policy “as it sugars off.”

The VA issues a $1.5 million, no-bid contract to Minburn Technology Group for HPE Synergy server modules and frames that will be used to convert 131 instances of VistA data to Cerner.

Privacy and Security

India-based IT outsourcing giant Wipro admits that its systems have been breached in a phishing campaign, with hackers using the company’s own systems to attack its customers. Wipro, which sells cybersecurity services, has hired another firm to investigate. Wipro has 170,000 employees and annual revenue of $8 billion.

Facebook actively planned to provide user data to companies willing to buy it or to advertise with Facebook while denying the data to companies that it saw as competitive, all while putting on a public face of protecting user data, an NBC News investigative report finds. Reporters found few examples where Facebook executives expressed any interest in user privacy except as a PR strategy or in profitably selling data access to app vendors.

Other

The DC business paper confirms Dudevorce’s reader rumor that I ran Monday – Inova Health System will stop offering its MediMap genetic testing for medication response after FDA warns it that the test is being marketing illegally. Inova says it was told it by someone unstated that didn’t need FDA’s approval, but FDA made it clear that patients were potentially being put at risk because the unproven tests could lead to bad medical decisions. 

Clinicians at Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan are trialing a trauma digital documentation system from T6 Health Systems, which the company says can integrate with Epic, Cerner, Meditech, and Allscripts. USAF trauma surgeon Lt. Col.Valerie Sams, MD  of the 455th Expeditionary Medical Group (on the right above) is leading the trial.

Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital changes its billing policy to eliminate balance billing and to set an income-adjusted maximum on patient payments, courtesy of some fine investigative reporting by Sarah Kliff at Vox. Let’s give her the credit instead of the hospital – until the expose ran, they were perfectly happy picking the pockets of patients by intentionally remaining out of network with EVERY private insurer so they could tap ED patients – many of whom didn’t have a choice because it’s San Francisco’s only a trauma center – with high bills that were quickly sent to collectors. One might reasonably expect that hospital heads should roll for creating and enforcing this policy in the first place, but that won’t happen. The hospital recently toyed with the idea of ditching the Zuckerberg part of its name (bought with a $75 million donation) over Facebook privacy shame, but at this point they’ve soiled their own name worse than Facebook.

Internist and health polity researcher Dhruv Khullar, MD, MPP writes a brilliant Stat editorial titled “Healthcare needs less #innovation,” making these points:

• The US healthcare system can’t even provide basic care safely and consistently, performing worse than almost all peer nations.
• As others have suggested, we need more “chief imitation officers” who bring home best practices from elsewhere rather than chief innovation officers.
• We have “a dissemination and implementation problem” in failing to consistently use medical developments for an average of 17 years after they have been proven.
• It’s nice to be in a swanky single hospital room hooked up to monitoring and Alexa-powered nurse call systems, but even nicer to know you won’t die of a catheter infection because someone failed to follow a checklist or use antiseptics improperly.
• Today’s culture favors using the latest shiny technical object as a solution instead of addressing problems the best way.
• Today’s tech startups follow the Theranos model of making grand claims while studiously avoiding publishing peer-reviewed studies.

A randomized clinical trial finds no evidence that workplace wellness programs work, as a large US company’s employees who participated said they they exercised more and watched their weight, but data analysis found no measurable improvement in their health, their healthcare expenditures, or their employment outcomes in the following 18 months.

In England, NHS Director of Digital Development Sam Shah says that hot technologies from other industries such as AI, virtual reality, and quantum computing should be placed on healthcare’s back burner in favor of building the less-exciting but vital underpinnings that can give consumers easier access, incorporate technology into care delivery, and to integrate data across IT systems and hospitals.

An India-based paper says that the number of India-based doctors serving as scribes for US hospitals is growing quickly, noting that US-based, $6 billion IKS Health employs 450 doctors in Mumbai and Hyderabad to support customers such as Massachusetts General Hospital and plans to increase doctor headcount to more than 1,000 this year. One doctor says it’s a good deal for young doctors who not only earn money, but prepare to advance their careers by learning medical best practices and documenting care in sophisticated EHRs.

InstaMed publishes its ninth annual report on healthcare payment trends, noting:

• 90% of providers still bill and collect using manual, paper-based processes
• 77% of providers say they rarely get payments within the first month of billing
• 91% of providers get paid by paper check by at least one payer even though almost all of them would rather have money sent by EFT

Sponsor Updates

• Mumms Software adds DrFirst’s e-prescribing and medication management capabilities to its hospice EHR.
• CarePort will exhibit at the NAACOS Spring Conference April 24-26 in Baltimore.
• The Texas Hospital Association features Collective Medical in its latest podcast.
• CoverMyMeds will host a block party instead of a groundbreaking as construction starts on its $240 million headquarters.

Blog Posts

• A simple & automated way to achieve success with Clinical Quality Measures (AdvancedMD)
• What Walmart’s walk-in mental health clinic reveals about how to improve care (Advisory Board)
• Contributing to the European IHE Connectathon, 18 years in a row (Agfa Healthcare)
• 3 Steps to Drive Change Management (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• 13 HIPAA-Compliant SaaS Tools to Increase Productivity (Atlantic.Net)
• Artificial Intelligence: Ready for Primetime in the Contact Center (Avaya)
• With alarms, sometimes less is more (Bernoulli Health)
• Spotlight: Tom Paluso (ROI Healthcare Solutions)
• Hot Topic: How Analytics Can Help During a Measles Outbreak (Dimensional Insight)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates. Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

Morning Headlines 4/16/19

You can do a vision test from home in 34 states and go buy glasses, but not in Indiana. Here’s why.

