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Monday Morning Update 8/20/07

August 18, 2007 News 2 Comments

From The PACS Designer: “Re: ASM. The abbreviation ASM might not be familiar to most HIStalk readers, but it will be seen more as we migrate toward more enterprise-driven software platforms. ASM stands for Automatic Storage Management and is the software that controls how data and image files communicate with an archive. ASM is going be more commonly used with Ethernet and TCP/IP usage. Techworld Online Magazine had an article last year that explains ASM along with some technical format ideas for techies on how to set one up for enterprise usage.” Link.

From John: “Re: Wal-Mart. From the Wall Street Journal: ‘In health care, Wal-Mart sees itself providing an array of services and home-health equipment along with prescription eyeglasses and pharmaceuticals that it already sells according to a person familiar with the effort. ‘In five years, Wal-Mart wants to be on its way to becoming the No. 1 health-care company in America,’ that person said.’ The company said it will open up to 400 in-store clinics in the next three years, bringing them up to 2,000 within 5-7 years.” Now that’s interesting. They’ve got a lot of buying power, both as a healthcare provider and consumer. Will doctors and nurses end up having mostly retail chain employers, just like the majority of optometrists and pharmacists? Everybody’s speculating endlessly that Google might roll out a PHR, while plain old bricks-and-mortar Wal-Mart is quietly cornering care delivery itself. Hospitals, medical practices, and labs that are indifferent to providing value and paying attention to the customer experience should be concerned. You can argue smugly about how low-rent and plain they are, but you’ll have to take a spot in line behind all the nay-saying grocery stores, pet stores, clothing stores, and pharmacies that are being crushed under their wheels ahead of you. They’ll spend money on IT, too. Post your thoughts in HIStalk Discussion. What impact will the company have?

Michael e-mailed me about Medicity, wondering why the company is under the radar for many hospitals that have poor inpatient/ambulatory systems integration. I asked CEO Kipp Lassetter, who said Medicity is working hard to get the word out about clinical interoperability. Their numbers: over 300 hospital customers, 135 interfaces inbound to hospital systems, and 1,750 interfaces feeding data to PM/EMR systems. They’re managing 100 million clinical messages a year for hospitals, IDNs, LabCorp, and statewide information networks in Delaware and California. Maybe it’s too easy for CIOs to just call up their HIS vendor, although I don’t know that those companies will always have the right experience and motivation to get the job done.

Vince Ciotti mentions that H.I.S. Professionals will be offering another two-day “mini-HIMSS” in Chicago on October 3-4, with several HIS vendors doing presentations and demos. He says a lot of old friends contacted him after his interview here.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Sentillion, the folks who created healthcare single sign-on (ever notice how hard that is to type?) They’re in the Healthcare Informatics Top 100, have over 250,000 live users, and offer five-nines availability. I notice their Q2 was big for single sign-on, user provisioning, and virtualized remote access. They’ve got some big secret announcement coming soon, which I know only because they warned me cryptically, “We will need to change our ad often and on specific days – can you do that?” I guess we can all watch the ad together to see what’s coming (it mentions “expreSSO”, so take your best guess). Anyway, thanks to Sentillion for supporting HIStalk.

A reader suggested I run links to previous HIStalk interviews to make them easier to locate. The full list is here (25 CEOs so far, plus several other high-ranking and interesting folks), but here are the most recent ones:

Ken Creager, Meru Networks
Vince Ciotti, H.I.S. Professionals
Cindy Dullea, SCI Solutions and the United States Navy
Michael McNeal, Emergin
Kim Pederson, Allina Hospitals & Clinics
Toni Rienzi, NYU Medical Center
Stanley Crane, Allscripts
Adam Gale, KLAS
Ed Daihl, SIS
Jim Morrow MD, North Fulton Family Medicine
Gary Kennedy, RemedyMD
Dewey Howell, Design Clinicals
Glenn Galloway, Healthia Consulting
Mike Cottle, Sumter Regional Hospital
Scott Decker, Healthvision
Bruce Cerullo, Lucida
Jon Phillips, Healthcare Growth Partners
Justen Deal, Kaiser Permanente
Tom Skelton, Misys Healthcare
Jonathan Bush, athenahealth

Mike Smeraski, now at Eclipsys, pays $50,000 to settle the SEC’s stock fraud investigation against him from his HBOC days. I read over the charges awhile back and got the impression that his bosses were doing all the fraudulating, not him, and I’m guessing the relatively paltry $50K fine reflects that. The Big Fish is still swimming (or sailing) freely, of course.

QuadraMed releases Version 9.0 of the scheduling system formerly known as TempusOne.

Brookhaven is live on Soarian. If anyone from there has a first-hand report for me, I’m listening.

A reader asked about lobbyist spending by HIMSS, leading Adam (“long time fan, first time caller – er, e-mailer”) to send over its federal 990 form (disclaimer: I’m not an accountant, but I’m reading it as best I can, and HIMSS will be due to file a new 990 shortly). It shows $1 million in lobbying expense. Other high points: HIMSS had $31 million in revenue, with $17 million from the annual conference and $4.5 million from publishing. Membership dues are listed as bringing in $4.2 million. Expenses were $32 million. It paid about $10 million in salaries and bonuses, of which CEO Steve Lieber got $485K. The form says HIMSS owns $16.6 million in investments, mostly stocks (it doesn’t say which companies’ shares) and sold $42 million worth during the year (I don’t understand that huge number for sure). HIMSS Analytics took in $5.1 million. HIMSS paid $331,000 in credit card fees (!) and $3.2 million in consulting fees. The form says HIMSS made $317K from professional services and $752K from industry affairs, each line footnoted to say that’s from “representation of the society” in government affairs/health industry events, so I’m not sure who’s paying that. HIMSS owns a chunk of Medtech Publishing that it values at $544K, which brought in $89K of income. If you’re an accountant and want to give a more professional interpretation, I can send the PDF over.

LA’s Antelope Valley Hospital will migrate from 70 Dell servers to four virtualized IBM 3850s.

Epic’s $100 million learning center will open next month in Verona. The horseshoe-shaped building is painted red to resemble a barn. The auditorium seats 5,300 and will be nearly full for the company’s September user group meeting. Campus 2 is already underway and will cost the same as the recently opened Campus 1: $150 million. The treehouse will be open this fall (I’m still waiting on Judy’s offer to sit up there as the company scribe). The article says Epic’s revenue last year was $422 million, about a third of Cerner’s and a little more than Meditech’s.

Need evidence that most press releases are rarely newsworthy and sometimes don’t even involve news? Oracle fires off an urgent release that describes TheraDoc’s choice of Oracle for its database … seven years ago. I shall alert the media.

Cisco says hospitals its strongest sales growth is coming from hospitals, bringing in about $1 billion a year.

A software developer in a UK hospital goes to jail for downloading kiddie porn at work. He claims a virus did it.

InterSystems subsdiary TrakHealth gets a 10-year contract to provide an EHR in the UK. You may recall that InterSystems acquired the Australian company, a former development partner, this past May.

E-mail me. Or, use the Rumor Report to your right. I’m fastidiously confidential with sources, so you need not fear being outed. A reminder, too: I’ve been writing HIStalk for over four years and all of it can be searched using the Search box to your right. Thank you for reading.



Inga’s Update

MGMA and the American Osteopathic Association (AOA) release research results indicating that the cost to purchase and implement EMR’s prevents some DO’s from using them in their practice (I could have told them that, by the way.) Large medical groups with more than 50 physicians have adopted EMR at a rate of 55% and solo DO’s have only a 25% adoption rate.

Talk to Inga.



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