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December 16, 2010 News 21 Comments

From Wireless Observer: “Re: InnerWireless. They’ve raised at least $75M in VC cash. Their VCs are just flushing their investment — there is no way they will ever recover what they put in. A transaction amount will never be mentioned because it will be embarrassingly low. This company has been a bit of a financial horror show. Not only did they burn tons of cash, don’t forget that IW bought what was left of Pango Networks (billed as a ‘merger’)and killed that company. And if anyone remembers, they developed the SPOT RTLS solution to the tune of $6-8M and killed that one, too. Not a good track record, to say the least.”

From HIPAA Hound: “Re: Hans Rosling BBC video lecture on the statistics of national wealth and health in the last 200 years. Pretty interesting in a geeky way.” It is pretty cool, not just for the information it conveys about countries advancing in income and health, but in the graphical way the information was presented. It also supports something I find myself saying a lot: public and global health is not all that related to healthcare services delivery. Only in some countries are hospital and insurance considered synonymous with health.

From Orion’s Belt: “Re: JPS. Not only is their new CIO’s background light when it comes to hospitals, they’ve chosen a consulting partner, Accenture, with very limited EMR experience, especially with Epic. I’d keep an eye on them if I were in your business :).”

From Laddie: “Re: Texas Health Resources. Dealing with a severe outage of their Epic EMR caused by a Citrix upgrade that coincided with the 09 upgrade.” Verified. CIO Ed Marx says he’d love to blame a vendor, but the buck stops with him and it was a leadership failure in his mind. To Ed’s credit, I’ve heard CIOs say  lot of surprising things, but that’s the first time I’ve heard that. Many of those I’ve known would have been making excuses left and right and looking for an IT director to fire as a sacrificial lamb. I can say from first-hand experience that when you have Citrix problems, things get very exciting – lots of systems go dark since it’s a single point of failure for all the major apps of many hospitals (although it has to be a big failure since it’s not hard to work around a failed server in the Citrix farm).

12-16-2010 7-36-32 PM

From CYAO: “Re: University Health Care System (GA). Appointed an ED physician as CMIO to lead their EMR implementation.” Shannon Stinson, MD is named VP/CMIO. The announcement took a little shot at McKesson, which is egressing as Epic is ingressing. Said the CEO, “For many years, University and McKesson successfully partnered on clinical and financial information system projects. However, recent experience with McKesson has not been as successful.” You know the relationship had to have soured if it warranted a CEO dig in a press release.

12-16-2010 8-23-28 PM

From The PACS Designer: “Re: Opera 11 browser beta. TPD is experimenting with Opera 11 after being a Firefox advocate for a long time. Some recent Firefox changes result in numerous hiccups that make the Firefox browser less attractive for use.” I like Opera myself, although I rarely use it except when I’m testing some Web change I’ve made to make sure I didn’t screw it up. I use Chrome 90% of the time, with Firefox making up the rest (but it’s noticeably slower). Opera feels very lightweight and fast to me and it just seems smoother (and extra points for working a Spinal Tap reference into the page’s description, shown above from a Google search). I know I’d rather have a root canal than use IE.

I’ll be beaming these instructions to you telepathically when you least expect it, so do these things now and I’ll stop: (a) put your e-mail address in the spam-proof Subscribe to Updates box to your right, ensuring that 6,490 more ambitious souls aren’t the first to know that your company has been sold or your 1998 arrest record has been unsealed and printed verbatim here; (b) check out HIStalk Practice and HIStalk Mobile; (c) Friend (Inga or me) or Like (HIStalk) on Facebook to help that nice Zuckerberg boy dominate the world; (d) show some sponsor love by perusing their ads and clicking reflexively at the many interesting ones so those companies won’t crush my ego by abandoning me; (e) instantly find mentions about a company or person by dropping their name in the search box to your right, which digs through all three sites at your command; and (f) tell your friends and enemies to read HIStalk, but don’t get their hopes up by laying it on too thick. Thanks for reading, commenting, writing, rumor-reporting, and e-mailing. And be nice to Inga since she’s fragile.