Visibly (fka Opternative) takes several Indiana state agencies to court to overturn a law that prohibits the use of online vision tests.

Medusind Has Secured Investment From H.I.G. Capital

EHR and practice management vendor Medusind secures an undisclosed amount of financing from H.I.G. Capital.

AMA, Sling Health expand engagement with physicians and entrepreneurs

AMA and student-run biotech incubator Sling Health develop the Clinical Problem Database to give physicians the opportunity to share their experiences with health IT and clinical services, and entrepreneurs the opportunity to develop solutions that improve those experiences.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 4/15/19

I was out with a friend on Saturday, at least until he had to leave to go to a planned downtime event at work. He mentioned that in all the years he had been with his company, it was rare for a downtime or disaster-recovery prep event to go as planned.

Maybe his industry has less tolerance than we do in healthcare, but it got me thinking about the impact of downtime in the patient care environment. The Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association published an article on this recently: “Clinical impact of intraoperative electronic health record downtime on surgical patients.”

Many of us just read the abstracts, and a quick pass yielded some interesting information. Researchers looked at the impact of EHR downtime events lasting more than an hour over a six-year study window. Specifically, they looked at adult patients undergoing surgeries more than 60 minutes in length during an inpatient stay lasting longer than 24 hours. Since it’s hard to do certain kinds of controlled studies on events like this, they matched more than 4,000 patients exposed to one of 176 downtime episodes with 4,000 patients who weren’t similarly exposed.

Looking at the math superficially, this means that the facility was averaging more than 29 downtime episodes a year, each lasting more than an hour. That’s pretty striking – approximately one every 12 days. I’ve never worked in a facility that had that kind of downtime and I can’t imagine the anxiety that clinicians might feel in that situation.

The authors found that although the patients exposed to a downtime event had operating room times and postoperative length of stay that were slightly more than unexposed patients, the 30-day mortality rates weren’t any different. In short, there wasn’t an appreciable link between the length of the downtime event and significant adverse events.

I wondered whether the sheer volume of downtime episodes might have been protective in this facility and decided to dig deeper than the abstract to find out more about the study site. The devil is in the details in this scenario, especially since the data was gathered at the Mayo Clinic. The identified downtimes could have occurred in any of the seven applications considered core clinical systems in support of the operating room. These included the anesthesia information management system, PACS, CPOE, clinical documentation, an integrated clinical viewer, the surgical information recording system, and the surgical coordination system.

Researchers categorized the length of the downtime as well as its impact, whether limited functionality was available or whether it was a complete outage. Scheduled downtime events were excluded as were those less than 60 minutes long. When matching exposed and unexposed patients, the team looked at day of the week as well as time of day to control for any variation in staffing, facilities, and EHR load. The patients were also paired according to surgical specialty, emergency / non-emergent status, and physical status.

The typical downtime was on a weekday between 7 a.m. and noon and was not a complete outage. The most commonly impacted systems were the integrated clinical information viewer, PACS, and CPOE. Surgical subspecialties most commonly impacted included general surgery, orthopedic surgery, and cardiac surgery. The median age of patients was 61 years, with a range of 49 to 71.

Although 30-day mortality wasn’t impacted by downtimes, interoperative duration was about 10% longer for the procedures where there were outages or interruptions. Longer operative times have been linked to greater risks of complications and also can lead to higher costs to the facility. In my experience, this also impacts physician morale, with surgeons who feel their schedules have been delayed becoming irritated and at times agitated. The operating suite is one of the parts of the hospital where the adage about time being money is truly applicable. They also noted a 4% increase in length of stay, which also has cost implications. Both increases underscore the need to have strong plans in place to help staff contend with unplanned downtime.

The authors further conclude that there is a need for future studies looking at scheduled vs. unscheduled downtime and parsing it down to specific systems to determine impacts at a more granular level. They also note the need to look at data from different facilities and healthcare settings. They also identified a limitation in the matching, namely that procedures weren’t matched year by year. Since there are constant changes in surgical technique and significant changes in some procedures, the year could have been a confounder. They also noted that, “In this context, it is not possible to generalize the results of this study at our institution to the potential impact of resilience and specific contingency planning to other hospitals.”

I don’t see other facilities planning to line up to bare their downtime data. Additionally, investigators at other institutions may not have the robust longitudinal downtime data that these authors had access to and they may not have the full cooperation of information technology staffers. I still see hospitals where the culture of fear is alive and well and efforts to study incidents in order to improve processes may still be met with suspicion. There are also those where downtime processes are fairly disorganized and they wouldn’t be suitable candidates for study.

I got a surprise Saturday evening when my friend reappeared unexpectedly from his downtime event. His comment about his company’s events not going as planned was prophetic because they actually canceled the downtime before it even started. It was good for a chuckle, although the theoretical risk of downtime events in the patient care environment is no laughing matter.

