Monday Morning Update 6/18/07

From Father Pablo Martinez: “Re: top CIOs. eWeek’s got a Top 100 CIO list and here is the extract of the healthcare IT top movers and shakers: #24 John Glaser (Partners Healthcare) edging out #41 John Halamka (pick one – CareGroup Health System, Harvard Medical School, and Harvard Clinical Research Institute) and #94 Dan Drawbaugh (University of Pittsburgh Medical Center). In the retail HIT space – #63 Denise Wong (Walgreen’s) beat #73 Jonathan Roberts (CVS/Caremark) and #86 Michael Laddon (Long’s Drugs). In the pure HIT space – #69 Randy Spratt (McKesson) barely sneaks past #72 Jody Davids (Cardinal Health).”

From Aristotle Sarajos: “Re: Google. Google VP Adam Bosworth said at the AMIA Spring Congress that Google would create a PHR because the medical and HIT communities hadn’t managed to do so. An ironic twist will be if whatever they cook up answers a question he posed about doctors: ‘How do you know who is well seasoned?’ and the answer is … not Dr. Zeiger who indicates that ‘about once a week, I still practice as an urgent care doctor at a county hospital.’ Of course, if you’re at an urgent care clinic, you probably won’t have time to Google your provider. As for me, I really would prefer the doctor that is devoted to practicing full-time, not just for licensure reasons or for street cred among other physicians (although that is a common practice).” I bet Google’s paying him plenty well to preclude his need for additional work. Plus, there’s all those cool perks, at least if you don’t mind hanging around co-workers not yet finished with puberty.

NHS’s Richard Granger says IBA will take over iSoft within a week, although he’s still considering dumping them for Cerner Millennium. Interesting: he revealed that he’d already put a team on the ground in India to start developing an internal solution in case CSC blocked the IBA takeover of iSoft.

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Kardia, a Rochester startup, has licensed Mayo Clinic’s echocardiagram software to sell to other hospitals. Mayo gets a 15% stake in the company.

An investment group puts money into Meditab, along with the obligatory installation of its own people. The company makes physician office and retail pharmacy systems, among others. It offices are in California, India, and the Philippines. A pharmacist customer is quoted: “You can fill 500 Rx’s per day with one Pharmacist, one intern, one tech, two clerks and one ScriptPro.” In states where that clinically dangerous workload and supervision level is not illegal, that is. Still, it must be an efficient product to allow it. I see its EMR product is CCHIT-certified, although that’s hardly exclusive territory these days.

Odd: a doctor in Australia gets caught exposing patient information on his MySpace blog, which included the name of an 87-year-old patient along with details about the rectal exam he gave the patient.

Emergisoft will partner with Capsule Technologie (as I always say, spelled right, despite how it looks) for that company’s DataCaptor Connectivity Suite, which will collect and reformat medical device data for use in the EmergisoftED application.

The worst state in the US for healthcare: Mississippi. The bottom four are in the Deep South, probably as a result of infrastructure upheaval caused by imperialist US aggression, i.e., the Civil War (my joking theory.) Speaking of which, who names wars anyway, why do other countries have civil war but we have The Civil War, and what was World War I called before World World II started? But I digress.

As I speculated, the Patent Office gives VISICU a favorable ruling, although CEO Frank Sample seems to hold a grudge with his quote about “negative and misleading publicity.” The stock dropped on the news for some reason. The market cap is only $355 million, which one might expect to be attractive to potential suitors (Cerner? GE? The usual suspects?) now that the legal challenges to its intellectual property appear to be over.

More on King-Harbor Medical Center: security cameras recorded ED staff ignoring the women who died after 45 minutes of writhing on the ED lobby floor with the janitor sweeping up around her. The medical director was fired after a brain tumor patient was held untreated for four days in the ED before family sought emergency surgery elsewhere. The hospital is close to being shut down, only a few years after it should have been. It’s a teaching hospital – I bet residents there have scary stories.

Novo Innovations is offering a one-hour webinar covering the Novo Grid and community integration. Lots of folks were curious about the company after I interviewed CEO Robert Connely, so I’m sure they wouldn’t mind if you listened in.

News, rumors, pointless pontificating: e-mail me.

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