News 6/11/08

From David Kissinger: "Re: Vision Center. You don’t have to wait until you are San Francisco to see the NEW McKesson Vision center. Click the video on the right of the screen." Link. I nearly choked when Hammergren said "integrated" in the two-minute informercial since the folks in the trenches know that’s a stretch, but I’ll assume that’s another Vision yet to be realized. And, even though he talks about the Vision Center, the video is just generic stock footage – there’s nothing from the Vision Center (or Centers, since the page says there are three of them). Nothing to see there, don’t bother clicking, although the Hammer is one smooth-talking guy in the narration (in a professional way, I mean).

From The PACS Designer: "Re: PDF/H. We are all familiar with the Portable Document Format or PDF.  Healthcare now has two PDFs. The original PDF becomes PDF/A and the new PDF/H is born thanks to the joint efforts of ASTM International and AIIM (formerly called "Association for Information and Image Management"). The new PDF/H now incorporates the use of the eXtensible Markup Language or XML, so you now will be able to provide transfer technology along with security options such as digital signature and audit capabilities to make the PDF/H desirable for collaboration amongst patients, providers, and others in the healthcare industry." Link.

From Dr. Who?: "Re: NHS inflexibility. That sounds like a version of ‘blame the victim.’ Perhaps Cerner and the other big vendors need to examine their own internal assumptions, inflexibility, and leadership." Great plan, except NHS has gone through just about all the vendors and isn’t happy with any of them. Playing solo hardball isn’t much fun. Maybe they should have gone through with Richard Granger’s threat to write their own apps.

From Keith Moon: "Re: reading it first. I see obscure stories in HIStalk and magazines and e-mail newsletters have them right after. I bet they get their ideas from you." Some have openly admitted as much and thanked me. Others just seem to coincidentally find the exact same stories from the gazillions I go through to choose the most important ones for HIStalk. I don’t mind either way.

From Mack: "Re: Dubai. I heard that the university hospital in Dubai chose Epic over Cerner and Eclipsys." I hadn’t heard that. It would be somewhat of a shocker since Cerner has put forth strong efforts there. Confirmation welcome if you can provide it.

From Doug Dinsdale: "Re: Misys Open Source. According to his LinkedIn profile, the tenure of Ryan Bloom, Director of Open Source Development at Misys, appears to have lasted a whopping seven months." Look like the company’s Open Source revolution is over, or at least being led by an understudy. Bloom left Misys month and is working for RadarFind, a healthcare RTLS systems vendor in nearby Morrisville, NC. VP Tim Elwell is still at Misys, according to his profile.

From Independently Irritated: "Re: QuickBooks. I hate it as well. I was told Peachtree is an easier alternative. Wondering what other independent consultants use?" I’m not sure any of the packages are both strong and simple. I’ve used MYOB and it was OK, but maddeningly clunky.

From Interested: "Re: ONCHIT. I read the section in BrevIT about the ONCHIT strategic plan and I’m curious about your opinion on what that means for EMR/RHIO connectivity companies like Medicity." Medicity is sittin’ pretty, to make a rhyme. The plan was broad and maybe short on details, but nothing suggests a reduced interest in interoperability. Medicity has big clients, has picked up valuable domain expertise like a snowball rolling down a mountain, and is associated with RHIOs that are actually successful (and was itself involved in developing the business model of CalRHIO, I’m sure). The failing RHIOs had one typical attribute in addition to being naive about financing: they chose weak technical partners learning alongside them, which will give Medicity a strong Round 2 pipeline.

From kidzdoc: "Re: HealthLogic. Has everyone at HLSC vanished since Bank of America acquired them? I knew the owner and the CEO both departed shortly after the buyout, not seeing eye to eye with the six billion dollar Treasury divisions leader. More key executives have vanished. Is anyone left that is old school HealthLogic?" It’s been almost two years since the revenue cycle vendor was acquired. I’ve not heard a peep and all that’s left is what could well be the ugliest and most dysfunctional web site I’ve seen.

From IT RN: "Re: FAAN. Rosemary Kennedy, Chief Nursing Information Officer at Siemens, will be inducted as a Fellow into the American Academy of Nursing this fall. This is one of the highest honors that can be bestowed on a nurse. This is particularly impressive as very few Fellows are from the vendor arena."

From xtremegeek: "Re: Jon Burns, stuck cleaning up the mess at the University of Maryland Medical System, is making his move. Major restructuring on the way. Stephanie Reel might finally have some legitimate competition in Baltimore, MD. Also, a new CIO at Rex Healthcare in Raleigh, a senior PM from Dell, to start June 16, 2008." Thanks. I didn’t run the Rex name because I’d hate to be wrong and get her in trouble, but I don’t doubt your information.

From Tom Yumgoong: "Re: hated software. Top of my list is Office 2007. Outlook is fine, but I hate the ribbons on Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. My productivity has gone down so much because of trying to find things and extra keystrokes. It just sux." Indeed it does. I got tired of bizarre Access behavior and had that POS yanked off and Access 2003 put back on my work PC. The ribbon is just absurd, items gray out for no apparent reason, the help function is horrible, and the damn thing would lock up at odd times, like just clicking into a field definition or when trying to save a tiny SQL. You’re right – it was taking me half a day to do something that I could have cranked out in 20 minutes in the old version (to be fair, I didn’t take any training, so maybe there are dark secrets).