I’d be interested to hear what readers think about this EHR downtime study and whether they believe their institutions would be willing to undertake that type of analysis of their own data.

Got downtime? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Morning Headlines 4/15/19

How elderly, sickly farmers are quenching China’s thirst for data

Private healthcare company WeDoctor sends medical vans to rural areas to perform mandatory exams on behalf of the Chinese government, enabling it to collect enormous amounts of patient data that it uses to train its AI-powered diagnostic engine.

Highmark IT solutions company sheds 239 workers

After adding over 1,000 employees in the last five years, Highmark’s HM Health Solutions IT company lays off 239 workers.

Amazon Alexa is luring health developers, but it will be a while before we use it to call a doctor

Despite Amazon Alexa’s newly announced HIPAA compliance, privacy concerns will compel it to take baby steps in developing skills that will enable patients to connect directly with physicians.

British doctor-on-demand app Babylon bulks up US team to seize slice of projected $400bn market

After announcing last fall that it would spend $100 million to ramp up its hiring for its London-based operations, telemedicine company Babylon Health plans to more than double staffing for its US and Canadian operations.

Monday Morning Update 4/15/19

Top News

A private company in China is deploying medical vans to rural areas to perform exams and to test urine and blood, but it’s not a benevolent government project. Private healthcare company WeDoctor (part of technology giant Tencent) offers the service so it can collect enormous amounts of patient data that it uses to train its AI-powered diagnostic engine.

Participation isn’t optional since the government requires villagers to submit to examination. They don’t necessarily know that a private company is involved.

WeDoctor, whose valuation is several billion dollars, operates online hospitals, sells data to drug companies, and offers appointment scheduling and video visits. It is connected to 2,700 hospitals, 220,000 doctors, 15,000 pharmacies, and 27 million active users. The founder saw an opportunity to disrupt a clogged medical system in which patients wait in line for hours just to schedule an appointment or resort to buying timeslots from scalpers.

WeDoctor says it has the healthcare information of 180 million people, and while China has no laws that protect personal information, the company says it uses only de-identified patient data for its AI work.

China is gaining an edge in healthcare AI because government control allows collecting and using patient data in ways that would not be legal in most countries.

Reader Comments

From Unilateral Disarmament: “Re: Cerner. The financial community is expressing amazement that Cerner paid so much attention to Starboard Value given the hedge fund’s low percentage ownership.” Quite a few experts are shocked that Cerner gave the Starboard Value hedge fund two seats on its board when it holds barely more than 1% of CERN shares. As one analyst said, 1% doesn’t give you much power to force change – just sell your shares if you don’t like the company’s operation, adding that two board seats usually comes only with a 5-10% position. Cerner rationalizes by saying it approved the new board members and they are well qualified (which they are), but the company did indeed capitulate quickly. They may regret that later now that they’ve invited a hedge fund into their house. Cerner also made it clear that they intentionally replaced visionary co-founder Neal Patterson (who, when healthy, would have told Starboard where to stick their ideas) with an “operator” in Brent Shafer, which sounds like a message that resonates better with a hedge fund than customers. He is an untested CEO and the whole “operational model” thing he keeps talking about sounds like something dreamed up by accountants rather than leaders, which if you are pandering to Wall Street, is probably the right thing to do. Maybe I’m just bitter in missing the competitive healthcare passion among pre-operator founders Neal, Judy, and Jonathan Bush.

From Dudevorce: “Re: Inova Genomics. FDA warned them about illegally marketing their tests and predicting response to medications. Their MediMap web pages went down shortly afterward. Oncologist Donald “Skip” Trump, MD was hired by Inova to develop a cancer genomics program as the Inova Schar Cancer Institute. He recently disappeared from the Inova websites.” FDA issued a warning letter to Inova Genomics Laboratory on April 4, saying that its MediMap genetic tests for predicting medication response has not earned FDA’s marketing approval, also noting that the tests were being ordered by lab doctors with the results sent directly to patients without involving their own doctor. Links to the MediMap web pages now forward to Inova’s main site (I took the screen grab above from a cached copy). That other Donald Trump no longer appears under Inova’s “find a doctor” page.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most vendor poll respondents have seen business conditions slip in the past couple of years, whether than means reduced sales activity, provider consolidation that leads to bigger but rarer deals, or longer sales cycles.

New poll to your right or here: How much time do you spend each week reading healthcare and health IT news, online or in print, excluding social media but including peer-reviewed journals?

Listening: new from Darlingside, extremely likeable, Boston-based indie folkies who huddle around a single microphone and create amazing harmonies around thoughtful lyrics that sometimes involve a dystopian future of uncertain outcome. Perhaps I was just in the mood for it after spending extra time in bed Sunday morning reading old Rolling Stone interviews with John Lennon. You might picture him as having been bitter, cynical, and slightly wacky with regard to Yoko Ono, but only the last one is true – he was a troubled troubador who lacked confidence about his musicianship and just wanted to play 1950s American rock and roll as a guitarist who was “not technically good;” saw the Beatles through the lens of always being pressured to write songs even as he and Paul McCartney fought for album space and collaborated less and less over time; and worried about where the world was heading. It’s hard to believe how thoughtful, worldly, and searingly honest he came across even in early interviews in his 20s. You can feel his pain in this 1970 interview when he declared that the Beatles were the best rockers in Britain until Brian Epstein put them into matching suits and booked them for 20-minute shows instead of their usual 6-7 hours: “The Beatles music died then, as musicians. That’s why we never improved as musicians. We killed ourselves then to make it and that was the end of it. George and I are more inclined to say that. We always missed the club dates because that’s when we were playing music, and then later on, we became technically efficient recording artists – which was another thing – because we were competent people, and whatever media you put us in, we can produce something worthwhile.”