12-16-2010 10-23-35 PM

The very nice Sunquest folks sent us a copy of a letter from President and CEO Richard Atkin that was e-mailed to customers Thursday afternoon, with the explanation that they know we’ve already written about their new investor (on December 3), but that they can comment now that the deal’s done (I really was touched a little that they remembered us, to be honest, but then again I’m easily won over with flattery). As we wrote earlier, an investor consortium led by Huntsman Gay Global Capital has taken a substantial equity position in Sunquest, but the company will remain independent and Vista Equity Partners, which bought the company from Misys, will continue as the largest single shareholder. The letter says the funds will be used to increase the field sales force, expand the regional consultant program, develop more products, create executive and strategic advisory boards, and possibly acquire other companies. My assessment is this: there’s not much of a safety net given the large amount of debt involved, but if management can use the money wisely and strategically to move to the next level, nobody’s going to worry about it. Like always, strategy and execution (in the form of management) will decide the outcome.

Listening: reader-recommended Dashboard Confessional, an emo band that I’m surprised I haven’t mentioned since I do listen to them occasionally.

KLAS just published its Top 20 Best in KLAS awards. I’ll probably dig deeper into it later, but here’s what has struck me so far:

  • Epic was named as the highest scoring vendor overall, with Hayes Management Consulting taking the top spot among professional services firms.
  • If you’re a single-vendor shop, the highest ranking software suite by far was Epic, but McKesson took two of the top four spots (Paragon and Horizon). Most surprisingly to me, Siemens Soarian came in #3.
  • I always like to look at Worst in KLAS, the bottom-ranked products in the hospital application categories: GE Centricity (hospital EMR), CGI Sovera (document management and imaging), Emergisoft (ED), McKesson Pathways (scheduling), GE Centricity (lab), Cerner ProVision (PACS), McKesson STAR (patient accounting and patient management), Mediware WORx (pharmacy), Sunquest (radiology), and McKesson Horizon (surgery management).
  • Some products did very well in one of KLAS’s subcategories, which means they can’t win an award, but some of them did earn a 100% “Would Buy Again” customer rating, which is to me the most useful measure of all.

RelayHealth’s RelayClinical EHR earns ambulatory EHR certification from Drummond Group, giving the company a trifecta of offerings (EHR, HIE, and PHRs).

Former Eclipsys CEO Andy Eckert is named CEO of CRC Health Corporation, which offers behavioral care services.

Xconomy Boston gives a status update of the integration of the former Sentillion into Microsoft. It’s still a work in progress and a lot of it is hush-hush, but former Sentillion CEO Rob Seliger has been promoted to GM of product management for all of the Healthcare Solutions Group, which includes HealthVault and Amalga, and references were made about new products yet to be announced.

12-16-2010 7-46-37 PM

I’ll take Things in Common for $200, Weird News Andy. And the Jeopardy answer is: blood pressure, surgeons’ egos, reimbursements, and meth users from the ceiling. The question: what are things that fall in the ED? A man shows up at a Louisville hospital’s emergency department with what he says are alcohol burns, but the woman who gave him a ride says his car-based meth lab had exploded. The police come, the man tries to climb into the ceiling to drop down into another room to escape, but he misjudges and crashes to the hallway floor. The police spokesperson’s assessment was cynically dry: “I would say it’s unusual for anybody that’s in the hospital to try and escape through the ceiling tiles.”

The VCs behind MedPage Today (which has an interest in the KevinMD site) sell out to Everyday Health, which runs ad-supported health and lifestyle sites that include that of Jillian Michaels.

Jobs on the sponsor-only Jobs Page: Application Consultant, West Coast (Nuance), Software/Implementation Engineer (MobileMD), Eclipsys Activation Consultant (Enterprise Software Deployment). On Healthcare IT Jobs: Client Manager, Soarian Clinicals Consultants, Dragon Trainer/Systems Analyst, McKesson Paragon Consultants.

Cerner founders Neal Patterson and Cliff Illig are sued for $3 million by their golf course partners, who claim the guys stiffed them on payments due.

12-16-2010 9-12-05 PM

I’ve said nice things about Nextgov, but this won’t be one of them. What were they thinking when they wrote the Wednesday story above? David Brailer quit as national coordinator nearly five years ago, in April 2006. David Blumenthal has been in that position since March 2009, but Rob Kolodner held the job between the Daves. Not to mention that its CMS, not ONC, that will “hand out” HITECH money (oh, if it were only that simple). When I saw the clumsily breezy headline, I thought that Health Evolution Partners was cutting Brailer’s pay and I wondered how (and why) Nextgov sleuthed that out.

