Re: "Physicians are just about the only professionals who are expected to enter data into a computer system while doing…
News 2/29/08
From Jay Mason: "Re: HIMSS. Thanks for the great event at HIMSS. I really enjoyed it. I have a question for you. Do you know who the largest ASP ambulatory practice management company is?" You’re welcome – thanks for coming. And, perhaps this is a trick question: the largest company, or the largest number of installed ASP clients? I know eCW has lots of ASP customers. athena’s are all ASP. I really don’t know, but I bet someone does and will tell me.
From HIMSS Road Warrior: "Re: HIMSS. You should probably have some form of HIMSS awards – best booth, worst booth, etc. I thought the McKesson booth was ridiculous. I have to imagine McKesson customers are wondering why they spend millions on a booth but struggle delivering a nice product. I found myself attracted to the smaller, more approachable booths. Picis was nice, knowledgeable people and had some good customer presentations. Epic was non-impressive as well as Oracle. PS – I saw many people with HIStalk stuff." Now that I’ve had a day to think about it, I’ll go with MCK for the worst booth; Cerner for the best big booth but, since they were on a different tangent, an honorable mention to Siemens; and Medicity for best overall for being innovative and well designed without being gaudy, although it’s tough to compare, especially when you know you didn’t see them all (I missed Picis, somehow). Wonder what they do with the retired ones? Sell them cheap to third world HIT vendors? Cannibalize them for parts? Set them up in a special HIMSS Boat Show Simulation Room to have the glad-handers practice their smiles and small talk and Olympic badge-swiping?
I was happy to see all the HIStalk stuff, though I really couldn’t comprehend it all. As I was watching people at the Mr. HIStalk Shoe Shine in the Red Hat booth, I wanted to have a dialog with the shinees: Do you know what HIStalk is about? Are you disappointed by the real me because I’m not what you expected? Does it seem strange that my name’s on a shoe shine?
From Neal’s Pizza Guy: "Re: UK. Don Trigg to be named Cerner’s General Manager for UK and Ireland." I e-mailed congrats (with a question mark) to Don and he didn’t reply, so either he was heading out of town or your rumor is true and he can’t confirm it yet.
Happy leap year. It’s good to be home, although I’m always kind of depressed after HIMSS for some reason. I always feel like such a loser when seeing other people out there doing cool stuff (especially the young ones).
I put a new poll to your right about Cerner’s decision to drop out of the HIMSS09 exhibits. Good idea or bad? You know where I stand.
Matt, the founder of CME Networks, e-mailed after reading one of our HIMSS posts, so here’s a little plug.
An ASHP survey whose results were released at HIMSS shows that only 11% of pharmacy systems are not integrated or interfaced to other systems. Bedside barcoding was reported in use by 23%, which sounds high based on what other surveys have found.
Smart marketing: Eclipsys announces that two of its Sunrise users have achieved HIMSS Analytics EMR Stage 6, joining fewer than a dozen hospitals: full physician documentation in at least one unit and radiology PACS (and including the lower stages: EMAR/barcoding, CPOE, clinical decision support, etc.)
The Methodist Hospital of Houston picks Picis for periop.
Big-time investment guru Carl Witonsky (who also happens to be a pretty good guy from my limited experience) is named to Dairyland’s board. I hadn’t kept up: last time I checked, he was running CliniComp, but now he’s on Sentillion’s board, too. I envy those big-picture money people, especially when I’m mired in day job minutiae after my "Cinderella at the ball" moment at HIMSS.
Students in India and China can take an online HL7 certification prep course for $100. And probably will.
Philips realigns its entire informatics business, although lost in the numbing flurry of buzzwords is an explanation of what they actually did.
QuadraMed has ported QCPR to Cache’. Like with RelayHealth, we scooped that a little in their HIStech Report.
Lacy Thomas, the former CEO of University Medical Center (NV) is accused of awarding uncontested hospital contracts to unqualified friends, among them former Cook County Hospital CIO Greg Boone. Boone got $50,400 for an 25-minute PowerPoint IT evaluation that caused employees to "chuckle and laugh" because it was recycled information he got from three employee interviews over two days (well, he’s not the only consultant to do that). A UMC IT director complained that Boone was unqualified, but boss CIO Doug Northcutt, sharing a fear of unemployment like many of his peers, told him to pipe down. Prosecutors say taxpayers lost $10 million because of Thomas’s shenanigans.
Kaiser says 10 hospitals are live on HealthConnect, with 23 to go. They finally admit a cost of $4 billion, although that could well be a low estimate.
Let’s give some more free PR to the urinal marketing people, just to annoy their competitors! Seal Shield announces a $40 dishwasher-safe mouse.I think they should run a HIMSS special and send a free banned urinal screen with every order, maybe framed like a gold record.
Elsevier begins marketing its clinical decision support applications that now include the former CPMRC of Eclipsys.
Medsphere announces an open source partnership with Tolven.
Former Medstat CEO Tim Murnane is named CEO of EVP/COO of NightHawk Radiology.
New York City claims its eClinicalWorks health records network will be the largest in the country, involving 200 doctors and 200,000 patients so far.
Inova Health signs an $8.3 million deal for Centricity EMR.