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The Detroit business paper profiles Detroit Medical Informatics, an EHR consulting firm started in 2015 by Hass Saad, MD. He says the company is generating $4-6 million in annual revenue, has four full-time employees, and works with 300 physician consultants in serving 20 clients.

A Stat editorial compares the proposed information-sharing rules of ONC/HHS to the Protestant Reformation, where information previously accessible only to priests was made available to everyone via the newly invented printing press, but notes that the final rule could be diluted through the influence of the AHA and lobbyists who are not fans of losing Medicare money when caught hoarding patient information out of competitive spite.

It’s interesting when member organizations change their names or membership criteria to spur growth outside their original mission, such as CHIME when it weakened its membership criteria to include non-CIOs. The latest is AONE (American Organization of Nursing Executives), which in realizing that the “executives” part of its name limits its membership count, has thus decided to rename itself American Organization for Nursing Leadership. The doors have been flung open to dues-payers who are “not just defined by your title, but above all by your actions.” Someone should do a study on how much hospitals spend on dues and conference attendance whose value is primarily driven by vanity.

Decisions

• Humboldt General Hospital (NV) will replace Medhost with Cerner in November 2019.
• Kingman Regional Medical Center (AZ) will implement Meditech this spring, replacing Cerner.
• Van Wert Health (OH) switched from Cerner to Epic in June 2018.

These provider-reported updates are supplied by Definitive Healthcare, which offers a free trial of its powerful intelligence on hospitals, physicians, and healthcare providers.

Other

Imprivata explains further the Windows API flaw it commendably discovered in testing its product against new Windows updates (and which Microsoft not-so-commendably broke with a failing API with no acknowledgment to developers who rely on it). I agree that the QE team deserves acknowledgement – I’ve been loaned out to testing teams over the years and it is thankless, unbelievably complex work where 99% of the tests turn up no problems, but some weird example fails only in a particular series of steps that must be replicated and documented for fixing. Those testing teams I worked on also got no love from developers, who were more exasperated than appreciative that their bugs were caught before code was shipped, so it’s nice that Imprivata gives those folks a shout-out:

Imprivata’s core Epic user switch functionality continues to work as intended with or without the Windows API. Instead, the feature that was affected by the API deprecation was a failsafe mechanism and not core functionality. For this to be seen at a customer site, a series of unfortunate events would need to occur, and we would define it as more of an edge case. However, due to the potential it has on our customer’s clinical workflows, we felt it important enough to notify our base as soon as we discovered it. Kudos to our QE team for finding this during our qualifications!

Researchers find that cancer surgery outcomes are poorer in affiliates of top-ranked cancer hospitals that share their name. The authors conclude that hanging the big-brand cancer center’s name on the affiliate makes patients think they will receive care as good as that delivered by the mother ship, but that doesn’t actually happen. To me, the fact that a cancer hospital is a desirable brand is a troubling in itself – having worked for a hospital that affiliated with one of the big names, we talked a lot about sharing protocols and tapping the Big Cancer Center’s expertise, but I’m not sure it really made a positive difference. The health system eventually dumped the affiliation for that of another Big Cancer Hospital, which should have raised all kinds of questions about the before-and-after advantages, the cost to rent the big name, and whether patient outcomes changed as a result.

Sponsor Updates

• Netsmart will exhibit at the NHPCO Leadership and Advocacy Conference April 15-17 in Washington, DC.
• Sansoro Health releases a new podcast, “Tacking Information Blocking with an ONC Expert.”
• Surescripts will exhibit at the 2019 OCHIN Learning Forum April 16-18 in Portland.
• Vocera will exhibit at the 2019 Argentum Senior Living Executive Conference & Expo April 15 in San Antonio.
• Wolters Kluwer Health CEO Diana Nole discusses areas where AI will impact future patient care.

Blog Posts

• Hot Topic: How Analytics Can Help During a Measles Outbreak (Dimensional Insight)
• Five Communication Challenges and Solutions for Healthcare Team Coordination Workflows (LiveProcess)
• Tackling Surprise Medical Bills: The First Step Toward a Comprehensive Patient Financial Experience Strategy (Loyale Healthcare)
• Lead With Your Values During a Merger, Revenue Will Follow (Waystar)
• Clinician Satisfaction: Cornerstones of Care (Netsmart)
• Artificial Intelligence and Magical Thinking (NVoq)
• Three Ways to Improve Supply Chain Processes: Inventory Management, Integration, and Reconciliation (CereCore)
• How can customizable edits improve your denial rate? (Experian Health)
• How to Build Relationships With Patients Through Ongoing Communication & Keep Them Coming Back (PatientBond)
• A Better Patient Financial Journey Relies on These 6 Elements (Patientco)
• Creating a Better Physician Work Environment Can Benefit a Hospital’s Bottom Line (PatientKeeper)
• Practice Velocity’s eReg Admin Portal Brings Customization to Users (Practice Velocity)
• Earn Preferred Provider Status: 6 Tips (PreparedHealth)
• Making sense of the proposed CMS interoperability rule update requiring electronic patient event notifications (Redox)
• How to Avoid Common Project Failures and Join Those Who Get It Right: Part 1 (ROI Healthcare Solutions)
• Excessive Healthcare Costs Burden Hospitals (The SSI Group)
• 5 ways a communication platform helps prevent burnout. (Voalte)
• 4 Ways to Market Your PT Clinic’s Culture (WebPT)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates. Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