A British hospital opens a communications room for hearing-impaired patients that offers assistive devices for hearing aid wearers and Webcam access to a sign language interpreter.

12-16-2010 9-43-34 PM

The board of 136-bed Rice Memorial Hospital (MN) approves $4.7 million to purchase a clinical information system. Its preferred vendor is Epic, which would make this one of the smallest Epic implementations ever, I would guess (assuming Judy goes for the deal). Now this is interesting since Epic contractually gags its customers from divulging what they paid, so you never see a price breakout: Epic was the cheapest of the five vendor proposals, with the cost detailed as $1.2 million for the license fee, $100K for hardware, $800K for implementation, and $2.6 million for five years’ of maintenance.

12-16-2010 9-54-19 PM

I was digging through the statement (warning: PDF) made this week by the FDA’s Jeffrey Shuren at the IOM’s Committee on Patient Safety and HIT meeting. Tidbits: (a) he implies that EHRs are medical devices for which FDA has elected not to enforce existing requirements, but FDA is interested in IOM’s opinion on whether it should start regulating them; (b) he suggests that clinical decision support will be a targeted area; (c) FDA believes interoperability should be standardized; (d) systems should be monitored with real-time surveillance. He points out that FDA oversight can take several forms: requiring manufacturers to register, running a voluntary post-market surveillance program, requiring manufacturers to follow ISO-like quality management programs, or require vendors to submit information before putting their products on the market.

12-16-2010 10-25-40 PM

Oracle announces Cloud Office 1.0, a Google-like suite of Microsoft Office-compatible word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation apps. That’s probably not the best news Microsoft has heard lately.

Former Allscripts EVP Mark Karch is named EVP of Apparture Inc., which offers Web-based marketing solutions for healthcare companies.

Strange: a woman in Australia reports to police that her iPhone has been stolen from her purse while she’s visiting a hospital. They track it down using its GPS-like application and call in a police helicopter to swoop down on the thief, a 16-year-old boy riding a stolen bike.

E-mail me.

HERtalk by Inga

From Eel Shoes: “Re: non-HIT matters. At this time of year, i don’t think we are hearing enough eel stories. I wondered if Inga had tried the soft but durable eel skin shoes?” I was quite amused by the reader that posted this comment, as well as the follow-up eel conversations. I am not an eel expert, though I once had a soft and durable pair of brown eel-skin pumps that have since been donated to Goodwill. As of late, my shoe fancy has been leaning towards new boots. Here is the pair I’d love to see under the Christmas tree (size 8, if anyone has Santa connections).

Cleveland Clinic will implement 3M’s Codefinder Computer-Assisted Edition software for inpatient and outpatient coding.

athenahealth expands its board with the appointment of its former COO, David E. Robinson. Before joining athenahealth, he was an EVP of SunGard Data Systems.

james dye

MedSynergies appoints former Dell/Perot exec James Dye as SVP of client management. MedSynergies also names Brid Kealey as SVP of human resources and Chris Walker VP of performance and change management.

Ephrata Community Hospital (PA) begins implementation of its Meditech EMR and expects to complete the first stage of the transition in early 2011.

Tool maker Stanley Black & Decker will pay $61.2 million cash for mobile workstation and asset tracking provider InfoLogix. InfoLogix will become part of Stanley’s Healthcare Solutions business, which Stanley is seeking to expand.

Hospital billing company and Tenet subsidiary Confer Health Solutions will close two of its seven offices as it tries to improve efficiencies. Conifer will close offices in Anaheim and Alhambra and consolidate its California work in its remaining Anaheim office. Closures will affect all 100 Modesto employees.

corec

Colorado Regional Extension Center (CO-REC) announces its approved list of 14 EHR products.

Atlantic Health (NJ) forms an ACO that  encompasses a seven-county area. The health system has already aligned with more than 300 participating physicians.

The price tag for OSU Medical Center’s Epic EMR: $100 million over the next five years. Once implemented, Ohio State doctors and hospitals have the potential to earn $25 million in ARRA money.

fasano

Kaiser Permanente promotes CIO Philip Fasano to EVP and CIO. CEO George Halvorson says the promotion reflects the “magnitude of Phil’s impact and contribution to our organization.”