The analyst who upgraded athenahealth’s stock earlier this week says he’s hearing that eClinicalWorks may have hit the wall on its ability to scale up support and implementation. I looked back on my 2006 interview with Girish Kumar to see if he mentioned it, reminding me of what a good interview he did (check out his predictions and competitor evaluations). I know someone told me that in an interview about their company, so I’ll have to dig further.
Sponsor Updates and Housekeeping
I’m thinking about shutting down the old HIStalk site at blog-city.com. Anybody have a reason I shouldn’t? I know some folks still read there, but I could send some reminders. It would make maintenance easier. I wouldn’t kill it since it’s got all the older articles, just not post to it.
I checked the HIStalk stats and February will set the record for most visits. Thanks for reading.
RelayHealth announces its Results Distribution Service, which we covered quite well, I think, in an HIStech Report interview. I should have asked Fake Inga to explain how it works.
AT&T will provide RFID asset tracking to Health First (FL).
Sage Software announces Intergy PM/EHR version 4.0.
Premise announces a partnership with Stryker Medical, contributing workflow and communications solutions to Stryker’s iBed project.
SXC Health Solutions will acquire National Medical Health Card Systems. Healthcare Growth Partners was strategic advisor to SXC.
NextGen’s EMR wins an MS-HUG innovation award in disease surveillance for its work with the Medical College of Wisconsin.
Art Vandelay on HealthVault
I took the plunge and played with HealthVault (HV). HV is not a PHR – it is a set of related health web services, schemas, and a storage service. Microsoft stated it is opening the toolkit and service. This follows its recent strategy for many of its other servers and portions of .NET. Codeplex will be the tool for sharing the open code.
The good: initial set of services, growing third party support for connected devices (BP cuffs, HgA1c monitors), cost of the service, and use of HL7’s CCD.
The acceptable: documentation, support forum, granularity of the security model, and basic service and XML schema testing.
The bad: no interactive debugging, error details, terminology services, overlaps in the data schema, and a confusing user interface. A number of issues exist with the Terminology services. This includes the lack of use of HITSP formats, the lack of terminology maps, and a lack of a consumer terminology engine. The confusing UI is less of an issue as Microsoft wants the partners’ developers to shield consumers from this layer of the tool.
The open questions: support responsibilities of Microsoft vs. partners, the number of hack attacks, and the intrusiveness of HV Search. HV Search is Microsoft’s sole revenue model.
Inga’s Update
It’s Wednesday afternoon and I am at the airport sitting at the gate. Don’t know how things will be Thursday but it took forever (more than an hour) to get my bag checked and go through security. It was ugly. Also ugly was my suitcase, which I could barely zip closed because of all the treasures I collected.
As I reflect on the last few days, it all has seemed a bit surreal. For example, walking by the booth for various sponsors and seeing the HIStalk signs prominently displayed – with my signature. And seeing various name tags and knowing that I have e-mailed or chatted with them. It hasn’t been that easy for me to keep my low profile, especially because my true nature is to go hug everyone!
If you are a sponsor, trust me, I stopped by. Michael, Dewey, Tina, Lauren, Don, Lynn and Bill – sorry I didn’t give you a hug. I did hug Tammi with AT&T because she helped me deliver the HIStalk signs to our sponsors.
Readers may not be aware of this, but it was also the first time Mr. H and I had met in person. He is just as funny and smart and warm-hearted as his posts suggest. Better really. He is not as gregarious as me, but I don’t think that surprised either one of us. We had fun sharing really gossip that was so juicy that it isn’t printable. I think he was amused and not surprised that I found attend several great after parties while he went to the hotel and made sure HIStalk got posted so that readers would get their fix.
Anyway, despite (or because) of all the fun and Internet access issues, I feel out of touch with real HIS news, so I look forward to catching up. Let us know your impressions of the meeting and make sure you have checked out the HISsies cartoon. The HIT Transition guys have asked what people have thought, so let us know.
While Cerner choosing not to exhibit at HIMSS may seem like a good idea, McKesson tried to float that ship several years ago. It sunk and McKesson never skipped the show that year (maybe 10 years ago?).
I have been an exhibit manager for a very large consulting firm, And while no deals are closed and most activities are geared around exisiting customers HIMSS is a necessary event to attend as a vendor. Electing not to participate leads to many questions by current and potential customers. Smaller vendors are, as I’ve said for years, conspicuous in their absence. (I know that comment will strip me of my secret identity to those that know me well.)
I don’t know that we’ve seen confirmation that Cerner will not be at HIMSS next hear and I’ll be surprised if that is the way it really turns out.
Re: Ralph Hinckley
Ralph, HIMSS may be important for consulting folks like you but from a sales persepctive, I would say it is an event that does not offer the bang for the buck. I think the “why aren’t you here, Mr. Vendor?” thing is way over blown and that the majority of companies do not suffer from not being at HIMSS and have not lost business due to not attending. Companies have a finite number of marekting dollars to spend and for the majority of them, HIMSS does not provide the return on investment. I would rather see my company continue to invest in more important areas-product development, implmentation, customer support and more rewarding marketing activities that help me as a salesperson succeed.