Weekender 4/12/19

Weekly News Recap

• Cityblock Health raises $65 million just three months after announcing a Series A round of $21 million
• Partners HealthCare (MA) will equip its clinicians and researchers with the tools necessary to develop their own AI algorithms
• Cerner bows to pressure applied by an activist investor by appointing four new board members as nominated by hedge fund operator Starboard Value
• Microsoft announces that it will shut down its HealthVault personal health records service on November 20, 2019
• Google Cloud opens its healthcare API for beta testing
• Urgent care EHR/PM vendor DocuTAP and urgent care solutions vendor Practice Velocity announce plans to merge

Best Reader Comments

I’m assuming that the single-digit margin you refer to is the margin on your institution’s whole operation, and therefore represents money that is left over after the institution pays for all its costs (salaries, equipment, etc.). Your vendor’s 30% margin is, on the other hand, probably the margin on a single product – and the only costs that are covered before that 30% margin are costs that are directly related to that single product. The 30% margin goes on to pay for things like accounting department, promotional efforts including sales team (without which there would be no business), facility, investment in R&D for new products, and so on. It’s not really an apples-to-apples comparison. (Clustered)

If your primary purpose of going to HIMSS as a vendor is to get quantified leads and build sales pipeline, don’t get a booth if you are a small or mid-sized vendor. (Lazlo Hollyfeld)

I really don’t understand why half of Wall St. is just putting blind faith in Apple. This basically amounts to “healthcare is a big industry, Apple is a company that could take advantage of this industry”. Do any of these analysts realize that Apple devices and the App store are already used in healthcare? And that it’s not making an impact on patient outcomes or the company bottom line? (Elizabeth H. H. Holmes)

My understanding is Cerner is making the Soarian Financial customers migrate over to the Millennium financials. However if they are trying to meld the two together to make a super system in concert with the Millennium Clinical system (so actually three together) does anybody who has been in the EHR industry for the last 3-4 decades think that can really work this time? The EHR minefield is littered with craters of vendors who tried to create a synergy between technologies that were created under separate paradigms and methodologies. (Smartfood99)

If you are trying to attract CIOs from non-profits to your event at Pebble Beach, please don’t. Some younger CIOs may not appreciate that this could end their career. Experienced executives will know that events like this or like the one I have turned down three times – attend the Masters and then play at Augusta – are just not worth being fired for over a compliance issue. We may not like the rules, but if we choose to work in this industry successfully, we need to follow them. (Justa CIO)

Watercooler Talk Tidbits

Readers funded the DonorsChoose teacher grant request of Ms. T in California, who asked for lap desks and floor cushions for her kindergarten class. She reports, “Thank you for your generous donation to give our class materials for flexible seating in the classroom. My kindergarten students were so excited to see the new lap desks and cushions. They love being able to move around the classroom more while they are working. The days are long for kindergarten students, and being able to have a more flexible seating arrangement is helping my students to have more fun while they are working. Sitting in a chair all day long is difficult, and gets boring for many students. The lap desks give my students a chance to sit in a different place in the classroom. They also feel special when they are using the flexible seating.”

Boston Children’s Hospital sues a Saudi prince who volunteered to cover the treatment cost of a two-year-old girl with a rare genetic disorder, then ignored the hospital’s bills for $3.5 million. The hospital says they wouldn’t have admitted the child without his promise of financial backing.

Those who have never worked in a hospital can’t imagine what it’s like on the front lines of human misery and emotion and to have horrible images burned forever into your brain. Example: a Texas man whose grandchild was in the PICU after being severely beaten threatens to kill the hospital’s nurses and the grandchild because employees couldn’t give him information about the child’s condition.

Apparently there’s no limit to our demand for Elizabeth Holmes-related entertainment as the Theranos story will get yet another on-screen treatment, with SNL’s Kate McKinnon playing the disgraced CEO in a Hulu limited series. I’m sensing a missed opportunity here – Holmes is tarnished for life, so why not just do her own documentary, drama, or instructional video? I bet plenty of people would pay for personal coaching in how to run a personality-driven scam.

Tesla is reported to have strong-armed the doctor who runs its on-site factory clinic to keep worker injuries off the books to make its workplace injury record look better and to reduce its self-insurance costs. One of the doctors who could be counted on to give company-friendly diagnoses was about to lose his medical license for sexually assaulting two female patients.