Someone posted a comment about some former CIOs who joined HIMSS and since left. I don’t know names, but it shouldn’t be hard to figure out. I did note that Liddy West has left there.

Microsoft names its Healthvault "Be Well Fund" recipients, organizations who will build applications for HealthVault. They look kind of interesting.

The folks at Sentillion have some hot jobs (engineers, analysts, implementations, and others). And speaking of Sentillion, Duke University Health System will deploy Tap & Go proximity card single sign-on solution for identity and access management, adding to its Vergence implementation.

We  interviewed Sentillion CEO Rob Seliger a few weeks ago, by the way. We also interviewed Paul Brient, PatientKeeper CEO, and former HTP CEO Ray Shealy on the RelayHealth acquisition. Good thoughts from the top.

NHS says 15 hospitals will be up on Millennium by the end of the year (five more, in other words).

Odd lawsuit: a woman receiving injections in a pain clinic develops an infection that paralyzes her. She claims the doctor didn’t swab her neck with alcohol first and neither the doctor or nurse can remember (since it’s such a routine practice, one might guess). She filed suit and jurors went with her version of the story, awarding her $6 million.

Listening: Go Betty Go, LA chick punk.

You’d think a hospital in chichi Boca Raton, FL would be doing well, but Boca Raton Community Hospital lost $42 million last year. Snip: "The hospital improved its billing system, hired nurses instead of using temporary ones and took control of spending on medical products." What kind of execs would wait until a whopping loss to do the obvious? And this sounds ominous: "New software and other improvements should bring $11 million that was missed last fiscal year." Like many hospitals that are on the ropes, they’re trying to build their way out the problem with new construction.

Interesting: Adventist Midwest Health is using EndoTool by MD Scientific of Charlotte, NC for glucose management (IV insulin dose calcs) which exchanges information with the EMR. I hadn’t heard of it, but here‘s the site (not very slick and disclosing no management information).

Donna Beed of Walter Reed Army Medical Center was promoted to lieutenant colonel in April and will become CIO for the Pacific Regional Command and Tripler Army Medical Center (HI) in August.

Big iPhone news, as scheduled: the iPhone 3G will go on sale for as little as $199 next month with an AT&T service contract. It’s faster, thinner, has GPS built in, supports VPNs, and has a software store. Docs will be carrying them within weeks, I’m guessing. Think of it as a computer that makes calls, not a telephone. Medical software introduced during Steve’s speech: MIMvista and Modality.

Drug companies are developing a system with CRIX International (which in turn seems to be working with Northrop Grumman) that will allow them to file clinical trial forms electronically, to enroll study participants, and to report adverse drug events directly from practice EMR systems (that part will launch in September at Brigham and Women’s).

The city council of Colorado Springs is upset with Memorial Health System to the point of considering selling it. This councilman summarized what I’ve seen of typical hospital board relations: "You whip 15 slides past me and I’m put in a position to draw the conclusion I’m led to draw." Council members didn’t know until they read it in the paper that the hospital’s new CEO had been hired and was given a $550,000 salary.

HIMSS announces two new organizations: the Institute for eHealth Policy (which sounds like a lobbying group, but may not be) and the National Health IT Collaborative for the Underserved.

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Inga’s Update

New recently announced installations: Virginia Commonwealth University Health system has successfully implemented McKesson’s Horizon Medical Image system; Pinecrest Hospital (WV) is now live on Medsphere’s OpenVista; and Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital has activated Eclipsys Sunrise Clinical Manager for its 4,000 users and claims its doctors are entering 75% of their 12,000 medication orders a day online.

The local Fall River (MA) newspaper features local employer Meditech and the high job satisfaction of its employees. It’s a nice, feel-good story that includes mention of the beautiful facility and very low turnover rates (two employees out of 60 in the last 2 1/2 years).

The Pittsburgh newspaper details the usage and costs associated with (non-profit) UPMC’s private jet. The paper estimates that over a nine-month period, UPMC staff flew the jet 58 times, averaging $18,752 per flight.

SleepEx announces the release of a new EMR that interfaces with sleep diagnostic equipment. Apparently the software is on display in Baltimore at SLEEP 2008, a national convention for sleep specialists (who knew there was such an organization?)

I came across a funny video from those zany Stratus Technologies folks describing virtualization and high availability servers. As the YouTube post says, even your mother-in-law could understand these concepts.

Greenway Medical Technologies, NextGen, Initiate Systems, and IBM are some of the technology companies demonstrating real-time standards-based clinical healthcare data exchange at this week’s National Health IT conference in D.C.

Secretary Leavitt names the 12 communities selected to participate in its national Medicare demonstration project. The five-year project provides financial incentives to providers using EMRs, with the goal of improving quality of care.

E-mail Inga.