UC Davis concludes that EMRs impact physician specialties differently (duh). The initial implementation of EMRs decreased physician productivity 25 to 33%. Over time, internal medicine providers adjusted to the new technology and slightly increased their productivity, but pediatricians and family practice doctors did not recover to their original productivity levels. The conclusion: there is a  “mismatch between technology design and the work-flow requirements and health administration expectations” for different specialties.

Sponsor Updates

  • API Healthcare introduces the Electronic Employee Record, designed for healthcare organizations to store and maintain employee information, track trends, and create forecasts.
  • Wills Eye Health System (PA) contracts with NextGen for its EHR and PM products.
  • Children’s Hospital Central California subscribes to CapSite to improve its capital expenditure process.
  • Wellsoft signs a two-year extension contract with Premier, allowing Wellsoft to remain the sole contracted supplier of EDIS for Premier’s member hospitals.
  • St. Tammany Parish Hospital (LA) selects RelayHealth as its partner to build its community-wide HIE.
  • HIStalk sponsors placing in the KLAS top ten of all vendors are 3M, Philips, Picis, Sunquest, McKesson, and Merge Healthcare.
  • Sponsors in the professional services top ten in KLAS are Hayes Management Consulting, Vitalize Consulting Solutions, Ingenix, and McKesson.
  • Sponsor products earning a Best in KLAS title in their segment are eClinicalWorks EMR (ambulatory EMR 26-100 physicians), Greenway Medical PrimeSuite Chart (ambulatory EMR 6-25 physicians), e-MDs Chart (ambulatory EMR 2-5 physicians), McKesson Paragon (community HIS), Allscripts Sunrise EPSi Decision Support (business decision support), Wellsoft EDIS (ED), McKesson Pathways Financial Management, Materials, and HR Manager (financial/ERP), McKesson Horizon Practice Plus (practice management 26-100 physicians), Greenway Medical PrimeSuite Practice (practice management 6-25 physicians), e-MDs Bill (practice management 2-5 physicians), and Nuance eScription (speech recognition).
  • Sponsors named Best in KLAS in the professional services category are Navicure (claims and clearinghouse services)and CareTech Solutions (IT outsourcing – extensive).
  • Precyse Solutions ranked #2 in KLAS’s transcription provider category, but outscored everyone in report quality.
  • UPDATE: we missed one! MedPlus’s ChartMaxx took Best in KLAS in the document imaging and management category, winning the #1 spot seven times since 2002. MedPlus has 140 implementations and 415,000 users.

inga

E-mail Inga.



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Currently there are "21 comments" on this Article:

  1. Ed,

    I admire your response to :”Texas Health Resources. Dealing with a severe outage of their Epic EMR caused by a Citrix upgrade that coincided with the 09 upgrade.” Verified.” I am encourage to see the leader assuming acccountability.

    However, please disclose more details, ie, for how long were the screens blank, what were your back up systems and how did they work, and lastly, are you aware (or would you be) of how many patients suffered injury or death from the attendant delays in care and neglect?

    How many of the 13 hospitals were afflicted?

    Thank you for helping the rest of us.

  2. OK, the press release where the new CIO takes a shot at McKesson is awfully odd. In fact, I think it’s a cheap shot. I’d say it says more about University than it does about McKesson. Switching vendors is fine. We all do it. And incoming execs do it a lot. What place this had in this announcement is beyond me.

  3. From Laddie: “Re: Texas Health Resources. Dealing with a severe outage of their Epic EMR caused by a Citrix upgrade that coincided with the 09 upgrade.”

    The worst aspect of all this is that if patients (who did not consent to have their care mediated via clinical IT) were injured or killed as a result — which we will probably never know, as the patient might not realize it, and even if they do and sue, the hospital’s likely to settle– then who’s accountable?

    (If your answer is the doctors, because they shouldbe able to function without clinical IT anyway, then I ask, why bother having clinical IT?)

  4. Re: Jeff Shuren Tidbits:

    (a) he implies that EHRs are medical devices for which FDA has elected not to enforce existing requirements

    This is in line with EU sentiments, e.g., as here:

    From a report entitled “The [Swedish] Medical Products Agency’s Working Group on Medical Information Systems: Project summary”:

    A general opinion of the health care providers represented in this Working group is that from a patient safety point of view, it is desirable that stand alone software and systems intended to, directly or indirectly, affect diagnosis, health care and treatment of an individual patient [what I have referred to a “mediating aspects of care” – MIMD] shall be regulated under a Product Safety Regulation.