New York’s health department investigates Danielle Roberts, DO for branding women with the initials of Keith Raniere and actress Allison Mack as part of their NXIVM sex-slave cult, of which she was a member. You have to wonder what could have convinced her that this was OK. She’s now hawking memberships in a holistic healing group she formed. Now every time I hear Twitterati yapping about their anemic “personal brand” I’ll think of these images.

In Case You Missed It

• News 4/12/19
• EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 4/11/19
• HIStalk Interviews Luis Castillo, CEO, Ensocare
• Vendor Alternatives to Exhibiting at the HIMSS Conference
• News 4/10/19
• Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 4/8/19
• Monday Morning Update 4/8/19

Get Involved

• Join my Rolodex to provide occasional news reaction or ideas
• Contribute regularly as a provider CIO, IT director, or informatics nurse (anonymous or not)
• Be interviewed (providers)
• Deliver an educational webinar (providers)
• Sponsor
• Report a news item or rumor (anonymous or not)
• Sign up for email updates
• Connect on LinkedIn
• Contact Mr. H

Morning Headlines 4/12/19

Better care, block by block.

Cityblock Health raises $65 million just three months after announcing a Series A round of $21 million.

Teladoc Health to Develop First Pediatric-Specific Consumer Telehealth Platform with Cincinnati Children’s

Teladoc Health will work with Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center to develop telemedicine software for pediatric hospitals.

Physician-researcher awarded federal grant to bridge evidence and practice for clinicians via electronic medical record

AHRQ awards Northwell Health (NY) SVP Thomas McGinn, MD a $1 million grant to further his work on developing a clinical decision support system that integrates seamlessly with EHRs and presents minimal disruption to provider workflows.

LRGH losing $1M a month

Hospital management company LRGHealthcare (NH) blames a a $13.3 million operations loss in 2018 on an expensive Cerner install and millions paid to service outstanding debt.

News 4/12/19

Top News

Cityblock Health raises $65 million just three months after announcing a Series A round of $21 million.

The New York City-based company was spun out of Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs in 2017.

The company offers care coordination services and technology that cater to Medicaid patients in underserved areas.

Reader Comments

From Ralestorm: “Re: Windows APIs. Check out this problem, in which a sign-off Epic user’s session is restored when a different user logs in afterward. I’ve seen this with other systems and vendors as a CMIO over the years.” This is a timely reminder that APIs create dependencies that can screw things up. Imprivata found out from internal testing that a Microsoft Windows 10 API is no longer working, so that when users switch within a XenApp session, the new user will be dropped back into the previous user’s session. The interesting aspects are these:

• Microsoft has never told software developers who use the API that it is no longer working or why it’s broken. It has not been officially deprecated, but reports are widespread that it fails.
• Imprivata caught the problem in its Windows 10 testing, which a lot of vendors might not have done.
• The problem is technical, but the result could be clinical – users could sign on and inadvertently start entering orders on the wrong patient.
• Imprivata has modified its OneSign agent to use a new Windows API and will post a hotfix before qualifying Windows 10 1809, a nifty bit of release coordination.
• Microsoft is touting its new commitment to healthcare, and while this is not a healthcare-specific issue, it might make you wonder whether it really understands the critical nature of its internal APIs and has the communications channel in place to work with vendors who rely on them.
• As quaint as it seems today as everybody pins interoperability hopes on APIs, this is the problem that healthcare software vendors avoided years ago by refusing to use third-party software components published by companies whose conduct and business outcomes were outside of their control. 

From Jiggy Jardust: “Re: Cerner. Will it follow the path of Athenahealth now that an activist investor is embedded?” Maybe. My thoughts:

• Cerner’s share price has been going in the wrong direction for quite some time, even now down considerably since before it signed huge contracts with the DoD and VA. Clearly the company wasn’t impressing investors.
• The hedge fund activist investor Starboard Value wasn’t as venomous as the one involved with Athenahealth’s – which used some truly deplorable smear tactics to get Jonathan Bush fired so that the reputation-faded Jeff Immelt could broker a questionable deal to sell out – and Cerner was unusually pliable about agreeing to making changes even before the hedge fund had a chance to go low. Starboard wasn’t even a significant holder of CERN shares.
• Brent Shafer had already laid out Cerner changes, but whether he will survive in his first CEO job reporting to an activist-heavy company board of nearly all new members is anyone’s guess.
• Whether you like Cerner’s changes may well depend on whether you are an investor or a customer. The recent announcements seem to shift focus to the former, who like the idea of the latter covering the cost of higher company revenue and profit, and Starboard’s track record of making money from activist investing is outstanding. Customers, however, aren’t necessarily going to be big fans of plans to boost profits by cutting costs and increasing revenue.
• Today’s Cerner is vastly different from the one that Neal Patterson was running until he died in mid-2017. The contrast between the publicly traded Cerner and its chief rival in privately held Epic was already sharp, but even more so now that Cerner is seeking fresh horizons and has involved hardcore Wall Street types for whom it’s just another investment to milk hard.

From Clinical Trials Curious: “Re: software to manage clinical trials. A researcher from a large academic medical center is surprised that we don’t have a platform for managing our clinical trials. We’re a medium-sized health system using an EHR, but manage trials outside it. Are people using specific software?” I’ll invite readers from similar organizations to respond. If you work for a clinical trials management software vendor that has community health system customers, I’ll waive my rule and allow you to give your company‘s information in your comment.

