I'd never heard of Healwell before and took a look over their offerings. Has anyone used the products? Beyond the…
News 3/16/11
Top News
Allscripts opens two offshore development centers in Pune and Bangalore, India that will provide customer support and other services.
Golden Gate Capital offers to acquire Lawson Software for $11.25 per share, but significant shareholder Carl Icahn suggests that the company shop around for the highest bidder (probably hoping to bait Oracle and SAP into a bidding war).
Reader Comments
From Yeah But … “Re: Ministry Health Care in Wisconsin. They were already a GE Centricity Enterprise customer. They will be upgrading to version 6.9 this year, which is the MU-certified version. It is true that GE has not had many new customers. In the past two years, they have made a small number of sales of the ASP version of Centricity Enterprise. Despite this, their total number of customers has dropped to around 27 on Lastword / Carecast / Centricity, down from 55 when they bought IDX.” Unverified.
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
It’s just me (Mr. H) today since both Inga and I are on our respective spring breaks, although most of mine will involve working on HIStalk. Dr. Jayne pitched in to help cover by writing a great piece for HIStalk Practice called Meaningful Use: 15 Things Your Practice Can (and Should) Do Now.
Listening: Deer Tick, no-nonsense, hard-living Americana rockers from Providence, RI. They’re good.
I’ll probably run a Readers Write Wednesday evening, so now’s your chance to get something to me that will appear quickly since I have just a couple of submissions so far.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
The Greenville, SC newspaper writes up VidiStar, which sells a PACS system and Web portal for remote reading of digital images.
The Wall Street Journal profiles Castlight Health, started in 2008 by Giovanno Colella MD (founder of RelayHealth) and Todd Park (now CTO of HHS). The company, which helps consumers understand the costs of their care, has attracted $81 million of capital funding so far, including an unnamed amount from Cleveland Clinic.
People
Streamline Health names Rick Leach, formerly with A.D.A.M., as SVP/chief marketing officer.
Announcements and Implementations
Children’s Denver (CO) will implement RemedyMD’s OutcomeTrack disease registry and outcomes tracking solution.
The local paper mentions the federally funded, six-month HITECH Workforce program offered by Indian River State College (FL), adding that Martin Memorial Health System had to fill almost all of its 60 Epic project positions internally because they couldn’t find anyone else.
Government and Politics
Dr. HITECH (aka Ross Martin MD of The American College of Medical Informatimusicology) releases the production video of The Meaningful Yoose Rap. You saw the live debut of the song at last year’s HIStalk reception at HIMSS in Atlanta, now check out the video, apparently filmed on location in Washington DC, including in front of the Capitol and HHS headquarters. Video credits here, lyrics here. Ross has kind of a Marky Mark thing going on that’s pretty cool. He’s obviously musically brilliant, like you didn’t already know that from his amazing Interoperetta. He also has some kind of HIT day job, but hey, we have plenty of people who do whatever that involves but not many who can entertain the industry.
Sponsor Updates
- Quality IT Partners is celebrating its 10th anniversary.
- MEDecision will incorporate Health Language Inc.’s Language Engine into its health management portfolio to help customers with the transition to ICD-10.
- Dutch imaging solutions distributor Fysicons signs a deal to incorporate imagine viewing tools from Merge Healthcare into its EVCOS Web viewer for the BeNeLux market. The company is also reviewing Merge’s vendor neutral archive and kiosk products.
- Technology from Carefx will be used by Northgate Managed Services to develop a clinical portal for a group of UK hospitals in a $10 million contract that Northgate just won.
- Capario announces that VP Angela McKenna has been appointed president of the executive committee of Cooperative Exchange, an association for healthcare transaction clearinghouses.
- Zynx will offer content from Thomson Reuters Micromedex in its evidence-based order sets.
- Main Line Health (PA) is implementing eClinicalWorks for its affiliated physicians.
Other
I was thinking about paper towel dispensers while in the airport restroom today, the kind where you wave your hand in front of the red light to have it dispense some preset length of towel. Some machines give an impossibly short length while others are more generous, leading me to speculate that they are networked devices using artificial intelligence (maybe adopted from slot machine technology) to determine the optimal mix of how much to dispense initially vs. how likely you are to begrudgingly accept the too-short length and leave with still-wet hands vs. just waiting until the red light comes back on to request another round by re-waving.
A UK woman dies of breast cancer after a doctor says her breast lump is benign, but then sends two appointment notices to the incorrect address, typing 16 instead of 1b for her street. Nobody followed up from the doctor’s office.
A family physician urges the same female patient to seek emergency care on two different occasions, once for an aneurysm and another for uterine swelling, after reviewing mislabeled CT scans belonging to other patients. The doctor says her actions were correct based on the information she was given, but the jury finds that she should have known the CT scans were someone else’s. They award the patient $75K for emotional distress. The two hospitals and the radiologist had already settled.
RE: Pune, my guess these are not new centers as Eclipsys had them already when Allscripts bought Eclipsys. The better headline here would be ‘Allscripts expands existing dev. centers in India to better…..’.
New Format: negative.
It’s harder to read when broken into the different groups with headers and lines. The eye wants to look through a longer list and will jump over sections when broken up.
Allscripts already has their interface analysts in India.
Thanks for the write-up! HIStalk been belly belly good to me.
Getting use to the new format – I like it!
LOVE that you are listening to Deer Tick! Thanks for the afternoon video pick-me-up. (oh and thanks for all the great info too)
I hope the new management under Glen will make the India based centers as true partners of Allscripts.
While I was with eclipsys India, the India management head Nitin had set all processes and policies with “India” in mind. What Eclipsys NA required was always of secondary priority.
The focus was on what “India” can do rather than how can they can help NA teams. Since I was one of the few bridge guys between India and NA teams,I had to face the maximum “oh my god this is awful but better look other way (for fear of local management)” sitiuations. The India president always was surrounded by his India based management team and had very formal relationships with NA based teams.
For true partnership and for India to succeed, the India teams have to shed their India specific coat and work as true partners with the NA teams. And the India leaders can ideally can lead by example.