    The Working group has not been able to define any other appropriate regulation than the Medical Device Directive when it comes to the definition of such systems. Adherence to the Medical Device Directive is important so that manufacturers and clients can work with the same intentions. This project report serves as one step towards the clarification regarding which conditions that shall apply.

    The Working group believes that software intended for a medical purpose must be regarded as a “device” and expressions such as “project”, “service” and similar must be avoided describing a Medical Information System.

  5. (If your answer is the doctors, because they shouldbe able to function without clinical IT anyway, then I ask, why bother having clinical IT?)

    Probably because they can function BETTER with clinical IT.

  6. MIMD, I think you take for granted that the current system we have is the ideal. It certainly is not. Patients die from medical information errors all the time in a paper world, even when Citrix goes down. The whole reason to consider electronic records and hospital automation is to improve on the process we have. Walking or riding a bike will get you where you want to go, too, but driving is much more efficient. Sure, there’s always the chance my car might break down and leave me stranded on the highway, but I’ll take that chance over peddling 35 miles from the suburbs to work every day. The apprehension you have is partially based on your having been stranded on the highway, so to speak, but you can’t honestly say that the current, fully paper-oriented process you advocate is the most efficient. Rather than be a naysayer, though, I think we’d all like to hear how you intend to improve health care efficiency and quality with a paper records system without using technology. In the meantime, we’ll all be sure to wave as we drive past you on the information superhighway while you’re peddling along.

    To be fair, I’ll acknowledge that the technology is not quite there – to keep the car analogy, we’re still in the 1950s, and we still have more to do. That doesn’t mean we just stop HIT altogether and wait for development to get to the latest, greatest stage it can possibly be (primarily because it never will, if software vendors and entrepreneurs aren’t making any money to have a reason to invest in R&D). If you prefer to practice medicine in a technology/EHR-free environment until a time when you feel it is up to your standards, I know a nice little hospital in rural eastern Kenya that needs a physician and would be happy to have you if you’re up for it.

  7. Anonymous at 11:20 a:

    You are missing the point. The data collection needed to improve the process is not occurring because the adverse events ae being covered up, to protect the vendors and consultants. To improve, there is need for trial and error, under experimental conditions. Since these are devices and there is neither IRB approvals nor informed consent, this ongoing national experiment violates ethics and the law. Beides, paper and fax have definite advantages over looking at clinically irrelevant data one page at a time, when a patient’s life is on the line.

  8. I find it humorous that not tired, who regularly trashes EMRs as unproven medical tools, is now asking how many patients were injured because their EMR went down. I’m still convinced it and suzy are contrarian autobots set up to attack anything related to EMRs and safety, however this time it got confused because it was the opposite of what the program expected.

  9. Rice Memorial Epic Deal: I bet Rice Memorial is not purchasing the HIS from Epic directly. Rather, I bet they are doing the piggy-back model. It is still very hard to believe that this product is cheaper than the competition?!?

  10. Seconding Anonymous (#6). Many of the comments here assume that paper doesn’t kill patients daily. I refer you to “Can Electronic Medical RecordSystems Transform HealthCare?” by Hillestad et al and the studies cited in that paper. If we were calling for comparative studies of harm due to EHR vs due to paper processes, that would be legitimate, but documenting harm due to EHR in a vacuum doesn’t demonstrate anything.

    Simple simon, you’re missing the point. You’re proposing an experiment with no control group. We would also need comparative data on how many people are killed by paper processes, and I don’t hear you asking for that data..

  11. I submit that the 1999 IOM Report “To Err is Human” documents pretty good evidence for how paper-based medical errors affect patient safety.

  12. Anonymous at #6 writes:

    MIMD, I think you take for granted that the current system we have is the ideal. It certainly is not. Patients die from medical information errors all the time in a paper world, even when Citrix goes down.

    1. This is indirection. Answer my question. If patients get harmed by the outage, who is liable (as opposed to merely responsible?)

    2. A first principle: medical ethics demands that “solutions” to problems not be implemented without unequivocal data supporting the intervention. That’s why, for example, drugs are not approved w/o randomized clinical trials. Anything else is not medicine, it’s unethical experimentation, no matter what the beliefs about the intervention. And the literature on HIT is certainly equivocal in 2010.