From CIO a NO GO: “Re: MD Anderson. Reportedly offered a candidate the CIO role after a long search with many fits and starts. The ‘recruit’ insisted on tenure status and that stopped the process. They are in desperate need of direction after the Epic Rollout Blowup but it doesn’t appear that they will budge or that anyone will jump into the deep end without a life jacket.” Unverified. I haven’t followed that position since Chris Belmont left in August 2017. The organization struggled with post-Epic financial problems (since resolved, apparently), a high-profile failure to make IBM Watson Health do anything useful, and the resignation of its president following investigation of institutional upheaval and a heavy-handed management style. The new president comes from Canada, so I don’t know how much relevant IT background he brings, especially regarding Epic.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Provider IT people — here’s a final chance to explain to outsiders who think we drag our feet on implementing disruptive technologies. I’ll recap soon.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Multi-vertical records retrieval company Ontellus acquires medical records request vendor ChartSwap. Healthcare Growth Partners advised ChartSwap on the transaction. Ontellus President Newton Ross will lead the new ChartSwap division, while Dawn Toups (Verisma Systems) will join the company as VP of provider sales.

Glytec receives another patent allowance for systems and methods related to its Therapy Advisor. When released, the new product will broaden the company’s capabilities beyond insulin optimization to include inhaled, oral, and non-insulin injectable diabetes medications.

People

Patient transfer software company Central Logic names Matt Dinger (Epic) VP of professional services.

Government health IT vendor Ventech Solutions promotes Tonia Bleecher to chief growth officer and hires Timothy Moore (Auburn University) as SVP of commercial health IT and Nathan Anthony (IBM Watson Health) as VP of healthcare enterprise solutions.

Sales

• In Canada, Mackenzie Health will deploy patient engagement software and services co-developed by GetWellNetwork and FlexITy at a new hospital set to open late next year.
• Summit Health Management will deploy population health management technology from Arcadia across its physician practices and New Jersey-based Summit Medical Group.

Announcements and Implementations

Partners HealthCare (MA) will equip its clinicians and researchers with the tools necessary to develop their own AI algorithms through its MGH & BWH Center for Clinical Data Science. The center collaborated with the American College of Radiology and computing company Nvidia to develop a similar set of software and services that will be offered for free to radiologists around the country.

Frances Mahon Deaconess Hospital (MT) goes live on Meditech Expanse with consulting help from Engage.

Teladoc Health will work with Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center to develop telemedicine software for pediatric hospitals. The hospital opened a telehealth command center several years ago.

Government and Politics

AHRQ awards Northwell Health (NY) SVP Thomas G. McGinn, MD a $1 million grant to further his work on developing a clinical decision support system that integrates seamlessly with EHRs and presents minimal disruption to provider workflows.

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks will exhibit at the ACP Internal Medicine Meeting April 11-13 in Philadelphia.
• Ensocare will exhibit at the ACMA 2019 National Conference April 14-17 in Seattle.
• EPSI extends early-bird pricing for its 2019 summit through April 30.
• Modern Healthcare ranks Optimum Healthcare IT as #2 among the largest healthcare IT consulting firms.
• Healthwise will exhibit at ANIA April 11-13 in Las Vegas.
• Mobile Heartbeat releases a new video featuring its clinical communication and collaboration work with Freeman Health System.
• PatientPing transforms care for high-risk, high-utilizing patients across North Carolina through its care coordination platform.
• Vocera will add Julie Iskow (Medidata Solutions) and Bharat Sundaram (Vizient) to its board.
• SyTrue names former HMS Holdings EVP/Chief Strategy Officer Cynthia Nustad to its advisory board.

Blog Posts

• CCM: From Zero to 800 Patients in Just 10 Months (EClinicalWorks)
• Imagining the Clinical Workflow via Smart Speaker (Ensocare)
• Is it Time for Healthcare to Disrupt Itself? (Formativ Health)
• 3 Great Communication Channels for EHR Implementation Teams (The HCI Group)
• A Winning Recipe for New Parenting Content: Collaboration + User Testing (Healthwise)
• Adena Regional Medical Center Makes 250 Best Hospitals List (Huntzinger Management Group)
• Successful Site Visits for Go-Live Support (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Blockchain in healthcare: Reality vs. hype (Hyland)
• 5 ways to boost lab efficiency and improve patient care through Epic’s Beaker LIS reports (Nordic)
• Health Payers: Tips for Enhancing Provider Engagement (Imat Solutions)
• Measuring Your Organization’s Telehealth Maturity (Impact Advisors)
• Laying the Track for National Interoperability (InterSystems)
• Work with a Deeper Meaning – Learning About Dialysis (PMD)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates. Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 4/11/19

The World Health Organization (WHO) has released its draft strategy on global digital health. Their goal is to “improve health for everyone, everywhere by accelerating the adoption of appropriate digital health.” The strategy calls for a united approach to the awareness and understanding of the role of technology while tailoring solutions for each country. The strategy has two major components: the first outlines four strategic objectives while the second creates a four-part framework for action. WHO is accepting public comments through April 30.

