Hard agree, and not just because I'm a spreadsheet nerd. Why are we all here? Isn't it in the service…
Monday Morning Update 12/29/08
From Blueware: "Re: promotion. Jyran Glucky was promoted from Lead Architect to Vice President of Application Development at BlueWare." I have to admit that I’ve never heard of the company and had to Google them. From its overly busy site, it’s hard to figure out exactly what they offer, but it has something to do with EMRs. And despite a press release about this promotion, there’s not a list of management anywhere I could find in the jumble, so I don’t know who else is involved.
From IntelliDOT: "Re: layoff. IntelliDOT in San Diego laid off 12 percent of its employees due to slow sales." Unverified. We’ll check it out.
Listening: Rachelle Ramm, a hard-rocking California beauty. Which reminded me of my old favorite, Swedish all-girl metal band Drain STH.
The New York Times writes up the Marshfield Clinic’s technology. A good quote from AHRQ’s Carolyn Clancy, who says the clinic "understands that it’s a system of improvement that technology makes possible that really matters, and the electronic health record itself is no silver bullet." That’s the positive, but the negative is this answer about the $50 million per year (!!) the clinic spends on systems: "People ask about return on investment, but that’s the wrong question. This requires the usual leap of faith that knowledge will yield good things — better care, doing things smarter and, yes, saving money in the long run." That’s a pretty big leap. Excellent article.
The Emageon saga continues, dragging the company’s name further in the mud. Would-be acquirer Health Systems Solutions, Inc. says its major shareholder, Antigua-based Stanford International Bank Ltd., won’t provide the funds for the acquisition to go through. Emageon CEO Charles Jett seems to be the outraged spokesperson, but he’s not a major player given that he was ousted from the board last summer after an ugly proxy fight with Oliver Press Partners. Now it could be that Stanford is just playing with the stock behind the scenes, safely tucked away in Antigua outside US jurisdiction, but it makes more sense that they’ve found something they don’t like about Emageon and their carefully created legal structure gives them an out that they’ve chosen to exercise. Or, that billionaire owner Allen Stanford and Oliver Press don’t get along, like Gordon Gekko and Sir Larry Wildman in Wall Street (Stanford really is a Sir, the first person knighted by Antigua, where he holds dual citizenship along with the USA).
Jobs: Cerner Millennium Senior Analyst (Healthcare Performance Group), Director of Clinical Information Systems (Snelling Executive Search), Director of Nursing Informatics (Johns Hopkins Medicine), PharmD (Parker Healthcare IT), CareVue Technical Specialist/Clinical Engineer (Cedars-Sinai Medical Center), C-Level Sales Executive (Company Confidential). Drop your e-mail address here and get a weekly jobs list.
West Virginia University Hospitals gets certificate of need approval from the state to spend $18 million on new hardware and a data center for its $90 million Epic project, although they’re short on capital and will delay the data center construction.
Odd: Mississippi lawmakers are considering increasing cigarette taxes to help support struggling hospitals, saying, ‘We have been leaving untold millions of dollars on the table." That’s what happens when politicians start seeing your money as theirs, although there’s no doubt smokers will cost the state a lot more than that.
The number of hospitals laying off in 2008 has already beaten the 2003 record, although the number of laid off employees is relatively modest at 9,700 who have filed for unemployment because of mass layoffs.
Kryptiq is awarded a patient on encryption of healthcare information in a way that prevents the servers it sits on from decrypting the data. Hopefully they’ll use it in products rather than as the subject line in nasty infringement lawyer letters.
Two employees of Samaritan North Health Center (OH) are indicted for identify theft and money laundering for getting names of the recently deceased from the newspaper obituaries, looking up their information in the hospital’s computer system, then taking out loans in their names.
The Bahrain Medical Journal will start publishing online with free access, even allowing readers to do whatever they want with the articles as long as they cite them properly. Leading the conversion to an open access journal was senior editor Dr. Mohammad Al-Ubaydli, author of the book Free Software for Busy People and author of an editorial (warning: PDF) in the current issue urging Bahrain to adopt open source instead of proprietary EMR systems.
UK patients, worried about NHS’s plan to store patient information in a national database, are choosing to instead carry their information on a smart card that doctors update via USB port after each visit. The card’s distributor pays doctors to download patient data, mention of which elicited this reader comment: "An other way for doctors to make a quick buck!! They are already been paid twice. Once by the taxpayer and the other by the drug companies. Its about time we patients had access to our own medical data."
The first 10 episodes of Children’s Hospital (inexplicably spelled Childrens’ Hospital) are now up on the WB, semi-entertaining in an Airplane kind of way. "A hospital is a place for smart people to take care of people who aren’t smart enough to keep themselves healthy."
Resident: You’re the attending physician and I need to get your permission. I need to cut this kid open.
Attending: Why? She’s got a broken arm.
Resident: Says who?
Attending: The X-ray.
Resident: Please. I don’t trust those – they’re not even in color.
Speaking of online series, Lisa Kudrow stars as an Internet-based psychologist who does three-minute Webcam sessions on the largely improvised Web Therapy.
Red Hat’s Q3 numbers: revenue up 22%, EPS $0.12 vs. $0.10.
Re Stanford Bank and Health Systems Solutions, Inc – take a look at the issues surrounding Stanford’s support of English cricket and, indeed, cricket in general. And at some of the background to Standford over the past year or so.
RE: Marshfield Clinic. $50MM sounds like a lot, but you might not realize the scope of their operation (I have no connection to them, by the way). They run a reference laboratory business and have first-class facilities in middle-of-nowhere places like Minoqua, Wisconsin, where my father’s oncologist pulled up CT scan results on a big desktop monitor to show us the lkiver mets that doomed him. I wish they had a branch where I live.