    — SS

  13. documenting harm due to EHR in a vacuum doesn’t demonstrate anything.

    I disagree in one way: doing so documents that clinical IT is not beneficent; it can cause new modes of harm.

    I agree in another way: We do need comparative clinical trials.

    In fact, it would be nice (or, more accurately, would have been nice) to have conducted such a clinical trial on a relatively constrained scale BEFORE movement towards national rollout.

    I also add that I am generally disappointed at the level of understanding of medical ethics displayed by commenters here. I think all need to read the Hippocratic Oath carefully.

    The modern version reads as follows:

    I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability and judgment, this covenant:

    I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as is mine with those who are to follow. [no gag clauses – ed.]

    I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures [that] are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism. [e.g.,use of clinical IT of unknown risk because we think it’s good, no matter what the real world consequences – ed.]

    I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon’s knife or the chemist’s drug.

    I will not be ashamed to say “I know not,” nor will I fail to call in my colleagues when the skills of another are needed for a patient’s recovery. [Not fire them as here – ed.]

    I will respect the privacy of my patients, for their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know. [EHRs must be secrure – ed.] Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. [Experimentation w/o consent is inconsistent with this part of the oath – ed.] If it is given to me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.

    I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, [or a computer – ed.] but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person’s family and economic stability. My responsibility includes these related problems, if I am to care adequately for the sick.

    I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure.

    I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm. [I write on informatics based on these obligations – ed.]

    If I do not violate this oath, may I enjoy life and art, respected while I live and remembered with affection thereafter. May I always act so as to preserve the finest traditions of my calling and may I long experience the joy of healing those who seek my help.

    In summary, critical thinking always, or your patient’s dead.

  14. re: Orien’s Belt.

    I would not say that Accenture is inexperienced with Epic… check it out, they implemented a great deal of it at Stanford.

  15. Re: Rice Memorial goes with Epic: I thought generally maintenance was about 20% of the cost; this deal appears maintenance is roughly 45% of the license fee — what kind of support a hospital gets for that money?

  16. Re: Rice Memorial… Mr. H, you are above reproach, but the article says they are implementing through Centra Care. This would be an affiliate model, not purchased from Epic Corp.

  17. Re: #10

    We would also need comparative data on how many people are killed by paper processes, and I don’t hear you asking for that data.

    I agree. We need comparative clinical trials.

    It would have been ethical and basic due diligence, however, if those had been done on a constrained scale before the past two administrations decided to push for national health IT.

    As far as the ethics of health IT is concerned, all non clinicians here should read the Hippocratic oath. It is here (modern version).

    The key line is: Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death.

    The approach to health IT to date has been a poor to this ancient wisdom.

    As far as paper is concerned, I also agree paper is (mostly) obsolete (but still has a proper place in medical record keeping). That said, my beliefs are that HIT needs to be improved to achieve the benefits to which it is capable, as I have written many times.

    Our approaches to doing this, though, are currently insufficient to achieve that vision. Note: I quote the National Research Council on that latter point.

  18. “OK, the press release where the new CIO takes a shot at McKesson is awfully odd. In fact, I think it’s a cheap shot. I’d say it says more about University than it does about McKesson. Switching vendors is fine. We all do it. And incoming execs do it a lot.”

    I agree, it’s a bit of a cheap shot. I think Epic will find soon enough that several of the hospital systems they’ve been able to entice over from other vendors will give them serious headaches. I think they’ll find what many have already stated on here – vendors definitely have their faults and none are even close to perfect, but more often than not it’s hospital leadership that fails in HIT, not vendors.

  19. Did you know that the study, recommended here by slightly tired: “I refer you to “Can Electronic Medical RecordSystems Transform HealthCare?” by Hillestad et al and the studies cited in that paper” was funded by the HIT industry? (sic)

    I truly pity the poor doctors and nurses at Mr. Ed’s places in Texass who must have been struggling desperately to keep their patients safe when the records vanished. I lived through that in a hospital Indiana (will not say where, for the retaliation). It is what they define as mayhem.

  20. http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10351/1111342-28.stm

    shows how

    the giants of health care have found a new income stream to apay for the HIT, as expensive as at OSU: The price tag for OSU Medical Center’s Epic EMR: $100 million over the next five years.

    That does not include the yearly maintenance. I performed a calculation. The roi is in negative numbers, without generating new income.







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