I had the chance to meet up for lunch with a former residency colleague who has also gone through the looking glass to health information technology as a career. He was interested to discuss the dissolution of Google’s AI ethics board less than one week after it was formed. The external advisory board, dubbed the Advanced Technology External Advisory Council (ATEAC), was designed to monitor how Google uses artificial intelligence, but the selection of members became problematic. There is so much to keep up with in the tech world that I hadn’t realized Google had been criticized for its role in a Pentagon drone project and since has said it won’t work on AI-related weapons systems. Google plans reconsider the role of an advisory board entirely, stating it “will find different ways of getting outside opinions on these topics.”

Since he works for a major health system, we also had a chance to discuss our thoughts on accountable care organizations and the shift towards value-based care. He wasn’t aware of recent survey data that shows that more than one-third of participants in the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP) are considering leaving the program. Our friends in governmental organizations love renaming programs, but I’m not sure calling it “Pathways to Success” isn’t going to make it any more palatable for organizations that are concerned about their ability to take on higher levels of financial risk. This year’s survey data represented approximately 40 of the 200 ACOs. Those that are more likely to consider leaving the program included hospital-led ACOs, which have tended to perform below their physician-led ACO peers.

We also had some good conversation around whether medicine is still a vocation or whether it’s becoming commoditized like many other industries. He’s no longer in clinical practice, and like many of our peers, attributes the decision to hang up his stethoscope to the moral injury that healthcare providers face on a daily basis. The reality of clinical informatics is that you don’t have to tell anyone that they have cancer and that their insurance won’t pay for treatment, or have to try to figure out how to help patients pay for their medications when they’re barely covering the rent. I think a string of practice and hospital mergers and acquisitions probably also contributed to his lack of zeal for the primary care trenches.

He hasn’t lost his sense of humor, though, and one of the funniest comments of the day was about trying to address governance and adoption issues while his health system’s physicians are spending a great deal of innovative energy finding new ways to try to say no to technology. We discussed what it would look like if people spent that time learning and mastering a system or re-engineering their practices rather than just raging against the machine. The bottom line is that even across the country and with a different physician population, many of us are facing the same issues every day.

Over the last several decades, the healthcare industry has been increasingly concerned about the role of government in healthcare, so I was excited to see an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association on “Building Trust Between the Government and Clinicians.” Co-authored by former CMS Administrator Donald Berwick, it notes that building such trust “requires understanding, empathy, and humility.” It encourages clinicians and policy-makers to walk the proverbial mile in the other’s shoes. The piece calls out several data points that are important – that the US spends nearly double what other similarly-developed nations spend on healthcare without significantly better outcomes or quality.

It goes on to note that some policy makers focus on clinicians who put self-interest above the needs of our society, resulting in the creation of systems to “guard the public from them.” It uses the example of Medicare recovery audit contractors who are paid based on the number of issues they find, putting all physicians on the defensive when only a few are committing fraud. The authors note that “out-of-control oversight and policing for the 1% who warrant this type of scrutiny burdens the daily work of the 99% who do not.” I think most of us in the trenches would agree. In 20+ years in practice, I’ve never had a prior authorization request or precertification request denied, yet I have to continue to jump through hoops to order medically necessary tests.

The editorial calls on clinicians and policy-makers to find common ground that supports both stewardship of resources and the patient care mission. This resonated with me. For policy-makers, achieving fewer and more efficient regulations would be more likely if they spent time understanding the position of the clinicians whom their policies affect. The realities clinicians actually face should provide a lens to view and judge new policies. Unless and until policy makers trust with their heads and feel in their hearts that the vast majority of physicians and other health professionals are well intentioned, they will continue to design policies around the exceptions rather than the rule. Policy-makers should regularly spend time visiting physicians’ offices and hospitals to better understand the ripple effects of policies on those providing care.

It’s similar to having software engineers actually visit clinician practices using the systems they design and create, so that they’re not operating in a vacuum. I’d love to see them observe the folly that my staff had trying to get a CT scan approved after the fact (emergencies don’t occur during normal business hours) when the payer was pushing back because my documentation of the patient’s abdominal pain did not use the word “severe.” I finally asked if anyone at the plan had actually looked at the scan results. Had they done so and seen the enormous and life-threatening pancreatic tumor that was found, maybe they would have toned it down a notch. Instead, they were arguing over semantics. Perhaps they would have preferred to care for a catastrophic event when it eroded through a blood vessel rather than the controlled hospital admission we provided.

They also call on clinicians to learn how the other half lives, understanding policy needs and learning about healthcare spending during medical school. In turn, “the vast majority of physicians who deserve to be trusted” would be rewarded with fast-track of pre-check systems like those used by the TSA. It remains to be seen whether legislators and other policy-makers will heed this advice, but we can be ever optimistic that perhaps someone will see through the money and special interests and give it a shot.

I’m constantly re-engineering my home office and it’s easy for me to take a break because I can just wander to the sofa and put my feet up. Having spent entirely too much time in cubicles and small circulation-less conference rooms, I was intrigued by the idea of a nap desk. Naps are supposed to help improve mental awareness, but I’m not sure I would want to sack out under my desk even if it is made of stylish lacquered wood, metal, and leather. The desk is just a prototype for now, and unless you have your own office, I can’t imagine it would be terribly restful.

What’s your strategy for catching a couple ZZ’s during the work day? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.